Two days ago I wanted to get an animation using stretchy bones from 3ds Max to Unity. I tried to simply export it using .fbx, but when I played the animation in Unity, my character, a blob of jello, just waggled a bit, and didn’t squash or stretch. Yesterday I found a working solution, and I thought I’d share this here, just in case someone has a similar problem and finds this.
First a little warning, or two. This might not be suitable for complex rigs, for several reasons, one of which is the second warning: I will be breaking a paradigm here, that I usually adhere to almost religiously. As you might be aware (if not, you will be after reading the next few lines), you should never ever (ever) scale an object that you might want to animate at any point in the future, especially not non-uniformly. Scale only in edit Poly Sub-Object mode or use a XForm Modifier. If you scale on object level, you distort the object’s transformation matrix and all children will move/rotate in this distorted coordinate system. You can easily notice one problem, when you rotate a child of a non-uniformly scaled object. If you really have to scale on object level, always use Reset X-Form afterwards to reset the transformation matrix (rotation is set to (0, 0, 0), scale to (1, 1, 1); position is left untouched), even if you don’t plan on animating the object ever, just to be on the safe side. I try to avoid the pitfalls I know of here, but be careful anyways.
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