Hello, I have a rigged model with some wiggly bones (wiggle bones 2 addon), I made an animation, baked it but then I noticed the first and last keyframe doesn’t match. Easy, I selected the affected bones, replaced the pose to match the desired position and of course inserted the new keyframes with new position. Everything seemed OK at first but then I noticed the bones really are in the expected identical position but the mesh is displaced. Only a little bit but when I loop the animation, it is visible and annoying. This happened across two different animations but also within one animation (first and last keyframe).
Here is a video to show this issue better. I’m still a newbie so I may be missing something but I couldn’t figure out how to even search for this issue to get valid answers. Any help is greatly appreciated!
Broader answer - when I’m looping an animation cycle, I don’t actually want the first and last frames to match. If it does, then you have a doubled frame every loop.
I’m not exactly sure how the wiggle bones addon works-- I haven’t used it. (I should maybe try it out one of these days.) It’s perfectly possible that it sits on the mesh rather than on the armature-- that the bones can have the exact same orientations, with wiggle bones doing something extra to the mesh.
But, my understanding is that it does physics, so it’s not at all surprising that your first and last frames of your animation don’t match. First and last frames of physics aren’t going to match.
If you want to match physics frames, you have to cheat, by interpolating between two different animations, one running backwards and one running forwards. You have to basically mirror the animation.
I’m not sure about a lot of your specific details. In order to mirror, I might try to make an alembic and then surface deform from a forward running alembic and a backwards running alembic, and animate the strength value on that last surface deform.
hmm. wiggle only works on the bones, not the mesh. did you double check there aren’t any hidden bones? (on a hidden bone layer or collection, or bones that were themselves hidden)
also maybe the bone might have a different local Y rotation? so visually it would look like its in the same spot, but could be slightly twisted. related to that - if you’re switching between keyed poses, you can key both euler and quaternion rotations, but only the current rotation mode will be shown. ie you could be trying to copy a euler rotation from another key but if the rotation mode mode isn’t euler, its adding the keyframes that aren’t visible.