Need some help wrapping my head around animations in regards to exporting to Unity.

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hello all. I’m QuestionablyInsane. I’m fairly new here on the forums but have been a user of Blender for a good 3-4 years. My studies learning 3d has been a little odd as I’ve been mostly self-taught after having gone to a terrible “animation” class at a community college (Should have been labeled 3d modeling class as actual animation and rigging was hardly touched on)

Anyways long story short, After these 3 years I have become a fairly decent modeler, and texture artist and have just recently gotten the hang of rigging and now my focus is on learning proper animation now that I’m at that level… Since my main goal is to finally be an Indie game developer I’ve been studying on animation and how to export to Unity and general animation practices.

So I have a few questions that might be simple to ask but hard to answer and would be very grateful on your guy’s expertise:

  1. How are multiple animations saved in one blend file? Is there a way to have all the animations is one blend file and then have the character models in a second file? Is this the best way to do things to stay organized? Should I have animations grouped by theme? (Like all my running and walking animations in one .blend and then all my like shooting animations in a different blend)

  2. Is it possible to have a complex rig in blender and then while exporting your animations to have only the deformation bones exported to not overload Unity with extra bones? It really seems like this is probably a thing… I think I saw in the .FBX export options a way of limiting which bones get exported. It’d be very handy to do up animations with proper IK/FK controls. Have bones controlling facial flexes and having a driver set up for easier control on the hands and whatnot.

  3. Lastly as a followup from the last question, I’m pretty new to Unity but I have heard that bones are pretty demanding on Unity but flexes/ blend shapes are even more demanding. Is there any general tips on how I should rig my characters? I have seen some riggers who have abandoned blend shapes entirely in favor of complex facial rigs and I am curious if this is a better approach to do things performance wise?

I was thinking that all body motion I would handle with complex rigs with but with not too many deformation bones so unity will have only the bones that matter to the animations and then I would have the head as a separate mesh with facial flexes. I was thinking I might do a control panel like thing with bones and blend shapes in blender so I can do stuff like emotions and lip syncing easier… And then try to figure out how to import the face animations into unity…

I know this is a lot to ask in one post. Any help to any of these questions would be greatly appreciated. I also highly respect links if you guys know of videos/ forum posts that answer these questions. I mean why waste time typing if someone has answered the questions already elsewhere? Thanks a bunch guys. ^^

2

I feel your pain.

1.) Each Action is an animation in Unity. Keep each part (say, idle, walk run) in a separate Action, Unity can blend them like the NLA strip editor does using an Animation Controller to define transitions of your liking.

2.) You’re just annoyed that the hierarchy is messy right? Yeah. So from what I know, all bones are always included. On your import settings Unity has a system that will hide all the bones (or up to a root you pick)- look for optimize game objects.

Every bone is just a game object with a transform and rotation. They can be addressed just like any other game object and even moved, you could make procedural animations with weighted vertex groups this way.

3.) For a game-ready asset, you should use as few bones as possible to make the animation.

As a newbie myself, I’m sure there is some way to do all that fancy “handle work” you see in advanced character rigs (like the ones in Darren Lile’s fantastic videos- those “wire” rings they use as control handles) and then exclude them- maybe? It could just be that those rigs are geared towards rendered video animations where the extra bones are trivial.