I use Blender to rig and animate my characters, export them to Unity and make them animate as it should with mecanim. No problem with the characters.
The problem comes when I want to work with non character animations (for example, a jeep bumping, any mechanical animation). I can export fbx animations into unity (without bones, no rig) but I don’t know how to handle this with mecanim.
Any idea? How are the car animations done with mecanim (wheels bumping, for example, or the chassis moving side to side)?
Not sure I understand the issue. It should be handled the same way as any Generic type. Also why don’t you just rig and skin you car ? Imo it would make things simpler.
You don’t need the bones if you don’t want to. It is not a requirement, was just a suggestion.
You can animate an object without any bones if your car is made of several children meshes (body, wheels, bumper, etc…)
The advantage of using bones is that your car will be one mesh which means one drawcall versus a bunch if decide to have it made up of different parts.
The advantage of not using bones is that you could swap parts of the car if you needed and removing parts is more easy. So if you want to swap one part for another then don’t use bones.
If its just to animate the parts moving when bumping things then a skinned mesh is less trouble I find. In both cases, you can also use physics rather than animation to move the parts.
In the end it depends what you do with the car in your game.
