exporting char studio riged animation for unity

[Anonymous]

For a fairly large mobil 3D project we have need to export thousands of frames or character studio rigged animation to unity.
It is known that FBX does not understand special transform controllers such as Character studio's so during export it "bakes" animation creating standard transform key on every frame. In our case it results in enormous number of keys (frames X bones X characters) which takes considerable amount of file size as well as eats up all the performance of the engine.

Any known solutions?
Is there any other then FBX way to export 3D max rigged character to unity?
I heard that CAT has better unity integration but i was not able to avoid baking animation as i was exporting it to FBX.

One method we tried is to export to fbx then import back to max (now /w keys on every frame)
then use  treduce-transform-keys  maxscrip  from scriptspot.com
to reduce number of keys - but this script is very slow as it redraws the screen to show progress bar
also it leaks memory so when tried on our volume of keys it eventually crashes.
Anyone knows better (automated) way to reduce keys on large number of frames/objects in Max?

[jon.bell]

Hi Pashashapiro,

I wanted to update my response based on further feedback from one of our awesome developers, Jean-Thierry Roy. Here's what he noted:

"When exporting animations as FBX from Max, it will always be ‘baked’. To optimize animation for game engines, such as Unity or any other game engines, optimization is not done from inside the DCC program (such as Max), but inside the game engine.

"Unity has their optimization settings: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/FBXImporter-Animations.html

"For best results, use the Unity FBX importer > Anim.Compression Keyframe reduction."

Please let us know if this helps. Thanks!

Jon A. Bell

Autodesk Technical Support