Animation without rigging?

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Hello all,

I'm working on a small project for my job, and most things are going pretty smooth on my end as the programmer since I'm pretty familiar with Unity; however, the artists in my group are having trouble getting their animations from Maya/3DMax to work in Unity.

I think the issue might be related to a lack of rigging/bones. Let me give you an example: suppose you have a cube and you want to morph it into a sphere. I believe the artists are doing this using the built in morph function in Maya and thus have no rig or bones in their model. Can Unity import and handle this type of animation?

I've tried importing such an animation from both Maya/3DMax with mixed results. Sometimes there is animation data, sometimes there isn't, but every time I can never get the cube to animate. I've also tried all the settings (legacy, generic, etc.) and nothing seems to matter.

Does anyone know what the problem might be from this info, or if you have an alternative method for animating in my example?

Thanks.

Answer 1

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Answer by Itinerant · Mar 11, 2013 at 07:52 PM

Are you doing vertex animation? If so, that might be your problem...iirc Unity isn't very friendly with it. There are assets on the store that can process them, you might check these threads out:

http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/124755/Vertex-Animation.html http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/28393-Can-unity-import-vertex-animation-from-max-or-maya

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Answer 2

Answer by Bunny83 · Mar 11, 2013 at 07:54 PM

No, Unity's animation system only supports skeletal animations. Morph-Target-animations aren't supported. Not many engines even support morph target animations because they mostly aren't suitable for realtime animations due to the CPU / memory overhead.

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Animation without rigging?

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