Can this be done?

Support Animation and Rigging
1

I won’t say forgive my naivety. If you don’t like me, don’t write back. Scorn is not very helpful and it’s a waste of your time.

For an animation to be transferred from Blender to a game engine, all kinds of information must be kept intact. Constraints, drivers, transform locks, influence sliders, keyframes, vertex weights, the list goes on endlessly. Man what a pain! Are all these things seriously running real-time inside the game engine post-transfer? That’s stupid.

A simpler concept would be recording mesh behaviour from frame-to-frame, ie. frame 1: vertex A is at this position in 3D space, frame 2: vertex A is now at this position in 3D space. Apply this to all vertices.

Can this be done?

2

Yes you can export this so-called vertex cache to Lightwave’s .mdd format for example. In Blender go to User Preferences->Addons->Import-Export and turn on NewTek MDD. Now if you animate a mesh you can export an .mdd file that contains the vertex positions. If you want to apply such a cache to a Blender object, use the Mesh Cache modifier. As I understand it the meshes have to be identical (number and order of vertices) for this to work in Blender because they are basically shape keys.

3

thank god! You’re awesome!

Andrew