Question for blender artists.

Unity Engine
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1

Sorry if this thread doesn’t belong here. Unity Forums don’t have a proper questions section.

My question is to all the Blender artists.

How would I animate small objects like chests, doors, curtains, etc without using shape keys? Unity3D doesn’t support shape keys yet. I tried using armatures on a chest but the chest object would either get corrupted or miss aligned. I don’t want to create individual animations in unity because if that object gets moved, I need to redo the animation. Its’ way too much work using unity’s animation system.

2

Yes it does; I’ve moved it there.

Use bones as usual; if the model gets corrupted that means you didn’t rig it correctly. Chests and doors are particularly easy (and could easily be done in code rather than making an animation, if you wanted); curtains would be trickier but still possible.

–Eric

3

ah ok. Ill try the bones again and see if I can do it right. Thanks for the help and for moving the post.

4

Yes, that is definitely an issue on your end.
If you can’t figure out what is going on, post that blend I’ll take a look into it.

I actually rigged a treasure chest in Blender for my props package. And all works fine :slight_smile:

5

I would so enjoy an initial transform relative animation mode in Unity. Being able to create an animation of a 90 degree rotation “open” and “close” that works on any object in any location at any initial rotation should not be such a trial.

6

actually there is and you can, though it’s still a dirtier workaround in my opinion than doing it in for example blender. You don’t have to use bones for animations like door though. You can also have your door and doorframe as seperate objects and animate their position and rotation, but that will probably split up your door object into 2 drawcalls instead of 1 (frame and door itself). Still, it won’t require a skinned mesh renderer so not sure what would be the best solution.

7

I would avoid rigging a treasure chest or door…seems like too much work for a simple rotation. Also I think a rigged mesh is more resource intensive than drawing 2 meshes (please correct me if I’m wrong)

as wasstraat65 said:
split the models into 2 peices and animate them in blender. You can move the origin of the top of the chest to where the hinge would be and do a simple rotation.
OR
import the 2 separate pieces into unity (without animations from blender). Then place the top chest piece into a empty GameObject. Move the top chest model so that the empty GameObjects transform is at the location of the hinge. Then animate the empty GameObjects rotation ( through code or using the animation window )