Unity deleting collada bones/animation upon changes

Questions & Answers
1

I noticed that David Mathews asked this a year ago but I conuld find a result so I'm asking it here.

I'm loading in an animated collada object. I can drop it into the scene and it'll play the animation once (it's default setting). It looks like this: collada import 01.

If you look above at the preview window then you can see that it's already displaying it in it's default pose rather than the animated pose. As expected, any applied changes to the object (for this example I use the split animation tool, but any change has the same result) results in the following:

collada import 01.

If you look at the inset window in red you'll see that Unity has stripped out the bones as well as the animation file and the character has now reverted to its default pose. The character was exported out of Maya. I've tried using the default DAE_FBX exporter as well as the openCOLLADA exporter with the same result. The debug log doesn't show any error message of any kind so I don't have any idea of what is causing this.

If I export the exact same animated object in FBX format instead of COLLADA then Unity treats it perfectly and I can make any changes with no errors. The reason I'm using COLLADA instead of FBX is file size. FBX prodcues files that are 50% larger and my character has several minutes(!) of animation attached to him. Using FBX would add 10-30 meg of additional size to my app which as aimed for the mobile market. So you can see why the file size difference is so important to me.

2

not used collada so not sure why it's behaving the way you describe.

you can however decrease the file size of the animations coming from maya by baking the anims in maya and deleting the rig before exporting to unity.

3

FBX works a bit better than COLLADA in Unity especially when you're exporting from Autodesk products. I do not say that we give FBX higher priority - if you have problems you should submit bugs.

You shouldn't pay attention to size of FBX or COLLADA file, because they are not included in the binary of your application. Unity converts them into internal formats, so both FBX and COLLADA are represented as the same thing in binary of your game.