hi,

is there a posibility to bake the cps of a model that is animated in a chor, so that i can delete the rig and stay only with the baked animation (something like pointoven)?

(i tried already "bake all actions" but it is not the same as baking the global values of the cps in the chor)

I've wondered and tried to accomplish this very thing...hope someone chimes in with an A.

Use the SDK :-)

Ok, for serious , You have my private adress ...

You can export a chor as a model. You'd have to do that for every frame but you could do it.

I think what Willi is looking for is the ability to export or save the CP mesh from a frame of action...without the bones, lights, camera etc... it would be a new model BAKED into that frame's placements...

that's what exporting chor as a model does, bake the CP mesh into the new position. the model also includes all the bones that were in the model (also in the new position) but those can be ignored or deleted without changing the new shape of the model.

Yes, exporting a chor as a model can be a life saver in some cases, but I don't think you can save animated CPs that way. The only way I can think of at the moment to do this without any additional programming is to go into Muscle Mode, select every CP (so a bounding box forms around them), then step through each frame and nudge the bounding box up/down a little so a keyframe is made for each CP ... on every frame. But I don't know if the keyframes define the CPs in World space or relative to the bone they are controlled by, so even this may not work.

I've done it before. You don't have to nudge any CPs.

Here's a PRJ... "original Model" is a cylinder rigged with three bones.


Click to view attachment


Chor 1 has the model keyframed into a bent shape at frame 0 and a different bent shape at frame 10.

"chor frame 0 exported as model" is Chor 1 exported as a model at frame 0

"chor frame 10 exported as model" is Chor 1 exported as a model at frame 10

in both cases the shape of the mesh at the specific frame is "baked" into the new model.


both include the ground model which is also in the chor. If you didn't want that you could delete it.

That's pretty cool Rob!

But how would this method address the animation? I suppose you could save every frame as a model and then turn them ON and OFF as needed in a new chor?

Yes, if you were trying to render animation in A:M, but they are already animated in A:M without this baking stuff so I'm not sure why we'd want to do that.

I'm not sure why Willi wants to do this... I'm saying this baking stuff can be done. Maybe he just needs 1 frame to take to a different app.

I also don't know what Willi is looking for. In some other applications the the animation can be cooked down to just control points (vertexes) and then cached, if the overhead of skeleton and other animating devices is large this can be very helpful. It can make it easier to work with a scene interactively, as well as reducing render overhead. I had assumed Willi meant something like this. However, I also can't really fathom why you would need this for A:M. It seems a tool that's only really helpful when you have models that are geometrically monstrous (built with polygons).

Willi,

What do you want to do with this baking?

I know! He needs to export baked frames of animation to make a 3D Zoetrope!

Pixar Zoetrope

Wow, that thing is freaky.
Willi, I think Rob is on to you

i had some issues with animated distortion boxes.
everytime i reopened the chor, the animation of the distortion boxes were different. when rendering in passes, the pictures werent congruent.
so my idea was to bake(or direct baking) the animation as a file that a:m can read back to the model, deleting the rig and render the passes.
(simcloth does the vertexbaking when simulating).
baking animation is also very common for interexchange through different 3d-software packages. lets say you have a character animated in a:m and rendered in maya,xsi, lightwave or cinema4d.
or you have some dynamic or cloth simulation done in other packages and want to get the simulation back to a:m.
pointoven (mdd-format) or the poincache (pc,pc2 format) are very common and standard formats for vertexbaking.
there is a plugin for a:m that exports to mdd, but is not supported anymore and you cant use it for a:m itsself.

If you have time can you post a simple test case that show this happening? Someone might look at it and see a solution that doesn't require baking.

That Pixar zoetrope is AWERSOME! Could you imagine being there and seeing that? What a great use of 3D printing! Those guys are SLICK!

I tried to do a 3D zoetrope in HA:MR...but just couldn't figure out the mathematics...

I don't know what Willi is up to...but I bet it's something COOL...I just hope he shares it with us...