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Can I unfreeze a morph without killing it?

aldoraenoaldoraeno Posts: 16
in New Users

When starting out, I looked into building my own compound morphs that set various other properties all at once. That led me to "ERC Freeze," and served my purpose perfectly.  Now that I'm trying to animate some of those morphs in non-linear ways on the timeline, however, I'm quickly realizing that having them all tied together is only convenient for outlining. I don't always want the components merged into a single morph throughout my entire animation.

What I want to do is bake those morphs into their individual components for the current frame, and zero out the value of the compound morph to compensate, but keep the morph available for later convenience.  I've seen two commands that looked hopeful, but ultimately neither one seems to help:

  • "ERC Bake (Delta Add, Add, Subtract)" does exactly what I want: It replaces the compound morph with its components. Unfortunately it also destroys the compound morph altogether so I can never use it again without manually re-freezing every property it contained.
  • "ERC Bake to Play Range (Keyed)" pops up a warning message that makes it sound like it will do exactly what I want (except on the entire play range instead of one frame), but it actually doesn't do anything at all.

So, other than manually going through every component and setting it to the same value as the compound morph contains, is there any way to "bake" a morph without destroying it?

Comments

  • alex86firealex86fire Posts: 1,130
    aldoraeno said:

    When starting out, I looked into building my own compound morphs that set various other properties all at once. That led me to "ERC Freeze," and served my purpose perfectly.  Now that I'm trying to animate some of those morphs in non-linear ways on the timeline, however, I'm quickly realizing that having them all tied together is only convenient for outlining. I don't always want the components merged into a single morph throughout my entire animation.

    What I want to do is bake those morphs into their individual components for the current frame, and zero out the value of the compound morph to compensate, but keep the morph available for later convenience.  I've seen two commands that looked hopeful, but ultimately neither one seems to help:

    • "ERC Bake (Delta Add, Add, Subtract)" does exactly what I want: It replaces the compound morph with its components. Unfortunately it also destroys the compound morph altogether so I can never use it again without manually re-freezing every property it contained.
    • "ERC Bake to Play Range (Keyed)" pops up a warning message that makes it sound like it will do exactly what I want (except on the entire play range instead of one frame), but it actually doesn't do anything at all.

    So, other than manually going through every component and setting it to the same value as the compound morph contains, is there any way to "bake" a morph without destroying it?

    What about copying the morph into a new one and using ERC Bake on that new one?

    In theory it should destroy the copy but keep the original.

  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 102,133

    You could bake, then save - depending on the proerpties used - a Pose or Shape preset (or a Properties preset to get both), go back to the unbaked version of the figure and apply the preset(s) with th master slider zeroed.

  • aldoraenoaldoraeno Posts: 16
    alex86fire said:
    aldoraeno said:

     

    What about copying the morph into a new one and using ERC Bake on that new one?

    In theory it should destroy the copy but keep the original.

    I was thinking the same thing, but I actually haven't found a way to duplicate a property.  The "Copy Selected Property" command only copies its numeric value, and "Property Cloner" won't allow me to add the cloned property to the same object as the original.  Hopefully I'm missing something obvious here, because if I could duplicate properties, this suggestion would make the process relatively easy.

     

    Richard Haseltine said:

    You could bake, then save - depending on the proerpties used - a Pose or Shape preset (or a Properties preset to get both), go back to the unbaked version of the figure and apply the preset(s) with th master slider zeroed.

    That would probably work. Actually I think the only issue I have with this option is that I'll very quickly pile up preset files in the database that I only used for one frame each (and flushing files out of the database seems easier said than done), but that's not an immediate problem.

     

    Thanks for the replies.

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