Export (bake) animations

[bluffParticipant]

Hello, is there a way to export/bake the animation from a character in Slate to a single animation file? Think of it like flattening layers in photoshop and exporting a single file. I’d love to use Slate to combine/layer animations on a character to create a performance and then be able to bake all the animations down into a single animation file that could be imported back into maya/elsewhere.

Thanks!

[GavalakisKeymaster]

Hello and happy new year!

I could add an option to bake an Animate Properties clip or Properties Track down to a Unity Animation Clip, but even then, Animation Clips created in Unity can not be exported to be used in any other DCC like Maya. That kind of makes sense though, since the general workflow with Unity is to import assets, Unity being the final tool for them to be used, rather than the other way around 🙂

So unfortunately the short answer is that this is not possible, but I am interested to know more for your use case.
Can you please post a screenshot, or explain more of what you’d like to have baked for example?

Thanks.

[bluffParticipant]

Hi, thanks for the reply! What I’d like to do is bring a bunch of animation pieces (blinks, head animation, body animation, etc.) into slate and piece them together with layering to make a character performance over a long dialog track. Then I’d like to be able to bake all those layered animations (eyes, head, body) down into a single animation track that can be exported as an .fbx file and brought back into maya for polish or brought into another rendering program to be rendered out as a high quality movie file.

[GavalakisKeymaster]

Hello again,

Thanks for the clarification on the use case.
Unfortunately this workflow is quite a bit beyond the scope of the use case for Slate :/, since Slate is designed for playing cutscenes within Unity, or render them with the Image Sequence Renderer provided. Exporting to fbx alone is quite a complicated task.
Have you tried Maya’s 2017 Time Editor tool though? I think it will work great for your case, considering that you want the final destination to also be Maya as well and not Unity.

Thanks.

[bluffParticipant]

Thank you for the information! I really love the interface of Slate, but totally understand that my request is probably outside the scope of what’s possible, or at least what is beneficial for the tool itself 🙂 The time editor in Maya 2017 looks really interesting though so thank you for bringing it to my attention! Keep up the great work with Slate though, it’s great. I might end up just crafting the performances in maya and then importing the baked animation into Slate to build cutscenes with them!

[GavalakisKeymaster]

Thanks a lot for understanding and for you very positive feedback! I really appreciate that 🙂
I’m glad I could be of help with the Maya Time Editor. I’ve tested it out myself a bit and seems very interesting addition to Maya indeed.
If you need anything in the future, don’t hesitate to let me know.

Thanks again! 🙂

[Author]

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