Importing Animation FBX from Maya to Unity Tutorial

Is there a tutorial out there somewhere that walks one through the proper steps to export an animation set from Maya into Unity and how to use the different animations?

I have a friend thats getting into Maya LT, and Ive been dipping in Unity (2d up until now) for a couple of months now. My friend made a simple Crane with animation in Maya, and when I imported it into Unity, I could not figure out how to get it to animate, it just stayed stationary. When I changed the Rig animation type from Generic to Legacy, it did play but not properly (the crane only swiveled, where it should have had several moving parts going up and down as well).

So we decided to go to something more basic to try and learn. He created a simple bouncing sphere in Maya. I imported it into Unity, and again no Animation on Generic. Switched to Legacy and it played the animation, however whenever I hit play the sphere changed its X and Z position to somewhere off camera.

Even if I get all that figured out, I still dont know how to create Animations to be used in a controller from the Maya animations. Im assuming (for example) that in Maya the object would have all the animations in a single scene at different keyframes (idle, walk, run, jump, etc.), then in Unity I saw you can set the clips on the Animation tab of the FBX once imported, but how do I actually reference those in the controller?

Basically, Im either looking for someone awfully patient to help explain (lol does that sound as funny as I think it does?) or a fairly in depth tutorial that covers both aspects (Maya and Unity)...

 

Try updating your FBX plugin for Maya. Unity keeps very current, and your Maya needs to up to date. I had a similar problem and it worked for me. There are FBX 2015 updates for Maya 2008 - 2012, pick the right one for your version of Maya, hope this helps.

 

Thanks for the response! He is using Maya 2015 LT which includes FBX 2015 already as well. We tried using FBX 2012 as suggested on one of the Unity pages, but that did not make a difference either.

 

Have you found a tutorial yet?

I would be interested in this kind of tutorial as well. In general it would be great to have tutorials for importing animations from different kind of animation tools (Maya, 3ds Max and Blender) into Unity.

 

Does it have a rig? Even a simple joint? I have gotten my character animation to work in Unity but the very first step I do is create a bone, then parent or group all objects for a "rig" under that bone and call it the "root" in the generic layout for Unity. Then even if it is something as simple as a bouncing ball (or in my case a gun the character holds), it's ALL skinned to a joint under the root.