Maya to Unity UV Animations?

Hello,

Is there any way to import texture/uv animations from Maya into Unity?

My character has no face other than some planes overlapping it's head. The texture for the planes has various facial expressions in each quadrant. When the character needs to express something, I will move the UVs to the appropriate expression and key the transformation.

I'm able to animate the UV's of my character's face in Maya but none of the methods I have tried import into Unity. To get the most organic facial expressions, I would like to be able to animate the face texture while I animate the rest of the character.

Help would be greatly appreciated

Thanks!

 

Unity can't utilize uv animation because how it deals with uvs are very different. So you will want to either export this animation for uv and sync it up in material or mesh, or hack it in by animating dummy bones, which you'll read as uv float values to be applied however you decide.

But there is no animation of UV from maya - you'll have to get creative.

You can try and see if blendshapes preserve it but I haven't tested nor checked.

 

Okay, thanks for the reply. I'll try adding the UV animations in Unity instead. I'd like to avoid the extra step but I guess there's currently no way.

If there is some way to use the animator in Unity I'll try that, otherwise I'll have to use animation events to trigger the offset.

Thanks again!

 

A lot of developers make little scripts in maya or max to convert something that is animating to a dummy bone, or just animate the dummy bone. Then this bone will animate on your character (its not bound to anything) in sync and you can easily read its local transform and apply those values to anything you can think of such as uv animation.

This is something we do as well if cornered since it requires no effort and is always in sync.

 

Oh I see what you mean now with the "dummy bone". Interesting solution for sure. Now I feel like I have a few good options.

Thanks, friend!

 

@hippocoder When you say "dummy bone" do you mean IK, or do you mean something else from Maya?

 

hippocoder is talking about a joint whose animation transformations will be used for controlling parameters inside unity like the UV coordinates. At least that's what I gathered. I still haven't used that technique because the animation events worked out just fine so I can't really say with confidence.