So I did a forum search and got nothing. I am having trouble baking an animation in Blender. I’m new to the animation scene (yes, a pun) and am not quite sure how to get an animation into my program. I have looked online and at some very helpful forum posts but nothing seems to work. All of the things I’ve found have said something about “baking” my animation first. I found the bake button in Blender but it wont work. It just sits there, diddling itself I presume. Is there some step that I’m missing before I bake my animation?
blender features a wide range of different animation and baking techniques(not all apply to animation). like armature based, object based, morph target based, physics based.
so first we need to know what kind of animations you are working with.
once we know that, we can start working on a way to convert it into armature based animation.
I’m not quite sure how to define it, due to lack of experience. I used bones, linked them to the mesh, then animated the bones.
Well under the Documentation section of the website there is “Videos”, and there you will find “Blender2Panda: Animations” by ThomasEgi: youtube.com/watch?v=bz9lfHk2dPg
So I checked out the video and my chicken exporter doesnt have an option to export animations. What do I do? Panic?
it will automatically display the animation export menu when you mesh is linked to an armature. if you stick with the instructions shown in the video this will work.
keep in mind that reparenting the armature/mesh will NOT work. only armature-modifier is supported. (most common error cause people read some outdated,yet somewhat popular tutorials on how to animate models using the reparenting techniwue)
I added a modifier for the armature and tried to do the weight tool but it skewed my mesh.
did you un-parent the mesh-armature before you added the armature modifier?
Yes I did everything. For some reason the bones wont move the mesh after weight painting.
did you move the bones in pose-mode?
yes
do you have the “deform” button checked in the bone-setup? if so i dont really know why it’s not moving. if possible you should upload a file where we can see what’s going on. so we can look for the error.
Ok so here is what I did. I deleted my previous armature and animation and started from scratch. I followed the video exactly except for when it came to the weight painting part. Instead of manually painting it I used the use from bone heat option and it worked perfectly. I was able to export the animation and am just waiting to hear back from my programmer to see if it works. Thank you so much for your help.