I’m curious how, or if, it’s possible to use the ARP exporter to export NLA strips as seperate animation clips in Unity.
The problem is, if I choose the action manager in the ARP exporter and enable actions, add my actions to the manager list, it’ll export the whole action instead of just the sections I’ve clipped to NLA strips. I don’t seem to be able to set frame range-per-action. For example animation 1 may be sourcing frames 1-100 and animation 2 uses 200-250, however in unity animation 2 will be 1-250 frames long with the first 200 frames just doing nothing.
If I choose to export as NLA, it’ll export the whole thing as a single animation clip instead of multiple small ones. Again, with frame range set to Custom I can’t seem to set it at a range-per-NLA.
With the default Blender FBX exporter it’s not an issue. If you check “NLA strips” and disable “All actions” It’ll export my NLA strips and respect their names and lengths, so for example if I have 3 strips on a single track (ie “Walk”, “Jump”, “Wave” for example) and name them (just the strip, not the action they’re referencing) it’ll show up in Unity as 3 separate action clips called “Walk”, “Jump”, “Wave”.
The workaround which is quite messy has been to export my armature with the ARP exporter, then reimporting that rig, creating the NLA strips there and naming then, then re-exporting with the Blender FBX exporter just to get my NLA strips correctly into Unity but I’d love to skip that whole export-reimport-export step as it can be bothersome and often requires me to do the same stuff twice. Needing to add further animations or adjust them then becomes extra work as well as I need to make the changes in the ARP scene file, then export and reimport and export again.
Below is a screenshot of a track with three NLA strips and how they show up in Unity with the default FBX exporter.
Edit: the NLA strips are all from the same “action”, perhaps the ARP exporter works properly when each NLA strip references a separate source action, but multiple NLA strips from a single action works with the default Blender exporter.
Having to split all my NLA strips into separate actions, and move all keyframes to start at 1 seems slightly messy when the default exporter reads them correctly and exports them correctly without that extra work.
I hope I’m simply missing something obvious that could make this a quicker process and that I’ll be able to export NLA strips with the ARP exporter the same way the default exporter handles it.
Thanks.
Additional edit: I just needed to change the workflow slightly, using actions instead of just relying on nla strips and using markers in each action and everything seems to work flawlessly although it may need slight extra steps to author root motion clips that have to be seamless across multiple actions when making adjustments in one action vs having a single action with multiple nla strips.
