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I have a sphere with a hole in it that I created in Maya (2015). I want to animate the hole open and closed for Unity.
I initially animated the vertices within Maya and exported it but the animation didn't show in Unity (I then had a Google and found that isn't supported). I've read that IK Joints work but thats a bone system which seems a bit over the top for a hole.
Whats the best way to go about doing this?
I don't have very advanced knowledge about animator being able to move mesh vertices around, but here is an idea. You can alter the mesh vertices programmatically. And the animator can animated any custom serialised field of a script of a game object. What you can do is split the concerns: the animator animates your float property and you programmatically set your mesh's vertices' positions based on that field.
In fact this trick can be a very powerful tool of separating concerns between an animator and a programmer. The programmer creates programmatic math-heavy animations and exposes their more human-friendly properties in the inspector so that the animator can play around with curves.
Answer by zach-r-d · Aug 05, 2015 at 10:14 AM
The best way to do this would be to create a blend shape for the sphere in Maya that has the hole in it, and then use Unity to animate the blend shape value. There's a section of the Unity manual that talks about using blend shapes in Unity in case it helps.
Ah that's it! I've got it working now, thank you for the help! I also found this video which walks you through how to do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXm6jcrE0uQ
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