View source for HowTo/Export Blender FBX Animation

===Things you need to do===
====Saving====
:* Save often.  Animation can be tricky so always save when you have reached a critical point.
====Animate the cogs====
:* Set the animation range to 120 frames, start frame 1, and the current frame 1.
:* Make the four cog armatures children of the root animation helper b.r.base.
:* For each cog:
:**  Make the cog mesh a child of its armature. Blender 2.8 seems to be a bit unreliable for this action so make sure the correct parent is applied.  You can see this in the Properties Editor, Context Panel->Relations.  The parent type should be object.[[File:Checking the cog parent.jpg|800px]]
:**  Create five keyframes for each armature as detailed in the table below:
::::{| class="wikitable"
! width=15% | Armature
! width=15% | Keyframe<br />1
! width=15% | Keyframe<br />30
! width=15% | Keyframe<br />60
! width=15% | Keyframe<br />90
! width=15% | Keyframe<br />90
|-
| <center>1</center>
| <center>0</center>
| <center>-90</center>
| <center>-180</center>
| <center>-270</center>
| <center>-360</center>
|-
| <center>2</center>
| <center>0</center>
| <center>90</center>
| <center>180</center>
| <center>270</center>
| <center>360</center>
|-
| <center>3</center>
| <center>0</center>
| <center>-90</center>
| <center>-180</center>
| <center>-270</center>
| <center>-360</center>
|-
| <center>4</center>
| <center>0</center>
| <center>90</center>
| <center>180</center>
| <center>270</center>
| <center>360</center>
|}
:* Run the animation and check that the cogs rotate in the correct direction and mesh with each other.  If this doesn't look right then you may have to fall back to a saved version or even the starting version.
:* For each cog:
:**Make a copy. (Shift D)
:**Move the copy to the LOD1 collection. (M key)
:**Rename the copy to "gearx-lod1" where "x" is the gear number.
:**Add a Decimate modifier. The Planar option with an angle of 10 will reduce the number of polys to a usable number.  There is no need to apply the modifier since the exporter will do that on export.
:*Hide the LOD1 collection and run the animation again.  This will show the LOD1 meshes animating.

====Export====
:*Select each LOD collection in turn and, together with the Animation collection, export to files called "cogs_lod0.fbx" and "cogs_lod1.fbx".  For this export you must select Empty, Armature, and Mesh.