How to import lattice modifier animation to unity?

Question

I have made an animation in Blender using a lattice modifier:

But when I export it to and .FBX to be able to use it in Unity, the animation from the lattice is gone. How could I solve this, to be able to see the lattice's effect in Unity?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

It's not straight forward to directly export a lattice modifier animation to Unity, as far as I know Unity only supports importing bone animations and blend shapes.

That being said, you do have a few options of how to get this kind of animation in Unity:

1. In Blender, export your mesh as MDD (has to be enabled in preferences), then reimport it to an exact same version of the mesh that has no modifiers. This will automatically create Shape Keys of every step of the animation. Then in Unity, you can import the mesh with the shape keys and create a script to play the animation. This video goes into more detail on how to accomplish that https://youtu.be/sdl-jpZ0NR0

2. Alternatively, you can bake a vertex animation. There's some paid Unity tools to help with this, such as https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/animation/vertex-animation-tools-128190 (I'm not affiliated and haven't used it). As I understand, the process is: Exporting a point cache file with the animation as a .pc2 point cache file, then using their player in Unity to open and play that point cache file.

3. Export as alembic, but Unity doesn't support if for Android builds.

4. As a last resort, you can recreate the animation with bones. Rig the mesh up with bones that can be adjusted to create the same effect, then move the bones over time and scaling them to generate a similar looking animation.