Over this past weekend I've been trying to work with raw animation files,
specifically,
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I have my own standard character model, and I wanted to take the animations from the linked asset pack to my standard character. After two days (having had used blender for a couple of years now), I found that its not easy.
in terms of
'who peddles in raw animation files?'
the reason I bring up what I was doing was that the asset files were organized such that there is an FBX file, with a character and skeleton, and then all the animations were individual FBX files that were purely animation data. By pure animation data, i mean, the data was so raw I couldn't use it. bones were represented with a bunch of empty objects, which contained the bone's animation data, such as location and rotation. Previously I had worked with some animation retargeting software, but all of those required a 'rig' not just a bunch of empties with matching names. The issue with this was that the empties acted like individual objects, while a rig acts like one object, and all the retargeting software I had wanted a rig ie a single object. So I couldn't make use of the data. I tried constraining the rig to match each unique empty... but due to how FBX importing work, when a rig is imported you can set the bone configuration, meaning that the program rebuilds the rig from the data, the data for the rig isn't specifically given, so the import settings don't match how the 'empty' objects get imported, so I couldn't get the angles to match.
Now what I could have done is actually used Source Film Maker (aka SFM) since I believe this will handle the data correctly (and what I believed would generate the original files). Looking at the source files, the rotation issue was solved by creating a custom meta rig in unity, something I wasn't able to extract to blender. In fact a lot of helpful tools I find tend to be plug ins for unity, which is frustrating since that means I can't export the data and I don't want to change my workflow to some third party unity tool. Now changing my workflow to unity tools or to SFM is a valid decision one could make, especially if they do want to use animations/models made by others, but in my case, I want to use custom models as well as use animation techniques that I only know work in maya or blender (using shape keys to add secondary physics effect without need for control bones) that I really like. That and looking at the animations, I have my own preferred style and would rather just animate things myself than use someone else's animation/motion-capture.
