How to create and bake animations in Blender (when you already have created the Rig Skeleton)

Question

I've created a little blocky character in Blender, with a rigged skeleton. I've tested the joints out in Pose Mode and they seem ok. (the character is for a 3rd person 2.5D side-scrolling platform game, I need idle, run, skid animations for now)

From the instructions ive been following and several tutorials, I believe I need to bake each keyframe. Now I'm not fully sure what that is, but I understand it basically means taking position details etc for every frame so that the rig doesnt need to be manipulated in my code in unity.

I am going for very simple approach here, I dont mind things like foot sliding and stiff like that. Its going to only be a few keyframes per animation.

I have to make it into FBX file i believe, however I've downloaded a few OBJ before off the net and they worked with animation in unity (if i recall correctly).

Here is the screenshot for what I've done so far showing the model and the rig skeleton. What screen do i need to go to in order to start making keyframes, and saving animations for unity?

(Sorry if this is quite a dumb/broad question, im just stuck again :\ )

Thanks for reading

Answer 1

OK I found the answer. There is an animation mode in the view selection bit at the top of the screen (where is usually says default). This brings up the dope sheet and then I can manually add keyframes in for each rotation . Ie. I have to set it to keyframe 1 and then press button 'i' on my keyboard, then press rotation. The I got to say frame 30 and move the rotation of the bone and press 'I' again , press rotation. This will make the bone rotate smoothly between 1 and 30 frames between the two values i inserted for that bone.

The bad thing is, that AFAIK I need to do this for every joint of every bone I want to animate, separately. Which seems annoying.

I tried to do it with multiple bone rotations at once and it seemed to forget most of it and the animation came out completely messed up.

I still have a lot to learn but thought id answer my own question just in case someone else reads it and needs the same help.