Unity seems to ignore Blender “Object Mode” animations unless the object animated is parented to an armature.
I can see why you would maybe want this for game development, as translation would be done by the game engine, but my requirements are different.
Can anyone tell me if it is possible to change this, or if not, are there any plans to allow it?
It is making life annoyingly hard for my project…
Unity will understand them if you explicitly export them as fbx files.
It works worse if I export as FBX, the anims do not show at all.
In order to get any translations to show up at all, I need to animate the translation in pose mode. Object mode does not work.
Here is a blend file of a rig that is not parented to an armature or empty. Exporting the anim to FBX then importing it to unity does not work at all.
If I parent the rig to a second armature consisting of one bone (lets call it a “handle”) and animate translation on the handle in pose mode, then import to unity - there are two copies of the rig in unity, but the animation works.
You can just delete the extra copy of the rig, but to work around it, you can use a “Child Of” modifier on the rig instead of actually parenting it.
This stops two copies from appearing, but the object centre stays at the beginning of the anim, so you have to enable “Update when offscreen” for all your meshes.
Because of what I am doing in my project, I need to animate spins easily, so I actually parent the rig to an empty to an armature (Two “handles”) so that I can use Euler rotations not quat.
Here are some links to demonstrate:
A rig with translation for animation. Neither exporting as FBX or just importing the blend works.
http://evilc.com/tmp/unitytest/trans.blend
Here is a unity project with a rig that works - I have had to wrap it in handles as mentioned. There is a link on the player page to download:
http://evilc.com/tmp/unitytest
Object Mode sounds like it would do mesh deformation basically and that type of animation is not supported at all.
Only skeletal skinned animation is supported which means that there must basically be a bone with weighted vertices if you want animation, be it animation as simple as translation or rotation, or it will cease to exist …
The type of animation you want to do though could pretty easily be done with with the animation editor in unity as well or through Ani.Mate calls
Object mode animation is supported (My test files prove that) and I fail to see the connection with mesh deformation.
Pose mode has more to do with mesh deformation, but I don’t deform any meshes in my project at all…