In the process of planning for an upcoming project, I’ve encountered 2 rather significant limitations with Facebook AR Studio due to its restrictions on the number of bones that a mesh can be bound to and the fact that joint animations are not imported with the 3d asset. I’d like to share my solutions to both of these issues.

Exporting joint animations:

UPDATE 5/18/2018: AR studio now natively supports exported animations with release v37.

TLDR; I wrote a Maya joint animation export script along with a corresponding tutorial video.

So I will cover what is likely the most common issue first – exporting joint animations with a rigged character.  As of v32 AR Studio does not import joint animations on rigged meshes. This is a pretty big limitation. This means that if you build, rig, and animate your character in a 3d authoring tool (in my case Maya) you will not be able to import those animations into AR Studio along with your model. It’s just not going to work.

Read more Exporting animated characters from Maya to Facebook’s AR Studio