Observations of Bake To Transformation

brucek5

This is a follow-up of my “Is Bake To Transformation my Solution?” posting and the observations I made.

I found to only bake animated pose setting to joint transformations, you must first multi-select “shift-click” the joints in the scene hierarchy, not the timeline. I set the node option to “Selected” and Propagation to “None” because I only wanted to bake the fingers.

With over 400 frames of animation, the function only took about 2 seconds to complete, where if I allowed  propagation, it would have taken 30 minutes. Once complete, all the pose properties that keyframes, where all zeroed out as expected.

When I played the animation, the finger positions were a mix of the correct animation, and multiple frames where the fingers quickly moved to a wrong position, then quickly returned to being correct.

I exported the file via FBX, and base figure Pose issue was resolved, but the animation was doing the same strange finger motion I saw in DAZ.

I examined the finger joint translations keys in the timeline and found the extra keys that were causing the causing the strange finger “jump for pose”. I relooked at the original animation and saw the author was animating the fingers with both poses and joint translations. The Bake To Transformation function didn’t “merge” the poses with transformations, but simply added to new transformation keyframes.

Based on my original observation of the base figure “A-Pose” being altered during the FBX export, I decided to try a different approach combining both existing transformation and pose controlled animations, which worked.

1. I created a new project and loaded my character.
2. On frame 0, I applied the Genesis-8F “Default Pose for UV” preset. I did this because it seemed to me DAZ uses any pose modifiers it initially finds in the animation to set the characters default rigging pose during the FBX export process.
3. On frame 30, I applied the animation preset. For the first 30 frames, the character went from the “A-Pose” to the pose of the first frame of animation.
4. I then did a FBX animation export (no morphs included).
5. When I imported the FBX file into Cinema-4D, the animation was similar to what I saw in DAZ, except that for about 20 frames into the actual animation, the character was spinning around on the “root” joint, then stopped.
6. I copied the root joint key values where the character stopped spinning, and pasted them at the first frame of the actual animation (frame 30).
7. Finally, I deleted the first 29 frames that had the transition from an “A-Pose” to the beginning of the animation.

The final results where all pose animations and joint translations got properly “merged” that Bake To Transformation function didn’t do.

Bruce