Bake action and shape key action

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hi mates,
I want to make something that I do not know if it is possible. I want to bake an animation composed of an action and a shape key action. I already baked two actions into a new one:

  1. Selecting the armature
  2. Selecting both animations in the NLA editor
  3. Pose/ Animation/ Bake Action, and activating Pose button only.

All right, but as said, when I want to bake an action and a shape key action synchronized, the new action does not contain the shake key action.
Of course, they can be reproduced together in the NLA, but having always active the shape key action strip, but I do not want it, I want a new animation containing both. I do not want to use drivers as I do not want to add new bones.

Any help?

Thanks.

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2

Shapekeys are on the mesh object, while poses are on the armature, so I don’t think they’re ever going to be part of the same NLA action.

What I’d recommend is to make a bone to drive your shapekeys. Then you can easily keep your shapekeys and your poses together, because you don’t actually have any animated shapekeys, only animated poses that drive them.

2 Likes
3

Hi, thanks for replying.

The shape key animation I created in the Shape Key Editor panel contains 2 different shape keys running on different frames, so, are you saying that a single bone can handle the weight of different shape keys at the same time??

As you said, I know that poses are driven by armature and shape keys are handle by the mesh (as you animate the mesh to create them), but! when you Bake Action you can choose both: Pose and Object buttons, that´s why I think that there is a way of mixing them into one action, apart from I am not achieving it.

4

It could, if you drive one shapekey from X loc and another from Y loc, for example. But more typically, you’d use one bone for each shapekey.

1 Like
5

Thanks, I am gonna try it despite the ideal state is not having 30 extra bones because your character have 30 shape keys, so I keep looking into the solution.

6

I’ve reported the issue to Blender and made a script for current workaround.
https://developer.blender.org/T101149

7

In principle, the same value from the armature can drive several shape keys’ value: it is only a data path; (and you can use drivers if you need to moderate some of the influences).
I try to use this technique to ease the calculation of a complex rig with many things attached to it.
My problem is to find out how to pass from the pose to the shapekey.