Importing Animation

Importing animation into Unity from external applications such as Blender, Maya, 3D Studio MAX, etc. will be covered on this page.

Importing Animation into Unity

If you have created animation in an external application such as Blender, Maya, 3D Studio MAX etc. it is possible to import into Unity. It is even possible to break up a single animation that includes many animations into their separate animations easily inside Unity. So this approach depends on which approach you would prefer.

For this example an asset will be animated in Blender (shown in the video) and imported in the usual way into Unity by saving it into the assets folder, or simply dragging and dropping it into Unity. This asset could be made in any tool that supports animation and exports to Unity compatible formats like .fbx.

It is perfectly fine to only import one animation from your external application. You will probably use the following tools in order to rename or add looping to your animation.

Select the imported asset, and then go to the Animation Tab in the Inspector.

Selecting the Animation Tab

To do this we can add these using the Clips section to create each clip (Red and Orange box), and the frames section to modify the frames for each clip (Green box).

Adding and modifying Clips

This tab will allow you to modify the animation settings as you see fit. In this case, I have two animations that I would like to set. An Idle animation, that is from frame 0 - 60. And a jump animation that is from 60 - 299.

Adding an Idle and Jump Clip

It is possible to set animations as loops or not under the frames section. The Idle will be set to a loop, and the jump will not. It is also possible to modify the Loop Pose and Cycle Offset if needed.

Looping the Idle Animation

You can preview the animation at the bottom of the Inspector.

Previewing the Animation

When you hit Apply your Animation clips will be available to use (dragging into an Animator for example) under the original Asset.

Applying your Animation Clips

Note that an imported model with an animation will not animate in a Space unless it has an Animator or Animation component applied to it. For Mona Spaces we recommend Animator, as that will open up Reactor as a tool for interaction. For more information on this you can look at Animation in Unity.