I’ve exported a .anim file via maya and copied it into the Unity project folder. But, unity cannot analysis it.
I found that there’re so many .anim files here from either being created directly by unity or included in the full .fbx file which contains models joints and animations. However the sole .anim exported cannot be analysised,why?and, how to fix it?..
Or…Those two .anim files that used in Maya and Unity are totally different things just with a same suffix coincidentally?..
Yeah, it looks like they are two different file formats that happen to reuse the same extension.
Unity’s anim files are its own internal objects serialized to yaml.
Not really sure what the use case for Maya’s animImportExport format is, probably just transferring animation curves between projects?
@R.White
Thank a lot for your reply, sincerely.
Seems Maya’s .anim is exclusively used for maya data flow (maybe influencing the other Autodesk products, not sure.) So the only choice remain is backing to the normal .fbx files.
I’m still heading for more solutions that could conveniently deal with the animation and skinned mesh separately, maybe i should email the Unity’s author group… 
So what we do with Unity, is for animations exported in fbx, we don’t include the mesh at all. (Basically at export time we create a duplicate skeleton, constrain it to the animated skeleton, bake, cleanup constrains etc…, export, and then delete the export skeleton)
The mesh(es) comes from a separate fbx file, which is also the file where we define Mecanim’s Avatar, then all of the animation files reference that avatar directly.
So in the end we get a lot of fbx files, each responsible for the absolute minimum amount of data that we need from it.
The Maya/FBX command “FBXExportSplitAnimationIntoTakes”, is very useful for exporting multiple animations on a timeline into a single FBX export.
While we looked into that, it does have the problem of updating any single animation in the file requires re-exporting / re-importing all of the animations in that one file. Which depending on how many are in the file can be moderately annoying. We also have some other issues where some of the engines we use don’t really support importing multiple animations from a single file, and we try to keep our core pipeline as engine agnostic as possible.
Yeah, it has it’s drawbacks. Your method has given me ideas, thanks.