Exporting armature to gltf and importing back, no longer bones

Support Animation and Rigging
1

When I export a armature as a glft, and then re-import it into blender it no longer consists of bones, just what I believe are ‘empties’, all in the correct bone positions and parented correctly.

Am I doing something wrong to cause this? When I export it along with a mesh it works fine.

(I realize this is an odd thing to want to do, really I want to export the armature into other software but it was not importing as bones, so I tried it in blender and got the same problem.)

2

I think this is an internal detail of the glTF format – if nodes are not associated with a skinned mesh, there is nothing that indicates they are meant to be ‘bones’ or ‘joints’ in the file.You can get around that by just including a simple dummy mesh, like a cube, too.