Home Website Youtube GitHub

Confused about how Bake Simulation is behaving on this rig

Rigging General
#1

Hi there. Recently I quickly put together a dummy rig to test some stuff in UE.
I’m having a weird issue with this rig I made. The issue is unrelated to UE itself.

When selecting all of the skeleton and then baking the animation to the joints, nothing at all seems to happen, which is something I’ve never seen before. Normally in my previous rigs I would do the exact same thing and the animation would then be baked to the joints for every single frame.

I’m attaching the file I’m working with in case someone more knowledgeable is willing to help me out in deciphering why this is happening. I’m working in Maya 2022.3.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-lE_0NYFVhJxDB_7tQLtOXSRFJcubyQU?usp=sharing

#2

My guess is that your joints are non-keyable. Is that right?

So there are a couple of options:

  1. If you’re using the bake menu, make all your joint attributes keyable first. Then bake as usual.

  2. Otherwise if you use a Python command to bake, you can pass a list of every single joint and every single attribute directly, and then they can be non-keyable, and they will still bake.

[joint1.tx, joint1.ty, joint1.tz ... joint45.rx, joint45.ry, joint46.rz] etc. etc. etc.

1 Like
#3

That’s right, that’s what the problem was. I had forgotten about the gray colored attributes meaning non-keyable. What I don’t fully understand however is why my guides are building the skeleton as non-keyable. Is there a setting that changes that behavior? I don’t recall having to deal with this problem in the past.

In any case, you helped me a lot, thanks!

1 Like
#4

I don’t remember it ever being different since the 2.X days. It’s always been non-keyable as far as I can remember. Definitely 3.6+

But maybe there are some GUI bake settings that work with non-keyable that you were using. I think if you say “from channel box” it will also respect your channel box selection.