Announcements
Attention for Customers without Multi-Factor Authentication or Single Sign-On - OTP Verification rolls out April 2025. Read all about it here.

Exporting Animation only in FBX (not including Mesh and Rig)

p.hartmans
Participant

Exporting Animation only in FBX (not including Mesh and Rig)

p.hartmans
Participant
Participant

Hi guys, 

I am at a loss here and I can´t find anything about this. (I´m fairly new to working with industry standards) 

I have a Mesh with Rig. I animated it in Maya and baked the Animation (for using it in Unity). 
Is there a way to export ONLY the animation clip with fbx? 

I feel like the game exporter offers me the option to do that with the time editor option. 

Best I can do so far is exporting the rig with the baked animation (I think it´s because I need to select the Rig to select my animation in the time slider) 

Is it even a standard to export the Mesh and Rig in one fbx and Animations in separate files? 

thank you in advance!

0 Likes
Reply
Accepted solutions (1)
3,261 Views
2 Replies
Replies (2)

Kahylan
Advisor
Advisor
Accepted solution

Hi!

 

I have to be honest, it's been a while since I used Unity. But when I last did, the way to bring animation into Unity worked as follows:

 

1) Export an FBX of your character with the skeleton with no animation and import it to unity. Make sure it has a specific name that doesn't match any other assets in your Unity Scene and that the FBX file has the same name. For this exaple I'm using "MyUnityCharacter"

2) Bake the animation of your clip onto the bones. Lets say your clip is an idle animation calles "idle"

3) Export just the bones.

4) Name the FBX file: "MyUnityCharacter@idle.fbx"

5) Import the FBX into Unity and Unity should automatically realise because of the @ in the name that this animation belongs to "MyUnityCharacter" and should show up in the animationcontrol window as "idle"

 

Maybe this workflow changed a bit in the last 3 Years. I would probably try to find some recent tutorials or forumposts about it. But this was how it was done back then and it worked pretty good.

 

Also eventhough you are exporting the bones of the rig every time and importing them into Unity multiple times, bones are basically just visual representations of points in 3D space and have almost no weight.

 

I hope it helps!

p.hartmans
Participant
Participant

Thank you! 

This sounds clean and helps me a lot. Had no idea you can do such things with naming.