Baking animations?

[Jo B.]

as far as i know it means to merge several mixed animations to one.
if you have a walkcycle for example, what you often do is to add another animation layer to it, to get rid of the loopstyle. now you can "bake" these two layers together.
i think it's usefull for games, cause you only have one animationfile rather than two devided in different layers.

[loked]

Also if you have something that is simulated, you can bake the animation and then it wont have to evaluate the simulation on each frame, it will have set keyframes instead.

An example of this is a cloth simulation. Once you've done a cloth sim, you can bake out the animation and then each vertice on the cloth will have keyframes set, so it wont run a simulation anymore. This same technique can apply to rigid body dynamics as well as a whole lot of other things.

later:wavey:
loked

[Boxsmiley]

Loked, Jo B. thanks for your responses! I appreciate it. Loked i understand what your trying to say to bake a simulation so that it is keyframes. Jo B. i'm having a newbie time trying to understand what you are trying to convey. Are you saying that merging animations using the same rig and placing them in different layers in max, and then flattening (bake?) the layers together into one? Is it the same if i am able to add a start and end note in the dope-sheet for each animation i create using the same rig? Could you go into more detail on what you mean by "merging several mixed animations to one." Thanks again!

:beer:

[loked]

I could be wrong, but I think what Jo.B is talking about is saving animation to clips and not really baking. If you have character sets for arms and legs lets just say, you can do different animation styles for the feet and the same for the arms. Then save them to clips and apply whichever arm motion you want with whatever feet motion you want. This is really just Non Linear Animation. Maya supports this through the Trax Editor. Basically what Maya does is saves the animation to a clip and you can then blend that clip with other cilips, cycle it or stretch and squash it.

If you dont quite get what I'm saying just let me know and I'll try describe it in a little more detail.
If I'm wrong about what Jo.B was saying, I apologise.

Later:wavey:
loked

[Boxsmiley]

Yeah Loked, if you wouldn't mind sharing the wealth. I use 3D Max but i will try to compare and, translate to what you are describing when talking Maya lingo. Thanks.

[loked]

Well, basically Non Linear Animation is pretty much the same in your animation package is it would be in a composting package like Premiere. All the curves and animation get saved into a clip that you can move around and do as you please with. I've never used Max, but within Maya lets say you create a clip of your entire arm waving. It will basically take the animation curves from the shoulder, elbow, wrist and so forth and save it as one clip. So if you stretch that clip, it will slow down the motion for the entire arm. If you cycle that clip, the entire arms wave will cycle. Now the beauty of NLA is that you can blend clips as well. A very primitive example would be with a ball bouncing. Lets say you create a clip of a ball going up and down on the exact same spot. Now you go and create aonther clip of the ball just moving forward. With NLA you can blend them, so the ball will move forward and up and down. Now if you decide you want it to go left and right as well. You just create a clip that does that and then you blend that as well. Now your ball will go up and down, while going left and right and moving forward. Make sense??

Its really quite simple, but I'm not sure if Max has a feature like this. So if it doesnt, just move over to Maya its better anyway:) Lookout, here comes a huge useless debate :hmm:

later:wavey:
loked

[Jo B.]

??? Whenever we blend several animation files/motion clips in any ways, and save them as one file we call that "baking them" together, but maybe that's not common to say??? I'm not sure about that. Ahh, and yes when we have simulations calculated and saved as keyframes we call it "baking" as well. missed to mention that...
sorry if i caused a little confusion here..:surprised

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