I'm using Blender, and deciding what I want my workflow to be like between Unity and Blender. Right now there are a few questions;

1. Should I make animations in blender, or in Unity? What are the benefits of doing it either way?
2. What is the standard method for switching between IK/FK in the middle of an animation (maintaining positions), while ensuring that it works alongside things like IK'ing the feet to the ground dynamically?
3. What issues arise when it comes to fading between animations dynamically if you do animations in Unity VS in Blender?

Hi @kiiryu. Here's what I think:

1. You should use whatever you're more familiar with as long as that can give the result you're after. The product is more important than the process after all. I think Blender has better animation tools and UI / UX for animators. The Unity editor does let you create and edit animation curves, but I think it would only be best used for simpler animations like moving platforms, sliding doors, animated cameras, those kind of things that aren't too complex. In these cases it may be faster since you won't have to import and test and asset brought from Blender. Characters, in the other hand, are complex enough that you'd have to use Blender.
2. As far as I know, when the animated asset gets exported from Blender (or some other software like Maya, Cinema 4D etc.) into an .FBX file, it shouldn't know what “IK” is anymore. Before exporting oyu always need to bake the Action in Blender so that any IK constraints (as well as any other drivers / set-driven-keys / scripted animation controllers) can become simple FK keyframes, which are nothing more than the direct transform (position/rotation/scale) that the node will have at that point in the animation. This is how you can use a super complex character rig in Blender and still have it animating the same in Unity, because you baked all the animation into FK keyframes and it doesn't know about the complex mechanisms that you were using back in Blender.
3. If I understood this question right, as long as you can get your animation sequences exported from Blender as .FBX and they look the same when imported in Unity, then you're set. You can import other sequences and have them dynamically blend within Unity just fine.

@Kryzon So basically, bake the animation in Blender, and then apply dynamic IK on top of it in unity if I need to? (like with feet)

That's right. You can access the skeleton bone nodes from within Unity and move them around, like triggering a ragdoll after the actor dies, for example.

EDIT: Fixed the post, the forum had mangled it…

Unity has built-in support for IK with its Mecanim system, provided that you configure the imported asset as a "humanoid avatar":
- https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/ConfiguringtheAvatar.html
- https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/InverseKinematics.html​​

You can also find custom plugins for IK, I think this is the most popular: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/animation/final-ik-14290​

But this is about as much as I know about Unity (as I don't personally use it), so after a while you'll be the one explaining things to me!

@Kryzon Alright, thanks! Baked FK in blender makes a lot of sense. Makes me feel more confident about rigging in blender that I don't have to worry “too” much about the nature of IK rigs in a conversion to unity.