Animation silently fails when Animator drives more than one object

🌵 Needle Engine
1

Needle Engine version: 6.0.0 alpha 4
Unity version: 2022.3.55

When a single Animator component controls animation on two or more objects simultaneously, none of the animations play after exporting to GLB/web. No errors or warnings are thrown during export or in the browser console.

Also sent u bug report regarding this.

Thanks.

2

Yeah — the Animator route is the likely culprit. Animator export only supports top-level state transitions; blend trees and sub-state machines are dropped, and they fail silently rather than warning ([4]). A single Animator driving several objects usually means layers/blend trees are doing the work, so nothing survives the export.

Quick test: swap the Animator for the Animation component (or split into one simple Animator per object) — if it plays, it’s the controller shape, not the exporter ([2], [6]).

Also worth checking: materials aren’t duplicated on export, so a clip animating a shared material may look dead ([4]).

If it still fails after that, share your deployed URL or a minimal repro at Needle-engine - Vite Template (duplicated) - StackBlitz and I’ll take a look.

Sources: Needle Engine Docs (55%), Needle Engine Docs (54%), Needle Engine Docs (53%)

4 replies left
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3

Also worth noting, Inspected the exported glb in babylon sandbox and there both animations works fine as expected.

4

Hi, any update? Its quite urgent.
This is what i meant by more than one object.

image
image461×174 17.8 KB

5

Hey,
we are currently working on it and hopefully we get a new update today available for you.

As a workaround, you can try to change the Materials in the SkinnedMeshRenderer. As far as i was able to see in your bug report, your SkinnedMeshRenderer was using 3 times the same Material. So you could try to duplicate it. So instead of having [MaterialA, MaterialA, MaterialA] on it, you set [MaterialA, MaterialA_Copy_2, MaterialA_Copy_3].

I will reply again when the update is available :slight_smile:

6

Thanks a lot. Looking forward towards the update.

7

Hey, new Needle Engine is released with version 6.0.0-alpha.6.
I hope that fixes your issues :slight_smile: let me know if it works on your side! Thx!