Blender metaballs-animation import

Hello Blenders,

I wonder how to export a metaballs-animation to Unity. As the FBX-exporter converts the metaballs to meshes the animation get´s lost. I have been searchin the net, but I could not find an answer to this problem.
If I try to convert the metaballs manually, the animation as well disappears.

Any findings to this one?

Thank you very much for any support!

Michael

 

Well, not gonna happen. Hate to burst your bubble but that is one of the many things that you can't directly use from Blender in Unity.

There are always workarounds though. Are you only viewing it from one angle? You might be able to get away with making a video and showing that in Unity. I can't remember if videos require pro or just videos on textures, so you might not be able to go this way.

Another way is to kind of fake it. If the animation is very limited, you might be able to do some tricks with animating scale and position to get something going, but I don't honestly think it will work well.

3rd way would be to buy one from the asset store if there is one. I know this isn't the best way, but it is the most likely one to actually work. I haven't searched for it but considering about everything there is on the store there may very well be a sort of meta-ball simulator.

Last way is to create it yourself using the math. Meta-balls are basically math. I don't know the formulas but I DO know you can google and figure it out. Unity supports custom run-time meshes, so you should be able to create a few meshes directly and have them interact as meta-balls do. This would take some time to implement, but it may be something you could put on the asset store if you get it right. This is the way asset store things have been created often. Someone wants a feature that doesn't exist yet, codes it for their own game, then extracts the needed code to make it portable and relevent in other game/systems.

 

You could do it using an OBJ Cache playback system such as MegaCache on the asset store, the author has a video showing a fluids particle system animation turned to a mesh using metaballs and then imported into Unity, the video shows 3ds Max but as it is OBJ based it will work with any package that exporters OBJ sequences so it would work with Blender as well. Video below.

 

Actually, that idea would also work great. I don't know why I forgot about that method. And if you are not going to do anything but show the animation it is likely the best solution.