Animation Baker \ Animation Baker Pro

What Animation Baker does?​

Animation Baker helps you to convert animations retargeted by Mecanim into Unity legacy animations. I.e. you can retarget any animations from some humanoid characters onto your character through Mecanim as usual and bake resultant animation into Unity *.anim file in order to use it with legacy animation system.

Video tutorial.
PDF tutorial.
Asset Store link.

Update 1.1:
- Added dialog for resetting current loaded dump file when pressing button "Load dump".

Update 1.15:
- Dump files and *.anim files now saves to custom folders for each character in AnimationDump and UnityAnimations folders respectively.

- Fixed null reference exception when trying to play preview of removed dump file.

- Added couple preventions of exceptions.

Update 1.5:
Main changes:

- From now Animation Baker works in its own window.

- Batch mode added, now you can bake any number of animations for any number of characters without unnecessarily set up animation for each character each time.

Update 1.52
- added support of Scene Motion Capture

Update 1.54
- Added other interpolation method for rotation curves that prevents wrong interpolation of rotation of the bones that could happen in some cases.

- Fixed problem of referencing to UnityEditor.dll when making a build.

Update 1.55
- Simplified process of adding characters and animation clips into AnimationBaker window.

Now you can just select desired characters/animation clips and click on area inside AB window instead of creating individual slot for each character/animation clip.

Update 1.57
- Fixed problem with ignoring rotation constraints for root bone

- Fixed double loading of preferences when switch to play mode while AB window is opened

- Root constraints now enabled by default as it fit for most cases

Update 1.58
- Fixed error of Quaternion to Matrix conversion that could happen in combination of specific animation clips and characters

Update 1.59
- Fixed issue with changing of recording sample rate

Update 1.6
- Added ability to add a prefix to the name of created clip

Update 1.6.2
- Supports Unity 5
- Animation clip for Unity 5 can be marked as "Legacy" or "Generic"
- Frame rate now saves with preferences

Update 1.6.5
- "Clear" button added to animations list and characters list to clear respective list
- Search field added to both lists. It helps quickly and easy find desired item in list by selecting it in the project view or by entering name directly into search field
- Labels with animation names now are selectable, so if animation name is too long - it can be scrolled by selecting label's text

Animation Baker Pro v1.1 released
Animation Baker Pro provides packet conversion of humanoid animation clips into legacy or generic clips.
I.e. you can retarget any humanoid animation onto any humanoid character and produce new animation clip native to character's skeleton.
Pro version has immediate conversion function instead of realtime recording in free version of Animation Baker. Speed of conversion depends on power of your hardware so it is a lot faster and greatly saves the time. Also Pro version allows to create prefabs with characters and automatically adds created animation clips to it.
Free assets already included.

Demo

 

This is fantastic ... definitely on my to buy list.

 

great

 

great work

 

Absolutly GREAT.. This is Retargeting for Legacy. Well worth this (very low) price.
Thanks a lot.

 

the author did hit the ball cleanly out of the park with this asset!

one of those rare assets that everybody must have!

the only thing missing is a batch mode...

 

-instant buy
clearly documented and easy to work with, a lifesaver! +1 for batch mode

 

Thanks to all for replying, good ideas about batch mode and dedicated folder for each character taken into account. I will make it as soon as possible.

 

added to wish list, can't wait to have it on my hand
bought, and +1 for Batch mode

 

Very good idea...
6R

 

sweet!

 

Does animation baker need to to be in all my projects to use the animations if i transfer character to another project?

 

Hi,

no, you don't need to put AnimationBaker into each your project, you can bake your animation and copy resultant clip into another project to play it on the same character for which you baked that clip, even not for same character but the character with same skeleton( with same bone names).

 

Hey,

we have bought AB and we are trying to bake an animation, but we are getting a unity exception "Could't create asset file!" on CreateAsset() when trying to create the .anim file.

Any ideas on what we might be doing wrong?

Thanks for your great extension!

EDIT: I found out that this error was thrown because we have moved the AB folder to another subfolder inside Assets. When we would declare a new absolute path for our exports, the error would be thrown.

 

Update 1.5:
Main changes:

- From now Animation Baker works in its own window.

- Batch mode added, now you can bake any number of animations for any number of characters without unnecessarily set up animation for each character each time.

 

Great job. Thanks for the release.

 

Ok, so is there any way that this could save the retargeted animations as FBX? Cause that would just blow my mind...

 

Hello,

Unfortunately this is not possible now, but i thinking about making extension to base AB functionality and maybe some useful things like that i will be able to include.

 

Just getting used to this asset, and it seems on most part to work quite well. I do however seem to be having some problems with some animations. For example. When I bake a crouch animation (crouch move forward) for example, when the animation is played on the Legacy character, the character is in air somewhat. The crouch death, the character is also in the air. No problem with standing animations, just others like crouch and prone. They all animate about .5 up on the Y axis. All models are set to zero on all three axis before I start any project. Is there a setting I need to change? Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thankx

 

Hi,

Do you use root constraints for your animation? If not, then try to enable root constraints and set constraints for all axes of all sections( positions,rotations,scale ) excepting only Y axis of positions, it should help. If it's not help(maybe in case when translation of the character implement actually by non-root bone) then you always can bake all positions for all bones (set flag positions in the "Baking options" section) and after baking set zero values for curves that responsible for x and z axes of root bone translation through animation editor of Unity, this is takes only a minute.

 

Thanx Ill give that a try...

 

fantastic asset congratulations. i just purchased and have a quick question/feature request. is it planned to be able to set parameters and bake a blend tree as an animation? so for example if i have a run animation and an attack animation with a blend tree that allows attacking while running i would be able to set the animator parameters and record the blended animation?

 

Hi!

Sorry for late answer, at least at this time AB stays as "convertor" for single retargeted clips, for recording of trees of animations is responsible Scene Motion Capture addition for AB

.

 

Hi,

When I am building my project for Iphone, I get errors from this asset because AnimatorBaker.cs is referencing UnityEditor .

 

Hi !

Yes, this problem takes place. I don't found laconically decision for this at this time. But you can easily make your build, just put AnimationBaker.cs into Editor folder inside AnimationBaker/Core folder or to any other forlder called "Editor", make build and then put AnimationBaker.cs back to AnimationBaker/Core folder.

 

I fixed it by putting a #if UNITY_EDITOR around each of the problem line.

 

Really nice and simple decision, thank you)

 

Hi Silent I plan on buying your product as it looks awesome and useful. Though I have a question if I understand the purpose of Animation Baker is it to convert mecanim animations from a character into legacy animations then paste it onto another character thus making the targeted character have the animations in it's file like they were imported with it from the beginning?

 

Hi!

Yes, that's right. For example, you have any humanoid animations and your custom characters with different skeletons. This animations are non-native for skeletons of your characters so you can't play its animation clips directly on them. In this case Mecanim can retarget this animations to play it on any humanoid skeleton. But if you need to get this animations on your characters for legacy animation system Animation Baker will bake result of retargeting to new animation file(native to character's skeleton) that you will be able to apply directly on your character. But it's not integrates this animation clip into character's fbx file.

 

Very nice asset, but I have a problem.

While all the animations work perfectly, my character has a CharacterController. I've used that controller for rotating the player up until now, but with the animations, the horizontal rotation no longer works. Why is that?

 

Hi!

Looks like your character's root bone also gets rotation from animation clip and that's why you can't turn your character. This question also discussed in comments to AB. This is decision: if root bone always gets rotation from the baked animation, then you can decide this in two ways. First: use root constraints for rotation of the root when baking your animation (also you can include constraints for position and scale of the root). In order to do this just set "Use root constraints" flag and set all flags for all axes of "Rotation" section. This will force AB do not bake rotation for root bone, as result you will be able rotate your character as you want. Second method: simply open baked animation in animation editor of Unity and manually remove "rotation" property from the
root bone of your character. This is the same thing that does AB when you use first method, only difference in that the AB does it automatically for you when you uses root constraints.

 

Thank you! That worked like a charm!

Now I have animations working as they should, but now I have another weird problem, but not sure if it's 100% related to Animation Baker, though;

With the Animation component turned on, animations works and all that (as said), but the first person camera (parented by the Player prefab) is positioned a long way from the player. If I turn the Animation component off, the camera sticks at its place.

Weird?

 

Normally if you uses AB for some character it produces animation clip that contains information only for objects inside character's hierarchy(skeleton bones) and it can't affect to any other objects. But if camera changes its position when you enable animation component, can presume that the animation affects to your FP camera also. Perhaps you used player prefab with already attached camera to it for baking animation, instead of "clear" character model(?). Anyway you should look at your baked animation in the animation editor of Unity, if there's any curves related to your camera's name - remove them. Also you may try to rename your camera and look what happen in this case.

 

Found this asset in the store for about 10 minutes ago, bought it for about 5 minutes
But something seems to get wrong for me. When I start recording, the .anim files are created, but they seems to be empty cause there icons are just plain white papers instead of the grey animation icons, and if I click them, no information is shown in the inspector. I Cant use them either.

Two error messages are shown several times:

and:

I have tried with two different models. And also tried to add and remove each model from the scene view while recording.

 

Hi!

Did you accurately follows tutorial? At what steps you getting this errors? Remember that you don't have to remove characters, created by AnimationBaker during recording, from scene , in other case you will get anything excepting desired result. On the picture that you attached shows animation dump files (.anm), not .anim files. This files uses AB internally to produce .anim files from them, resultant .anim files (if everything is okay) appears in the UnityAnimations folder inside AnimationBaker directory.

 

I have a question about your new plugin - Scene Motion Capture.
I need something like this to capture the motion during game play, not in the editor. Is this possible?

 

Hi, rocki !

No, unfortunately it's not possible to record motion with SMC from the build. And, yeah, closest to this purpose solutions in the Asset Store are nicely priced in comparison with SMC. The idea is good, but it's far from my current objectives. Perhaps if i will get some free time i'll think about upgrade.

 

Hi
I have a problem with importing animation to another character. They work fine as long i dont move character, the moment i move character and stop, animation and object gets reset to its original position. Is there a way to overcome this?

 

Hi,

As i understood the problem is that you can't move your character when animation is playing? Did you tried set root constraints for all axes of "Position" section inside "Use root constraints" foldout menu when bakes your animations?

 

Hi Yes I did that and I don't move character while animation is baking. I have use the "Use root constraints" option, the problem with that is, that character doesn't move when a key is pressed, it just stays in one spot, like locked it. The problem with not using "Use root constraints" is that, the character moves, but but its rotation gets reset to its original Y axis, which is annoying. I have wasted about 3 days on this so far trying to get a good animation without any problem. When one thing is fixed, there another issue.

If this asset is not going to fix this issue, can you please let me know, so I can look at other avenue?

 

Hi again,

Yes, i found that now animation curves creates for all components of transform property even if you don't want it. It was not happened before, and now instead of ignore of baking rotation for root bone it's creates all 3 curves with 0 values - this is the reason of this problem. I'm sorry for your lost time. I'll fix it and send you it today if you write me message from your e-mail, just include please your invoice number. And until you got it you can resolve your problem by removing "Rotation" property of your character's root bone from animation clip in the animation editor of Unity.

 

I tried removing rotation from the animation, but didnt work. Maybe I have done it incorrectly.
I will send you an email shortly.

Thank you

 

I sent you new version of AB , try to bake some animation with it (root constraints are already enabled ). If it'll not help send me screen of your player's hierarchy, of course if you can. Because hierarchy of some skeletons are non-friendly for simple customization your animations, so in some cases requires manual customization. Also from my point of view it's not too good way to build handling of your character around character's model with assigned animation component as it makes some things very uncomfortable. For example if you simply want to change "skin" of your player in this case you have to fully remove player then instantiate new model and assign to it all
required components( controller script, character controller or rigidbody, etc). For example i uses in my project player's hierarchy like that:

Main object(has all components required for handling):
====Skin controller(has a scripts that responsible for animating skin):
========Character model(skin itself with attached animation component)


In that case you can translate main object in any way and skin rotation and position will not make any effect to player's handling. Skin controller in this case is a just dummy object with assigned script of controlling skin animations and i attach character model to it.

 

Hi Silent,

Thanks for the new version, it did solve the problem. Now I can convert mecanim animation to legacy without any problem.

 

I'm using the latest release of Animation Baker, and in general it's great and it works really well. However, on about 20% of the animations I get the message below, and those animations are unusable.

Quaternion To Matrix conversion failed because input Quaternion is invalid {nan, nan, nan, nan} l=nan

Any ideas? I'm just using the default options when baking.

 

Hi, daisyDynamics

It didn't happen for me so i needs some info from you to fix it. Is there any logs from AB precede this message? This happens when problematic animation bakes with other animations from list or even when you bake it singly? Can you send me some example of problematic animation?

Thank you in advance!

P.S. You may send file to devshut@gmail.com

 

To daisyDynamics:

Thanks for your message. I've tested animation clip that you attached and at first look there was no problems to work with it, i've tested this clip with Robot Kyle and characters with different skeletons that were created in MakeHuman. But when i tried to bake it for mixamo soldier i've got the error that you talking about. In my case animation still playable but during playing this error appears all time. Anyway, looks like i've fixed it. I've sent to you AB v1.58, please, let me know if this resolves problem of your animations or if doesn't.

 

Thank you! I've rebaked those animations with the new version of AB, and the issue is 100% resolved.

You're right, the issue was related to those Mixamo models. All my other models are DAZ, and they've never given any problems.

 

i wonder if i can use it in some generic animations