Exporting Animations via blend files - Common Asset Duplication

Question

Thanks for reading.

I want to export to unity with a flow that retains my previously imported assets and connections etc. I already have my unity project and have imported by .blend file. Now when I go back to blender to do some more animations I re-export another blend file. Now inside both of these blend files are my mesh, materials etc, which means when I import them into unity they are duplicates, or even worse slightly different (if I've changed the mesh).

So my question is how do I organize my export blend files, so I can avoid having duplicate assets, and at the same time all my animations work ?

Answer 1

For anyone else getting started with Blender >= 2.8.3, there are many animation features.

The best seems to be to use :

The dope sheet editor to capture an animation that has several objects being animated as a single animation.

The animation editor to capture multiple animations for a single character/game object ie idle1, idle2, walking.

When you import these assets into unity as fbx files, you can split the animations anyway you like, but the best I found seems to be splitting them into fbx's that contain the meshes and armatures that the animations are applied to, so have an fbx for a single game object and its animations, then one fbx with any animations that cross single objects, including again all the meshes and armatures.