Load GLTF animation without mesh?

[trusktr]

This other thread talks about how to do this using Three’s GLTFExporter:

Export GLTF containing only animation data

Hello everyone! Is it possible to use the threejs GLTFExporter to export a GLTF containing only the buffers for animation data, no other buffers? This tutorial shows a way to load a GLTF with these restrictions on top of a base GLTF that contains the other buffers. What I want to do is the inverse: export a GLTF containing only animation data. More precisely what I want to do is send animation data created on a client to a server where it is integrated in to a common GLTF file. I know I could…

So although this doesn’t answer how to do this with Blender, a possible workflow is you could load the GLTF file into a temporary Three.js scene you use after you’ve exported from Blender, then use GLTFExporter to create the final GLTF file with only animations and no mesh data.

Once you have that resulting glTF json in the temporary Three.js setup, you can save it as a file by making a new File or new Blob, and then using:

/**
 * @param {File | Blob} file - The `File` or `Blob` to have the user save.
 * @param {string} fileName - The file name to pre-fill in the save file dialog.
 */
export function saveFile(file, fileName) {
    const url = URL.createObjectURL(file)
    const a = document.createElement('a')
    a.href = url
    a.download = fileName
    document.body.append(a)
    a.click()
    a.remove()
    URL.revokeObjectURL(url)
}

If you’re familiar with Blender plugins, you could possibly write a python pugin that can open a browser with the Threejs code to do this automatically once you’ve got it going manually.