Extra empty gameobjects being exported with FBX models from Maya

My artist is having an issue with her models that she creates in Maya. The models import technically fine, but consistently have at least 1 parent empty gameobject, though sometimes there can be up to 10 empty game object parents. This is quite an annoyance. She is unable to figure out why this is happening , and I do not have experience with Maya to help her out.

She stated that she thinks it has something to do with layers, but when she tries to remove the layers she gets a warning about how a leaf object (or something like that) can not remove it's layer.

My other artists use 3DS Max, and do not have her problem, but do not know anything about Maya to help her out. Does anyone know why her files would have empty game objects in them when coming from Maya? Is there a way to fix it?

 

Do they have the latest fbx plugin installed for their version of Maya? And can you post a screen grab of the exporter settings?

 

Can you ( or her) post a screenshot of the outliner with the objects that are being selected to export as fbx? Lights import as empty game objects in Unity, it could be empty groups. Layers do not import into Unity as empty game objects ( they get completely ignored by Unity fbx importer)

 

Thank you both very much for answering! I took the time to try and figure out the problem myself and discovered that it was indeed groups causing the problems. She's adjusted her workflow to not utilize groups now to prevent the problem.

We also had another problem where the assets were importing in huge and at 0.01 scale GameObjects. I was also going to ask about that, but then we discovered that Maya has to use centimeters instead of meters to scale into Unity correctly, but the objects still need to be sized as if the centimeters were actually meters instead. Quirky stuff!

 

Good on you for finding out what was causing it by yourself
Yeah, Maya units are really weird to be honest. Much prefer Max's unit setup as it works perfectly with every other softwares/engines I've used.

 

Hey, I am receiving the same issues on maya in exporting an importing on unity. I tried many ways to solve the problem but I am struck. I wonder if anyone is here to help me with this?