Importing Animated models from Blender into Unity 5.3.4

Hello everyone,

I know there are a bunch of threads regarding this topic in the archives, but I didn't find any that could help me with what seems to be a rather simple problem. I am exporting .blends with animations into my unity vr game for oculus dk2, and not getting any animation. One of the .blend files is humanoid with a rig, but that's actually not the one i'm worried about (for now). I have light animations with meshes (such as fireworks) that I would like to repeat for the entirety of my small game, as well as vehicle objects which were set to follow a circular course in blender. When I import these objects into my game and look at the inspector, these objects come already with the Animator Component, which says "Not initialized" at the bottom.

So I did enough research to find out that for some animations, (like ones with particles, I'm guessing) require the Animation Component - however, this component will only work if my animation is marked as 'Legacy' which, in Unity 5.3.4, I cannot do from the debug tab in the Animation Component.

So I believe I am still failing to understand something conceptually about how I access the animations present in my .blend files. I saw some mentioning of exporting a .fbx file in order to get the animation from the animated .blend file in blender, and putting that .fbx file in my assets folder, but it seemed like an outdated method. Any help would be greatly appreciated, and I'd be more than happy to share my project file with anyone.

Best wishes,

 

This really should be in external tools instead of animations. It isnt a Unity animation issue.

(Max artist) Im nearly 90% positive particle animations in blender wont translate into Unity regardless of the export method.

Suggest replicating the particle setup in Unity particles and getting more comfortable with fbx files (not an outdated method unless for blender only)
Blend files are only useful for blender users. If you plan to work with other people and they dont use blender - the blend file is as useless as an unreal engine file.

 

Ah. I meant that I would share my unity game file, which would include all the necessary .blend files and related things, but yes, at this time I'm only looking for contributions from those who are familiar with working between blender and unity. I myself am more familiar with blender when it comes to modeling, so that's my preference for setting up all of the models/animations I would like to have in-game. But I suppose learning Unity is the approach I'm going to have to take. Sorry if I posted this in the wrong section, also.

EDIT: Also, that still doesn't cover the animated objects that are neither humanoid or particle animations. Sure, some of these I could simply reanimate in Unity, but I simply thought there would be a way to carry over any object attribute from a .blend file into my unity game project

 

Simple solution is to rig them even if they are only primitive mesh objects.
I've seen 1-2 basic demonstrations floating around of people claiming things could be animated without rigging/bones, and imported into Unity, only, thing is, no blender users ever commented to those examples, so it's hard to say if they actually work or not or if they are only gimmick workflows.

What does work 100% of the time unless user error is rigging/skinning and exporting with fbx files.

If you feel comfortable with blender particles (if they are anything like pflow Max particles) you will have no problem picking up Unity particles. They are very friendly to users who have used more complex particle systems in 3D apps.

Hope you find the solutions that work for you.