optimising baked anims, maya

rooster

Changed my mind I do need help
whats the best way of shaving off keyframes? We have a character entrance sequence which needs to be mightily reduced, but our current efforts with resample curve and simplify curve are still ending up with massive anim files and slidey ice skate feet. any suggestions appreciated

Frankie

are you making it to go into a game or to be rendered out of maya?

rooster

its for going into a game, we need the animation file size reduced a lot for the engine to cope

Frankie

I think most game engines store a keyframe on every frame then blends linerarly between them rather than how 3d packages store keyframes then blends between them with Bezier(or other) curves. That probabaly means that reducing key frames in maya wont help(it will just make the animation look worse) but in order to make the file size smaller you will need to reduce the frame rate or reduce the accuracy of data in the file you export.

rooster

hm, I dunno if I explained well enough, I'll detail the process-

we have the character rigged up with a bunch of IK stuff, and we parent all those to locators, so no animation is on the actual bones. then, we bake the animation down onto the bones so there is a key on every frame like you describe, optimise out un-neccecarry keyframes (such as keys that don't change from frame to frame, or very slight changes), then export a file to the engine.

without the optimising step, the file output is too big for the engine to manage (its a longish anim for ps2). The resulting keys are indeed interpreted linearly, but if we've chopped the right ones out it won't look too much worse.

the difficulty is using the tools to chop the right keys out, we're getting some kind of inconsistent results- the reduce curve option seems to take some keys out of a straight row, but not all of them. Looking for tips on using reduce curve (think thats the name) and resample curve

Frankie

oh ok, I've no idea then apart from doing it by hand