So I'm working on a hobby game for my son and I can't figure out the toolchain to get an animated character working in engine.
I have one character that works fine; I can even add new actions (figuring that out was 'fun') and they will load in Unity no problem.
I have another character (a set of ghosts) that just goes from one type of broken to another with each different thing I attempt. Currently I have it in a state where everything imports, including all the actions as animations and the mesh, but the animations do not play in Unity. I'm using my working character as a control group and by process of elimination I've come to 'something' being broken within my ghost character's blend file but I've no idea what.
Ghosts blend file; https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=XZ5h92VZJVXITzXbB2mxI8qfDzLpcz2pw3l7
Things I've tried:
- Different export options (All Actions, NLAs, and lots of other combinations)
- Exporting with / without different parts (meshes, armature, materials, actions etc)
- Appending the files to another .blend and exporting from there
- Relinking, seperating and making fake users for the animations etc. when they refused to export
- Changing configurations in Unity (identical to the other character and different setups)
- Using the NLA system; some tutorials, posts and blogs recommend this and others say avoid it like the plague (my working character doesn't use it)
- Using .blend directly instead of exporting to FBX which some sites recommend but don't explain; my actions were never available within Unity when trying this despite experimentation
- A bunch of random stuff grepped from the web (which possibly caused whatever the issue is..?)
Things to note:
- This is one rig with multiple animations and meshes with one atlas'd material
- This was originally based on a simpler model which, being so dirt simple, I wanted to improve
- The ghosts animate fine within Blender
- Some of the ghost meshes have a Mirror modifier included
- Using Blender 3.0.1
- Using Unity 2022.1.21f1
Conclusion So I've kind of given up on experimenting with this blend file (for a week and change now) and am going to reconstruct it from scratch and see when/if it breaks and simply rollback from there. I realise that I'm using three WIP / Broken systems here; Blender animation, FBX and Unity animation but there must be a correct methodology for this, somewhere.
- Question 1: Can anyone point me to the correct toolchain? Everything I've found has been incomplete, old or just wrong.
- Question 2: What is actually wrong with my Ghosts.blend file?
- Question 3: Can the Ghosts.blend file be salvaged?
Thanks!
