How To Import An Animation From Blender To Unity

Animation from external sources

Animation from external sources is imported into Unity in the same way equally regular 3D files. These files, whether they're generic FBX files or native formats from 3D software such as Autodesk® Maya®, Cinema 4D, Autodesk® 3ds Max®, or Blender™, tin contain animation data in the form of a linear recording of the movements of objects within the file.

An imported FBX 3D Asset containing an animation titled Slide — An imported FBX 3D Asset containing an animation titled 'Slide'

In some situations the object to be animated (eg, a character) and the animations to go with it tin can be nowadays in the aforementioned file. In other cases, the animations may be in a split up file to the model to be animated.

It may be that animations are specific to a item model, and cannot exist re-used on other models. For example, a giant octopus finish-boss in your game might take a unique arrangement of limbs and bones, and its own set of animations.

In other situations, it may exist that you take a library of animations which are to be used on various dissimilar models in your scene A Scene contains the environments and menus of your game. Remember of each unique Scene file equally a unique level. In each Scene, yous place your environments, obstacles, and decorations, substantially designing and building your game in pieces. More than info
Come across in Glossary . For example, a number of different humanoid characters might all employ the aforementioned walk and run animations. In these situations, information technology's mutual to have a elementary placeholder model in your animation files for the purposes of previewing them. Alternatively, it is possible to utilize animation files even if they have no geometry at all, but the animation data.

When importing multiple animations, the animations tin each exist as separate files within your projection folder, or you can extract multiple animation clips Animation data that can exist used for animated characters or simple animations. Information technology is a simple "unit" slice of movement, such every bit (ane specific instance of) "Idle", "Walk" or "Run". More info
Run into in Glossary from a single FBX file if exported every bit takes from Motion architect or with a plugin / script for Autodesk® Maya®, Autodesk® 3ds Max® or other 3D packages. You might want to do this if your file contains multiple separate animations arranged on a unmarried timeline. For example, a long movement captured timeline might contain the blitheness for a few different bound motions, and you lot may want to cutting out certain sections of this to use as individual clips and discard the rest. Unity provides blitheness cutting tools to achieve this when you import all animations in one timeline by allowing you to select the frame range for each clip.

Importing animation files

Earlier any blitheness can be used in Unity, it must outset be imported into your project. Unity can import native Autodesk® Maya® (.mb or .ma), Autodesk® 3ds Max® (.max), and Blender™ (.blend), and also generic FBX files which can be exported from near blitheness packages. Note that importing from .blend files requires a local installation of Blender™.

For more information, see Importing.

Viewing and copying information from imported blitheness files

You can view the keyframes A frame that marks the start or end betoken of a transition in an animation. Frames in betwixt the keyframes are chosen inbetweens.
See in Glossary and curves of imported animation clips in the Animation window. Sometimes, if these imported clips have lots of bones with lots of keyframes, the amount of information can look overwhelmingly complex. For example, the paradigm below is what a humanoid running blitheness looks like in the Blitheness window:

To simplify the view, select the specific bones you are interested in examining. The Animation window then displays only the keyframes or curves for those bones.

Limiting the view to just the selected bones

When viewing imported Blitheness keyframes, the Animation window provides a read-just view of the Blitheness information. To edit this data, create a new empty Animation Prune in Unity (see Creating a new Blitheness Clip), then select, re-create and paste the Animation data from the imported Animation Clip into your new, writable Animation Clip.