Animation without joints - Maya to Unity - Help!

Hi guys!

I'm currently working on a small game project where I seem to have a hit a wall when importing animation from Maya to Unity. My character is currently joint-less and animations are based on simple rotation of geometry around shifting pivot points - however - this is where the problem occurs

Inside Maya, everything works fine, but when we take it into Unity, problems start occuring. It looks to me like Unity isn't able to understand when a pivot point moves to a new location (therefore it just plays the animation with a fixed pivot).

We currently have 3 cubes on top of one another - these cubes functions as a limb and are able to rotate at the intersections. However... We do not want the cubes to rotate from the center, but instead from the edges. This means that whenever we rotate the limb forward, it need to have it's pivots at the front - vice versa backwards. So far I have achieved this effect with "rotate pivot XYZ" from the channel box, to fine effect in Maya, but as said - this doesn't seem to function when exported/imported to Unity :/



Does anyone have any clue as to what may be causing this? I can't seem to wrap my head around it :/ And maybe there's a smarter way to do this stuff that I do not know about.

I have avoided setting up joints for the limb, since I cannot figure out how to achieve this effect with a rig. If anyone out there have an idea, feel free to share it

Anyways - hope there's someone out there who can share some words of wisdom Would be greatly appreciated <3

 

You are correct that you can not animate the pivot point in unity.
I'm a 3ds max user, but I image the process would be the same in Maya. What I would do is place a main joint for each box and then more joints at each pivot that you want. Parent the pivot joints to their respective main joint, and then from the main joint, make a "parant contraint" to each pivot joint. Then just change the weighting and you're good to go.

*edit*
You don't strictly need joints for this to work. Using null helpers and parent constraining your box to them may work as well.

 

Thanks for the reply Jrocket. I tried the methods you suggested, but haven't really been able to figure it out. I have tried using null helpers (Locators in Maya - somewhat at least), but it always results in the geometry jumping "back" in to place whenever I move the locator/Null at the opposite side (resulting in weird looking animations) - It's the whole "forgets its old position" problem I'm having :/

I tried your bone setup aswell, but I can't really grasp it. It currently looks like this:



As you can see I'm no rigging master + I'm having a hard time getting this to work hehe (I kinda feel like it should be a somewhat simple setup).

Does anyone have any clue as to what I'm doing wrong/have an solution to this?

Thanks again jRocket. Really really appreciated