Cache, Money

One requirement of our realtime effort is that we be able to achieve film-quality animation within Unity.  The current release doesn't support blend shapes, and even if it did, we'd want to leave ourselves some room to use other deformer solutions, as well as allow the animation to come from any arbitrary 3rd party package one could imagine.  The industry's standard answer to a problem like this is to point cache the scene data.

At this time, Unity also does not support caches.  So!  We have to make our own, or buy something someone else has made.  We're frugal, so we made our own.

The concept is simple - store non frame-varying data once (triangles, uvs), and frame-varying data once per frame (vert positions, normals), in some text file, and construct a parser in Unity to build out the resulting mesh, predicated upon a frame in the range you wish to animate.

One problem though...

Unity uses a different coordinate system than most other 3d packages.  As an example, we're using Maya for our asset creation - and it happens to use a Right Handed Coord-Sys, whereas Unity uses a Left Handed Coord-Sys.

In practice all our positional and directional vectors (i.e. vertex positions and normals) have to be flipped (*-1) in the x-axis (or "right" vector).  But that's not enough!  If you were to only scale, all your normals would be inverted, so you must take care to also reverse the winding-order of your triangles upon export.

The winding-order simply defines what is considered the "front-face" or "back-face" of a polygon, and its really just what it sounds like - the order in which the vertices are listed in the polygon's array.  By reversing the winding-order, you effectively flip the face normal, and now all is right in the world.

What's fantastic about these two simple observations is that (as far as I can tell) this is exactly what's happening within Unity's Maya Scene Importer.  Now anything statically imported from Maya through Unity's traditional pipeline will match perfectly with anything dynamically cached!