Procedural Motion Baker
Overview
In many instances it is advantages and helpful to bake procedural animation and/or IK/SPIK to keyframe data. This allows you to have more control over what you are working on, and it is more exact and easier to generate various things like looping animations.
To do this, use Procedural Motion Baker 5.1. You will also need to install the following three tools libraries if you haven't done so already:
Using the Procedural Motion Baker
The tool is fairly easy to use. The workflow is as follows:
- Open the tool dialog.
- Select the objects whose animation you would like to bake to keyframes.
- Click Get Selection.
- Select the channels you would like to bake to new objects.
- Select the types of controllers you would like generated.
- Click START.
Below you can see a SPIK chain that has been baked to keyframed objects (a slider is also rotating the chain). In the second image the SPIK arm has been rotated down a bit so you can see the new keyframed bones:
This is mainly a tool for Animation TDs, as it creates an entirely new hierarchy.