Importing 3DS Max with keyframes

I've been struggling with this for a couple of weeks and am wondering if anyone has a solution.

I have a book that I've modelled in Max. The pages deform when it's opened. I initially did it using a spline but then discovered that Unity doesn't support it. So I created the page block using polygon modelling and just moving vertices around, recording their positions in keyframes. Again, works fine in Max but the minute I try to import into Unity, the animation fails.

At the moment, all that happens when I run the animation in unity is that the book opens, but the pages don't deform. What could be causing this?

 

I'm sure that direct keyframing of vertices (if I understood you right) is also Max-specific feature. Game engines will require you to either make Morph Targets for pages or weight them to animated bones.

 

Alternately, look into Alembic export-import: https://forum.unity.com/threads/alembic-for-unity.521649/page-4 I heard that this format supports baking mesh deformations on per-vertex basis (point caching), which can solve incompatibility problems for things like Max animated modifiers. However I have zero experience with it.

 

Thanks. I'll take a look at Morph Targets. I did take a quick look at them a couple of days ago but wasn't entirely sure why they would work.