Parenting mesh to bones in Blender throws off the mesh’s orientation after exporting to .babylon

[pmhpostman]

I made a simple robot in Blender, created an armature and parented the meshes to the bones.

To parent, I selected the mesh in object mode, selected the armature, went into pose mode, selected the appropriate bone, pressed CTRL-P and selected the bone option. After watching several tutorials, it seems like this is the correct way to parent meshes to bones.

 

Here’s a link to the blender.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/uaz17whur5cadw2/AACpJxmS-ERPbtjnyC52Ikoza?dl=0

 

In pose mode, I can move the bones around and the meshes move correctly as expected.

When I export to a .babylon file, all the meshes go to the origin and lay flat like shown below. Animating the bones has no effect at all.

I’ve applied transforms and scales to the meshes.

Can anyone give me a little guidance on how to animate meshes in blender so they move properly in blender.

It works properly if I use Automatic Weights like people often do with character animations, but I plan on animating many rigid meshes of complex models in many scenes and it would be very laborious to fix everything with weigh painting and wouldn’t be practical. This robot is just a test piece to help get the work flow down.

I’ve put a lot of time into switching from 3DS Max to blender. Everything has gone really well.  I really like the switch, but after all that time invested, I can’t seem to get animations from blender to Babylon. I’ve spent so much time trying to figure this out and would really appreciate some guidance.