- The Solution
- Other things to pay attention to
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How to fix?: Blender does not export the entire animation
Let’s say, you have a complex animation and whenever you export this animation as an FBX file to import it into a game engine such as Unreal, you see that some of the key points are exported. What’s the solution and why is this happening?
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The Solution
Sampling Rate: 0.10 — Simplify: 0.00 (Lower the number, more accurate the exported animation)
When we click on File > Export as FBX option, the screen above welcomes us. Underneath the Bake Animation tab, we’re seeing these two options named as “Sampling Rate” and “Simplify”. What these two options do is basically taking the animation you made, checking the similar key points in it and getting removes those keypoints “if” they are too similar to reduce the file of the FBX file as much as possible. On theory, and sometimes in practice, it works great. But sometimes Blender removes too many keypoints that you actually want to keep in your animation. By default, “Simplify” is set to 1, and “Sampling Rate” is also set to 1. By changing the values as I provided above, you’ll get rid of the problem of Blender not exporting the whole animation.
Note: I just want to underline one thing: Reducing the sampling rate (From 1.00 to 0.10 in this case) increases the file size a lot. I advise tweaking these values based on your animation until you find a sweet spot between how correct the animation itself is and how big the exported FBX file will be.
Other things to pay attention to
Make sure you enabled that “Fake User — Save this data-block even if it has no users” option in Dope Sheet > Action editor, if you encounter any additional issues. I don’t exactly know why but sometimes Blender does not assign the keyframes you created to a user this option fixes that.