Baking Bone Animation Removes Shapekeys

[Maneki]

When I bake my bone animation it removes all keys from my shapekeys without baking it in the timeline.
I’m not sure if that’s a bug or if I do something wrong.

[Alessandro Padovani]

Please describe the exact steps to reproduce the issue.

[Maneki]

1. Importing G8.1F without changing anything
2. Importing a morph (in my case Victoria 8.1 Body)
3. Keyframe the morph with 0 value at frame 1 and 1.0 value at frame 50
4. Either in Object or Pose mode select “object” or “pose” in the top left and bake “pose” with “visual keying” and “clear constraints” selected. (Those options appear to not really matter, I tried different variations and they all cause the same)

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[Alessandro Padovani]

Works fine here.

steps:

1. import G8F and merge rigs
2. import expressions
3. keyframe some poses and expressions in the timeline
4. in pose mode: pose > animation > bake action

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The expression keyframes are preserved after baking.

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Anyway baking is in general a “destructive“ operation, in that you lose the original keyframes that are replaced by the baked ones. Thus I wouldn’t worry too much. In any case you have to backup your original animation before baking if you want to save it.

[Maneki]

Usually I bake in the very end but some constraints require the object or armature to get baked first because Blender doesn’t know in which order those constraints have to be treated if it’s not on the same object.
Example: I have a empty to act as child parent for the hand IK and the empty is parented to part of the body which is moved by shapekeys. If I want to get a correct result I first need to bake the empty translation and rotation.

Anyway, it seems that “Overwrite Current Action” is necessary to sustain shapekey keyframes. I’m not sure if that’s a intended limitation?

[Alessandro Padovani]

I don’t know I always use “overwrite“ because it makes sense to me. For general questions on blender better ask at blender artists.

[Maneki]

@Alessandro Padovani “overwrite” bakes all keyframes on the current action instead of making a new one. Blender can shift all keyframes to another action but it appears that daz importer doesn’t work that way at the moment. Maybe this option could get added?

[Alessandro Padovani]

The blender tool doesn’t bake the drivers, also that wouldn’t make much sense since the purpose of baking is to remove drivers and constraints that’s what visual transform is for. If you don’t overwrite then of course you can’t see the drivers keyframes because you’re in the new action. You have to go to the original action in the action editor to see the drivers keyframes.

But again, for general questions on blender better ask at blender artists.

[Alessandro Padovani]

If there’s nothing to add please close as invalid.