Animation/Emissive question?

[noonespecial]

From all the tutorials I've read, it seems that animations should be done in Blender but emissive/light animations should be done in Unity.

So how would one go about combining the two? Say I have an animated part that includes a light that I want to turn on when the animation is played (part deployed). How would I go about doing that?

[OrbitusII]

You can animate all of the geometry in Blender, but things like lights and emissives need to be animated in Unity. Also, because you can't edit animations exported from Blender inside of Unity (AFAIK) you should animate everything in Unity to get the physical changes to work correctly with the light changes.

I prefer Unity's animation system anyhow, it's a lot more user-friendly than Blender's, which doesn't even add a lot of extra functionality.

[nli2work]

add the light in Unity; a spotlight or a point light; key it as part of the emissive animation clip. same way you key the emissive RGB or Alpha; key the light's intensity, color, and/or range.

[noonespecial]

add the light in Unity; a spotlight or a point light; key it as part of the emissive animation clip. same way you key the emissive RGB or Alpha; key the light's intensity, color, and/or range.

Yeah. I know how to animate an ordinary light in Unity. But, do I do as OrbitusII suggested and do ALL of the animation in Unity, or is there a way to do the emissive animation clip that plays at the same time as the animation export from blender?

In essence, there is a light assembly INSIDE one of my parts. An animation done in blender "deploys" the light, not I need to turn it on.

[nli2work]

need to clear up the terms here...

by "light" you mean the visible mesh? or the game object that emit light?

if you mean mesh; follow the steps I listed in the last post, simply position the light object where the light mesh is, child it in the heirarchy and key it as usual.

if you mean game object hat emits light, you add a light object in Unity, open the imported object, find the animation clip and duplicate it, CTRL-D. you can then add an Unity light object; insert it in the heirarchy; and animate it as usual in the duplicated animation clip.

Edited September 30, 2014 by nli2work

[OrbitusII]

Blender's lights cannot transfer over into Unity, so you can't animate the light's settings in Blender and have them work in Unity. In order for everything to work in one animation, that animation will have to be done in Unity since animations imported with a mesh are read-only. If you want to do the animation in Blender, I'd only use it as a reference for making the final animation in Unity.