Dealing with Animations made in Unity

[cxg2827]

I have an animation that is driven by shape keys, so I cant just import an FBX. I need to do the animation within Unity via the blendshape.

I created an animation "Deploy" and then added the component But, when I load the part into the game, it is invisible, and just puffs smoke from the attachment nodes.

Anyone know what steps I am missing for this animation?

[SpannerMonkey(smce)]

Hi not familar with your method of animation, however i notice that in the inspector window the animation size is 0, in a normal unity animation or inported fbx dae etc this would mean that the anim isn't correctly attached to your part or it contains no pertinent information,

I also note that the animator window has no named animation loaded or selected. Did you actually animate the object using the animator window? If so i would have expected to see the animation curves and named transforms etc when you game object/model is selected. does the anmiation run properly in unity?.

Is there, a particular reason you chose this form of animation rather than the usual method?

Im guessing that the base would be fixed and the heatshield expands out from the fixed base, why couldn't you just scale the heatshield to simulate inflation/deployment? I know this works as I have a couple of huge animated heat shields for my colony ships mod and they work really well animated as I described.

[cxg2827]

I also note that the animator window has no named animation loaded or selected. Did you actually animate the object using the animator window? If so i would have expected to see the animation curves and named transforms etc when you game object/model is selected. does the anmiation run properly in unity?.

Im still pretty fresh with the animiation in unity, so I'm not entirely sure about some things. I did open an animator window, and set keyframes with the blendshape value going from 100 to 0, and then it saved it as Deploy.animat file. This is the "Deploy" animation that I have loaded into the game object, and when I do the preview it works. But opening up the animator window again after closing out from unity just opens up a blank timeline. I guess i need to do a bit more reading up.

Is there, a particular reason you chose this form of animation rather than the usual method?

Im guessing that the base would be fixed and the heatshield expands out from the fixed base, why couldn't you just scale the heatshield to simulate inflation/deployment? I know this works as I have a couple of huge animated heat shields for my colony ships mod and they work really well animated as I described.

This heatshield was made to be a bit of a hybrid/mixed-technologies design. The center section is rigid, and only the outer portion inflates from the base, so when I texture they will look a bit different.

Though, thinking about it, I may be able to make 2 separate meshes, and do the scaling animation to almost mimic the same animation as the keyshape (mesh 1: rigid base, mesh 2: inflatable outer perimeter).

Here is an outdated save of the heatshield to better explain the animation. I read up that modifiers need to be applied BEFORE you do the key shapes, otherwise unity will not recognize them (in the case of this save file).

https://www.dropbox.com/s/t2yvezgamni079q/3M%20Expanding%20Heatshield.blend