This is really a follow up to a post I made earlier this year :

http://www.gamedev.net/topic/665461-alternatives-to-wavefront-obj-format-for-skinned-models/#entry5208662

I've pieced together some more information on my models and now have Bones,Weights and Animation Data available.

I've written a Collada exporter for this, and as far as I can tell using the AssImp viewer the data is now correct, I can play through the various animations in the viewer and they all appear ok.

Despite this I'm still struggling to get the data into my Unity scenes. There doesn't seem to be an option for importing raw collada files. If I use Autodesk FBX converter then it doesn't convert the anims. If I import my collada file into Blender and try and export from there It only seems to read one of the animations (the dopesheet shows a single action). Importing that into Unity shows no animations either.

I feel like I'm going round and round in circles trying to get a format that will import successfully so wanted to check again and see if anyone had any recommendations for apps, toolchains or techniques for doing this form of conversion

Help!

Thanks :)

Unfortunately I don't have a 'raw' blender/maya file, Instead I've generated a Collada file from my own converter program. Collada is just the latest of my converters, I originally had .OBJ which was great for everything apart from skinned models and I could just drag that to unity, or convert to FBX. Then I had an ASCII FBX converter which again worked well for static, but the fact that the documentation was lacking meant that even when I figured out the skinning information in my files I couldn't find a good reference to put that into FBX. So then came Collada as that had a (relatively) well defined spec and tools that I could check and debug by export errors in. Unfortunately having done all that, and generated all the animations and seeing them work in the viewer I then was again stumped in that Blender or Unity wouldn't make proper use of the multiple anims (no anims at all in Unity). I guess my next step could be to look at the Blender Collada importer and see how /when/why it generates amature actions as I think that may be key, but just wanted to see if someone else had the same issues.

Thanks for the links, I've just tried saving a blend file and dragging it into Unity and that does give me one animation, i think if I can persuade blender to generate more armature actions then that could do the trick.

Yes definitely. Thanks.

Thanks. I'll have a read through.

In case anyone's interested I came up with a workaround / decided to cheat (depending on how you look at it) . I rolled all the separate animations into a single one and stored off the frame timings. This then loaded into blender and therefore hopefully into Unity where I can set-up some animation fragments with the frame info.