Anim files lose animations when passing project to partner

What format are your original animations? For example, are they built into your imported FBX file? Or are they separate FBX or .anim files? If you inspect the original file (e.g., FBX model with animations), do the animations show up?

If so, you might try this: drag an animated scene object into the hierarchy to make it a prefab. Then open your project on the other platform and see if the prefab's Animation component is intact.

Does it work better if you export the scene (and all dependencies) on one platform and then re-import it on the other?

In any case, I recommend version control. In fact, I'll pose that as an answer. :-)

We did all the animation in Unity. So all the animations are solely ".anim" files, as far as I know. We only use Unity in our workflow, so we're adding all textures, and creating all materials, scenes, and animations directly in Unity.

And we haven't done any exporting of scenes or anything else yet. I'll have to wait for her to be able to open the other project and walk her through it, as I don't want to mess it up trying to do so on my machine. I assume we'll have to do scene by scene exports to resurrect this project (crossing my fingers that works).

Any idea why the .anim file would just lose all information attached too it though? Or do they not store animation data? I can't even drag in the .anim's from the functional project, because they still come in empty.

The .anim's store animation data. If you highlight one in the Unity editor, what does the Inspector show? And if you exa$$anonymous$$e one in Explorer/Finder, is it the right size? $$anonymous$$aybe they're co$$anonymous$$g across as zero-byte files somehow.

If I may suggest a future tip for scenes (one I learned the hard way), only put prefabs in scenes. The only exceptions are empty game objects used to group prefabs together. This way, if you modify a prefab (for example to fix the Animation component), you only need to do it once, and it applies to all of your scenes. Otherwise you have to make the same edit to every instance of the object in every scene.

They're all co$$anonymous$$g across as 10 kb files. But it's the same file size before and after the transfer. So I assume something just gets messed up in the Library when you're making that kind of switch.

Having her export the scenes as packages, and me import them, seems to be the easiest short term solution. While looking into SVN is probably the best to avoid future mistakes. :)

Prefabs isn't a very good solution for us, because every single Scene uses new materials/textures/animations etc. We really don't reuse anything. (not because we're reckless, but because it's the nature of the project!). Thanks again for all the help!