Combining several animations into a single FBX

Question

I'm trying to figure out a workflow for preparing character animations for Unity so that they are all combined in a single FBX file. The advantage as far as I see it is that it then uses only a single skeleton where multiple animation files would each have their own skeleton (which I think is unnecessary and would increase size considerably).

I've tried using Maya for this but haven't been successful so far. Then I tried Motionbuilder and I can get the animations (takes) together into a single file but many of the animations don't look right afterwards.

So I was wondering does anyone know of a solid workflow to achieve this? I'm having a hard time finding information about what I'm trying to achieve. This is probably a piece of cake for experienced animators but I'm just starting with animation now.

So how do you combine several animation FBX files into single one (whith either Maya, Motionbuilder, or 3DSMax) and make sure that the animations are all properly retained like they should? I'm sure there are some additional things to take care of but I don't know exactly what they are.

Answer 1

I'm a bit late on this, but perhaps you can still use it or someone else might come across it.

Exporting

First of all, if the animation look wrong when imported into your game engine, it can be a good idea to bake your animation before exporting. Animation baking can also be done during FBX export in Maya, however I'm not sure it works as well as baking in Maya beforehand under Edit > Keys > Bake Simulation.

Using an extension, you can also setup clips for FBX, which is how you could then have all your animation in one Maya file and similarly export it one, see this link.

If you prefer using Motionbuilder for combining the clips and the re-exporting, try baking the animation before exporting.

Setup in Unity/Game Engine

Now for optimisation. I'm assuming you're using Unity based on other questions you've asked...

AFAIK, Unity will handle optimisation if you name and use it correctly. Let's assume you have a character called Soldier. What I would then do, would be to import a simple T-Pose of this character with no animation on and name the file Solider.fbx. For the walk animation I would name it [email protected], jump [email protected] etc (see documentation here).

This Unity will only use one file and the model avatar, and only use the animation from the other files and apply that to the avatar. It doesn't import a new model and skeleton with each fbx file you import. See the documentation on Creating the Avatar and their video tutorials on the subject on Unity's website.