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Blender bone constrain animations in Unity

Discussion in 'Asset Importing & Exporting' started by jgb143, Feb 8, 2012.

  1. jgb143

    jgb143

    Joined:
    Jun 8, 2010
    Posts:
    132
    I have a 3D character that I have animated by attaching various bone constraints to bones of a separate bvh animation. I also weighted some of them differently so, for example, the head wouldn't bob quite so much. On top of that, I added my own animations to bones that weren't in the bvh, to bend the fingers for example.

    What I would like to do is "bake" all these constraints into my armature and delete the bvh and remove the constraints leaving me with 1 armature animated just the way I like it. So far I have found absolutely no way to do this.

    What I'd settle for is having it work as is in Unity, but that has been problematic as well. Either I'll just get a single animation, for example the walk cycle, while the others do nothing...or I'll only get those animation that I added myself separate to the constraints.

    Does anyone have any ideas?
     
  2. Screenhog

    Screenhog

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    Jul 2, 2009
    Posts:
    498
    First of all, what's a bvh? I haven't heard that term before.

    I can tell you that I have made constraints work in Blender, but you're using a different approach than I recognize. Are you using the Action Editor for each individual action, or one long action on the timeline?
     
  3. jgb143

    jgb143

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    Jun 8, 2010
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    BVH is motion capture data. It imports into Blender as an animated armature. I added rotational constraints from my bones to its bones...only those I needed at least...and weighted some of them not to get the full motions on a few of the bones.

    I used the NLA editor to create one long action(of different animation cycles) out of multiple bvh files. So now I have one animated armature and then my character that is controlled by it. It seemed the easiest way to use motion capture data and tweak it for the animations I wanted. It looks and animated great in Blender but it's causing all sorts of problems in Unity.
     
    Last edited: Feb 8, 2012
  4. wccrawford

    wccrawford

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    Sep 30, 2011
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    2,039
    My own experiments with BVH and animations have been horrible. But along the way, I did see a video that describes what you want. I have no idea how to find it again, though. Good luck!
     
  5. niosop2

    niosop2

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    Jul 23, 2009
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    1,059
    Have you tried the Bake Action command? I regularly transfer motions using it by constraining my armature bones to that of an imported BVH.
     
  6. jgb143

    jgb143

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    Jun 8, 2010
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    132
    Is "Bake Action" in Blender? Where is that at? It looks like there used to be a button in Blender for baking animations but it was removed several revisions ago.

    I thought maybe the "Bake Animations" checkbox in the Unity FBXImport settings would might do what I want but it's greyed out and I can't check it for some reason.
     
  7. jgb143

    jgb143

    Joined:
    Jun 8, 2010
    Posts:
    132
    I finally figured it out. The "Bake Action" option is still there...it's just hiding. In pose mode, select all your bones and press space. Start typing "bake action" and it will come up. Select the number of frames you want to bake, press ok, and you're good to go.

    This is actually a pretty nice way to use BVH files on your rigged characters. Since they are usually moving around, adding only rotational constraints to the bones keeps the character in place. And you can ignore any bones you don't want.