So some of that is already done by the GLTFRecorder on export (simple stuff like removing colinear keyframes). You can also lower the export FPS there I believe
Also, if you use the results inside the Needle pipeline files will get meshopt compressed anyways which massively brings down animation size too, so I wouldn’t worry too much about it.
hmm… it sure looks like almost every frame is still in there, though - and admittedly I know replacing animation values with transform ones will be 6x the data - but I’m looking at a 50kb .anim output from two combined 4kb .anim inputs
by user 248501710404845568
.anim?
yep - the file I’m looking at is what I have by hitting ctrl+D on the Unity animation from inside the output .glb to create a .anim file
by user 248501710404845568
And the reason you’re doing that is that you want to edit it?
Unity’s animation format is hilariously bad in terms of filesize on disk
I believe it!!! but this is all in service of attempting to get a giant set of complex, multi-track timeline animations to work in Needle
by user 248501710404845568
Yeah I get that 
Just saying, I’ve seen 3 MB glTF animations explode to 2 GB of text file .anim data, but if you export it as glTF again it’s small again – just Unity’s storage format is very inefficient
could we export juuust the animation to glTF and still use it?
by user 248501710404845568
(For humanoid motion data we tend to do cleanup in Blender if needed, not in Unity’s animation window)
Mind clarifying what the flow you’d like to see there would be?
what I don’t want to do is have to include 50 copies of a character in the build
by user 248501710404845568
Ah I see
You won’t have 50 copies of the character in the build if you only reference the animation clips from those files
I believe we have an experimental branch that does just that (minimal export/recording so that mostly only animation is contained); I’ll check with the team. Used for humanoid motion tracking in some places
we thought the same about FBXs, but Unity seems to keep including non-animation parts of the FBX in WebGL builds no matter what we do
by user 248501710404845568
I believe that doesn’t happen with Needle Engine / UnityGLTF
so regarding the ideal flow - I’d like to have a tool simply output either an .anim file, or a .glb containing just the animation data (no meshes, materials, etc.). It seems like the best approach in the short-term however is to generate a .glb for each merged timeline per character, and just allow the entire copy of the character to add to the file weight of the project.
by user 248501710404845568
I think technically you could postprocess the glb (using e.g. glTF-transform) and remove the data you dont want (e.g. remove meshes from the file + nodes)
that sounds great - could I get a quick pointer to getting started with that tool?
by user 248501710404845568