Question Really Struggling to Import Animation

Hey so Im really struggling to get a super basic rig animation working - havent done anything 3d animation before so this is a new area for me.

I have imported the Starter Assets FBX 3rd Person Controller armature into unity, and added a new action called "Zipline" with two keyframes, the standard pose at the start, and a keyframe with five modified bones so as to make the model reach upwards.

I then export that as an FBX, and import it into unity. When I look at the animation in Unity however, it seems to have loads of extra keyframes all over the body, and indeed when I attach it to the animation controller, put it into the animation flowchart with some transitions, and activate it in code, the character goes into a really weird sitting position, completely unrelated to how it looks in blender. The same happens when I preview it in the animation window.


Investigating further, I discover that the animation I have created looks wholly different from the existing animations in the Animation tab, which all appear as "PlayerArmature - blah blah blah", as opposed to my new animation which is structured differently and filled with (Missing) errors.





Does anyone have any input into what I am doing wrong, or even a direction I should look in to figure out whats going on - Ive been really struggling with this seemingly super basic thing for like a week now and I just have absolutely no idea what to do. Ive been following various tutorials and documentation but I cant find anything that discusses animation as it is structured in the Starter Assets 3rd Person Controller sandbox and I dont want to abandon everything I have already done to build a new character controller from scratch and use tutorials to build animations.

 

You might have better luck not modifying the actual FBX that came with the starter assets and instead just create your own animations right in Unity, saving those .anim files (obviously) separate to the FBX file.

That way you'll be making animations using the existing Animator and hosted at that point in the hierarchy, and it will have a much higher chance of working.

You can make a super-ultra-simple one-bone wiggle animation to prove the workflow, and it will always be much smoother than going in and out of Blender for an object that probably wasn't even created in Blender in the first place.

Every tool that touches your data (potentially) leaves warts on it.

 

Is there an easy (relatively) way to make animations in Unity directly, the only potential method I have found would be manually inputting angles and transforms in new keyframes which seems an impractical way of making animations.

Thanks for your help

 

My own animation-fu is at about the level of a 2-bone slime blob.

You may find more information in this forum:

https://forum.unity.com/forums/animation.52/

 

I use an asset called uMotion

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/animation/umotion-pro-animation-editor-95991

which does what you need and more. It also has Forward kinematics and Inverse Kinematics which are a must to actually mange to create any humanoid animation.

can't recommend it enough.

there may be other assets that do same thing maybe even better, but I've used only this one so that is what I'm recommending

 

Thank you, I used the free version of the plugin and it let me do what I needed in less than 5 minutes, you're a lifesaver!