Motion baker… that works
My latest LScript is a motion baker script for LightWave that bakes such things as items animated through Denis Pontonnier’s DP Kit + Node Item Motion and other “non standard” ways of animating in LW.
It also bakes all selected items, and on a test of 100 nulls, it took about 12 seconds to bake them over 100 frames, so 10.000 keys set in total. To make sure that it bakes the correct value, it runs through the timeline once, extracting the values from each selected item, and then afterwards applies those values to the respective channels: position, rotation and scale.
Once it is done baking, it goes back to the frame you were at when triggering the script, nothing grand, but just a little extra touch to make it a nicer workflow. As far as I can tell, this script will bake other tricky animations such as expression based animations and the like. Give it a spin and see if it works in your projects.
Thanks to Mikael Burman for suggesting and testing the script!
Edit: updated the script to have a GUI so you can specify the range of frames to bake.
5 Responses to “Motion baker… that works”
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I’m having trouble with the generated keys not including its Parented Object’s motion.
I think it needs to have its motion calculated relative to an Origin point, then applied to a new object or Null, so the resulting path is not affected by the Parent and subsequently exaggerated.
Can that be done?
The parent wont be baked unless it is also selected, so the best way around it is to go to the scene editor and select children recursively. If thats not what you are after, could you send me an example scene of how it is not working?
Thanks for the quick response.
That didn’t seem to work, but then I may have misunderstood.
I’m applying this to a Camera Path. It’s Parented to two Nulls affecting its position and bank, while it’s Targeted to another Null that is affecting its pan and tilt. (based on the motion tracking advice here: http://bit.ly/cR1W3p )
Does that make a difference?
Then I would suggest that you replace the camera with a third null, and just use a motion modifier on the camera to make it follow that third null, so when you bake the camera, it will be correct in world space.
Awesome plugin! You just made my life a whole bunch easier! Thanks!