Exporting Character Animation with Blender

Datadog

This query has more do with skillsets than Adventure Creator itself, but since Chris is experienced with animating in Blender, and Blender seems to be a common tool among indie developers, I thought this would be a good place to ask.

I've been switching over from Maya to Blender for all my future 3D needs, and was wondering what a recommended animation pipeline for Unity development would be. I've been going over tutorials and it looks like a common practice is to store all the animation clips inside the NLA Editor of the main Blender model (as opposed to Maya, where I reference models and save animation in separate files.) But is storing all my game animation inside one character file a recommended practice? I imagine down the road, my player character would have hundreds of animation clips and I wouldn't want to load them all in every scene.

When organizing and exporting character animation with Blender, what is your preferred method?

ChrisIceBox

Good question!  In my own experience, I've found that Unity doesn't like to import Blender animations (as FBX files) unless it also comes with a rig/model that supports them in the same file.

So, what I like to do is create "animation holder" files that I use just for storing my animations in.  In Blender, these files contain copies of my characters, with any number of animations.  The animation data, however, is actually linked from separate animation files, which don't get imported directly.  That way, if I want to do some animation that relies on e.g. other characters / props placement, I'll animate in a new file, link the animation data into my "animation holder" file and export that into Unity.  You should be able to have as many such "holder" files as you like.

Datadog

So the basic idea would be to reference the copies rather than the other way around? Or something like this, where any changes I make to the main model would need to be manually appended to its copies?

ChrisIceBox

That graphic looks along the lines of what I was saying, yes - with as many of those "animation holder" FBX files as you need.

Ideally the character model in the animation holder file would actually be linked back to the original file, rather than a straight copy.  You really want to link as much as you can - but in my own tests I've found that Unity doesn't like importing that for some reason.  Things may have changed, since then, so it's worth trying.

Datadog

Great! Thank you! I'll run some linking tests and see what works, but for now, this clears up a lot of my workflow.