can you bake animation in max?

rooster

something we've been doing a fair bit in work with maya is animating models with various constraints and ik chains, and baking down the animation to bone rotation. I was wondering if anyone knows of a similar feature/plugin/script in max?

Eric Chadwick

One way... export to FBX, re-import. Converts it into standard FK bone animation. But FBX might give you wonky-looking bones, I know we're getting bones with some weird fins, importing some mocap right now. Still works fine though.

e_x

You can bake, or collapse as max calls it, animation on bones that have IK on them.

Select the IK handle, open up the Motion Panel and go into Trajectories. From here, you can specify how long your animation is and how many samples you want.

Pretty sure you can only do this for IKed bone chains though, which sucks. I wish there was a better way.

rooster

thanks, I'm not sure if I have the settings wrong but I can't get that to work. If I select the bones and ik to export, bringing it back in keys the bones but they are motionless, and a helper object with the same movement as the ik is imported too- if I export just the bones, they import back in with no keys.

it seems like the same thing is happening as when I tried to manually key the bones, a keyframe gets applied to the bone but even though the ik has moved it, max doesn't read it as changed rotation so when the ik is deleted the bones are only keyed in their original position

edit: ah thanks e_x I'll try your suggestion!

rooster

brilliant thats what I was after, cheers man! every instance of 'bake animation' on google was pointing me at maya, and I didn't know what max term to search for. Some kind of terminoligy translator would be so handy

thomasp

also try http://www.veloceinteractive.com/ and in the maxscript section look for collapseParentPRSAnim script and sample file.

e_x

Glad I could help out