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Can we import a blender animation (as FBX) that only has a rig, but no mesh?
I'm trying to get a model on which I can stitch body parts to the endpoints of its bone transforms. For this I'm trying to import only the exported FBX which contains a rig with animations, but no mesh.
The import is successful, but when I play, the transform values never change. Looks like animation is not playing, despite being imported.
I think this might be similar to the question found at:
http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/1063203/animations-donnt-get-imported-properly-without-mes.html
but I don't consider the answer(s) provided there so far to be completely explicit in answering my particular question.
Look into the gubbings of Blender $$anonymous$$anual. Look at the bit that tells you about where the Data is actually stored. There is a selector that defines 'Object Data' etc etc. One of these settings should allow you to make this work and the other will leave the useful information out. You will need to research.
The trouble is that if you have never parented a mesh to the rig, this vertex weight data may not exist at all. The best way is to use a rig with mesh for import to Unity, then swap out a mesh.
The other issue you face is that your model may not receive a Skinned $$anonymous$$esh Renderer.
Answer by Kamil1064 · Oct 08, 2015 at 04:14 PM
You can export only bones (your rig) with animation without any problem. There will be no model in preview in unity but if you change rig to humanoid it should change to an you have in your project (if not just drag an to see animations). I just tested this with default export settings and nothing bad happened. But blender and unity are still beings uprading and sometimes it's exporting badly (even if you nothing change once can export good, later not). To prevent this you can simply click "Bake action", you can find this in pose mode - Pose>animation>bake action. It will paste key frames in every frame but you can reduce them inside unity.
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