If by animated without rigging, you mean it was just the mesh moving? If so, then you can take your rig and skin with to the non-rigged version with the animations. Because what you want is the vertex info of the animation which the non-rigged one has. If you can duplicate this, it should preserve it's keyframes.
Hello all. Long story short, I have a set of weapon animations that were animated before they were rigged.:\ What are my options for moving those animations to my rigged version of the model? I am using 3dsmax. Thanks in advance.
Yeah maybe you could simply use the animated model as your bone rig. If you export that as FBX then reimport, the animated mesh-bones should be converted into standard Max bones, in case you need that for some reason. If you need to fit the animation to a specific rig, then you have to retarget:…
There are a few ways to do it. 1) Like Eric said export to FBX and import. But you will need to click on the animated meshes and flag them as "bones" for the FBX export/importer to handle them. Select the meshes, go to Animation > Bone Tools and check on "Bone On". If you don't they will probably just import as meshes…