Blender: Armature Animation [Support Thread]

[Jonx.]

Alright fellow aircraft developers, the time has come to officially tackle the armature problem in Blender Exporter.

Although, I don't know a flawless solution, I am very close. As an aircraft developer who solely uses Blender, I know getting armatures working will boost my works quality 10x. Everything uses it, complex gear animations, character animations, soft body meshes, wingflex, yawstrings, yoke cushions, wires, ropes, etc. As a whole, the independent developer community needs to really focus on this issue if we want to eventually branch out into bigger projects and higher quality builds.

So far my method is as follows:
- Create a Mesh.
- Add Bones.
- Assign Vertex Groups.
- Assign Contraints.
- Split Mesh by Vertex Groups.
- Assign Each Mesh to an empty.
- Assign each empty to the upper level empty following the same path as bones.
- Create an Empty as an Animation Controller with constraints.
- Animate the Armature using the Animation Controller.
- Select All Bones you wish to Export Animation.
- Bake Pose Animation with "Only Selected Bones", "Visual Keying", and "Clear Constraints".
- Drop Baked Animation to NLA track.
- Assign Anim_Name to NLA.
- Add coding to model.xml
- Export Model using Blender2MSFS Toolkit
- Ensure Apply Modifiers is Checked

So far I've been able to animate various things.
Please let me know if this works for you and if you need official support. We are all here to figure this out together and no questions are dumb questions.

Very Simple Single Arm Gear Example: