Baking Animation

Today we were introduced to an essential little trick used for importing animated objects into Unity. The technique is known as baking.

An example of a baked animation once put into unity. When triggered the robot brandishes his gun.

In Maya you select the geometry, making sure that all the keyframes are selected and then export it as an FBX and click on edit preset. Then you simply make sure that the smoothing groups, animation, and bake animation check boxes are selected as well as making sure that its exported as FBX 2009. Then you simply export and save in the scenes folder. Once that's done it's simply a question of importing it all into unity and if you've had different animations on the same timeline then ensure that the keyframes boundaries you select when importing into unity are correct.