Unbaking Motion Captured data

Unbaking is the process of re-creating the animation with minimal number of key-frames so that it can be easily edited. Typical motion capture data captures the pose at every frame, though through this make it very difficult to edit the captured motion / animation. In order to edit the motion smoothly without loosing detail unbaking methods are employed.

MotionMuse provides easy ways to unbake animations and curves with fine control of what joints to unbake, for how long, and the quality of the unbaked animation. Two buttons and are available in the KeyEditor to unbake selected joints within the range set by the Motion-Editing slider.

1. The first option unbakes the animation by trying to solve for the best key-frames that fit the animation quality within the Motion-Editing slider range. This tries to optimize for the poses of the selected joints and finds the control points and tangents that best match the input animation while minimizing deviations as shown below

Figure 1, Original Input Animation

Figure 2, Unbaked animation with minimal number of key-frames

2. The second option solves individual curve independently. This option is not very useful for unbaking mocap data, however is very useful in particular cases where the the user wants to edit some small part of the animation and wants editable keys in order to do so. Please note, unbaking the entire animation per-curve will produce a less desirable outcome than unbaking poses, hence this option should only be used in cases where required. The output of per-curve unbaking is shown below for the same input shown in Figure 1.

Figure 3, Unbaking each curve individually for the entire animation

It should be noted that unbaking each curve individually does not necessarily reduce the number of key-frames for the entire animation as each curve can have different control points depending on the cuve and thus do not match up within the timeline. For best results for a given animation Unbaking using poses is more desirable.

A video Explainaing the Unbaking process: