Importing animation from 3DS Max into Unity problem

Hello,

I apologize in advance if this is a remedial problem, but I haven't had much luck finding a solution to my problem.

I use 3DS Max 2010, and export models in the .fbx format. When I import anything into Unity, it works fine, all the geometry and textures come in fine, but when I import an animation, it will just disappear as soon as I go into Play mode. The odd thing is, I open up an older animation (just some unrelated animated piece), and when I import that into Unity using the exact same .fbx exporter on the same settings, it works perfectly fine, with all the animation solutions available.

I am at a total loss as to what to do, and hope I can get some help here. Does the specific length of the animation matter in max? Like, if it is an odd number of frames, is that an issue? Or is there some odd setting off in my file of an animation? All the files are made in 2010, the animated models that work and those that don't, with I BELIEVE the same settings, but I'm not positive, or even sure of what would be different.

Please help! Thank you for any aid in advance...

EDIT: After toying around with it a bit, I found out that the main problem is that you can not use Set Key, because that will key position, along with rotation and scale. After going in with Auto Key, I found out that any simple, keyed animations with position keys will not work in Unity. Only rotation and scale work appropriately.

The only exception is that when I make a little animation with Reactor, using the Create Animation button, Unity will accept these files even though they have position keys in them. I don't know a whole hell of a lot about Unity, but I'm pretty damn confused about this. Does anyone with more knowledge of the software know what might cause this? And, more importantly, a work-around I can take advantage of?

Sorry for the lengthy post... x.x

Make sure when you export to FBX, animation is checked. If that's OK, I would try different FBX versions--2011.3, 2010, 2009, 2006.

Is this a Bone-Based animation? If it is be sure to Collapse the transforms in the trajectories panel (Motion->Trajectories->Collapse Transform group->Collapse) Also as loginuhahaha stated make that Animation is checked in the FBX Export dialog.

Alex,

You’ve probably already worked past this, but for anyone else that might run into this…

I had a similar issue. Exported a simple animation from 3DSMax 2013 (animating from one position key frame to another) as an .fbx and imported into Unity. Looked great, but when it started to animate it ‘disappeared’.

What actually happened is when the animation played, the game object jumped to a zero position in the world-space (in Max my animation started at xyz 0, but in Unity that put it under my terrain). I just didn’t see it under the terrain, and didn’t realize that Unity was moving it to the 3DS Max keyframe coordinates.

What fixed this issue for me was to select the ‘bake animation’ option in the 3DS Max .fbx export window.