Shape key animation?

[Dr. Jet]

Always wanted to make a deployable dish antenna. Finally managed to make decent one in Blender using shape key animation... only to discover that Unity does not play that animation after import (though Unity 4.3+ does support shape key animations). Is there some kind of trick to make it work? 

P.S. Squad deploying dish part (commDish88-88) is using mesh-to-bone animation, which I haven't try yet. 

[nli2work]

could export from Unity 4.3.x... bigger question is whether KSP supports blend shapes. Skinned Mesh will definitely work.

[DMagic]

I don't know about shape keys, I swear I read something about shape keys working in Unity, but that they had to be set up in Unity, not imported; I have no idea where I might have read that though, or if I actually did. 

As far as I know the only types of animations that Unity understands are standard object manipulations (translate, rotate, or scale object 1 relative to object 2) and armature rigs (bones and skinned meshes).

Unity doesn't understand bone constraints on armatures, but it is still possible to do all sorts of interesting things by simply baking down the constraints into a regular animation. For instance, making a flexible tube with fixed ends, or any type of kinematics animations.

For that specific dish animation I think an armature animation would work fine, it might just be very tedious to setup and animate all of the rigs. 

[raidernick]

Shape keys definitely do work in unity 4.3, when you import the part into unity, unity will say it is a skinned mesh(i don't know why), but the animation will still work.

Edited March 23, 2016 by raidernick

[Dr. Jet]

On 23.03.2016 at 8:49 PM, raidernick said:

Shape keys definitely do work in unity 4.3, when you import the part into unity, unity will say it is a skinned mesh(i don't know why), but the animation will still work.

Tried that in Unity 5 (concidering 5 > 4.3), it didn't work.

[nli2work]

No point to setting up vertex cache animation, it won't make it through PartTools.