Blender Armature Animation - Scaling from zero doesn't work

I'm importing a rigged animation where I am scaling meshes that start as if they don't exist (by using a scale of zero) and scale up to full size then back to zero to disappear again.

The animation looks fine in Blender; however, in Unity the animation only works if everything is above a scale of zero - anything set to a scale of zero in the start pose is never animated (so you never see those meshes at all) and anything that scales to zero mid-way through the animation causes the animation of that mesh to flicker a few times.

If having a bone pose scaled to zero is not possible, is there a way to achieve a vanish/disappearing effect via Blender animation another way?

Currently my crude work-around that works (for testing purposes) is having the scale set to a very small number so that it isn't really visible (0.00001); obviously this is not a preferable solution.

 

Do it using scripting. You can easily multilpy scale to zero and back to whatever original value from code. Or even enable/disable the rendering of your object.

Code (CSharp):

1. using UnityEngine;
2. using System.Collections;
3. public class EnableDisable : MonoBehaviour {
4.     //toggles object visiblity by pressing E
5.     private bool IsVisible = true;
6.     private Vector3 ScaleOld;
7.     public float ScaleVisible = 1.0f;
8.     public float ScaleInvisible = 0.0f;
9.     public bool DisableRenderer = false;//determines the method we use to hide the object
10.     private MeshRenderer mesh;//we assume that the object is non-deformable mesh (otherwise use SkinnedMeshRenderer) and is not a sprite (use SpriteRenderer)
11.  
12.     void Start () {
13.         mesh = this.GetComponent<MeshRenderer>();//get the mesh
14.         ScaleOld = this.transform.localScale;//store the original scale
15.  
16.     }
17.     // Update is called once per frame
18.     void Update () {
19.         if (Input.GetKeyDown (KeyCode.E) == true) {// the E key press switches visibility of the object;
20.             IsVisible = !IsVisible;
21.         }
22.         if (DisableRenderer == false) {
23.             if (IsVisible == true){//set scale method
24.                 this.transform.localScale = ScaleOld*ScaleVisible;
25.             } else {
26.                 this.transform.localScale = ScaleOld*ScaleInvisible;
27.             }
28.         } else {//disable renderer method
29.             mesh.enabled = IsVisible;
30.         }
31.     }
32. }