Cant export only skeleton animations. Skeleton gets removed if not attached to anything

Im having a problem with exporting from maya and fbx2gltf. If I export only the skeleton animations in an fbx and convert it the skeleton gets removed. If I have it attached to a mesh it works perfect. Seems to be something very weird that happens. Tried to remove the meshes in sandbox and then exporting only the skeleton but does not work either.

Would really like to get help with this because I need this to work for the character animation system Im working on. Want to create a library of 100 animations and dont want it to have the mesh attached to each one but just applying the skeleton to the base character.

Any help regarding this would be super, using maya but open for any solution that works to convert fbx joint animation to working glbs.

cc @PatrickRyan

if you are using our exporters this is not a supported features. that being said can you try with a dummy mesh? like a cube or something?

@HTJonathanNilsson, it seems to me that you are coming at this from the opposite direction where you are reassigning your skinned mesh to one of 100 skeletons in your scene depending on the animation you need. There is actually a lot of overhead for keeping those 100 skeletons in your scene and potentially some problems with blending between animations if you have multiple skeletons, one for each animation. I may be misreading your original statement, but that sounds like what you are trying to do.

Instead of needing a skeleton definition in your file, you have everything you already need without it. Here is a scene that imports a skinned mesh with an animation and a second animation-only asset with no skeleton or mesh and retargets that animation to the skinned mesh.

What we are doing is loading the animation only file - you can see in the inspector that the file only has transforms and no mesh or skeleton - and cloning the animation group. You don’t need to clone the animation group if you aren’t retargeting to multiple skinned meshes, but I do here to retain the original animation and naming structure. You then run through each of the targeted animations within the group and find the name of the bone in your skinned mesh that matches the target of each animation. Then you reassign the matching bone in your skinned mesh as the target for that animation. Even if there are some naming mismatches like there were in my skeletons, you can get around this with an abstraction of each bone to map between source and destination.

Once you have your groups with the targeted animations assigned to the bones in your skinned mesh, you can then just play, pause, stop, or blend between them as needed and you don’t need to manage any reassignment of your mesh to another skeleton.

I know this is the opposite path of the one you were taking, but I think this is probably the more flexible approach as well as slightly more optimized as you don’t need to keep 100 skeletons in your scene. I hope this helps, but feel free to ping back with questions.

Dummy mesh is something I’m thinking of but not sure it will add all skeleton parts. Will definitely try and see if it works. Thanks for the suggestion

Im using the same worfklow as in regular game development. Using one base file with the rig and the mesh and want to apply the animations to the same skeleton. It works but now, I thought I needed the skeleton but the nodes seem to apply themselves correctly to the character. Now the only problem is that every animation is still 2mb, just the bone definition and the animation. So its not very scalable.
10 animations in one file is as big as 1 animation per file.