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Bake color effector to keyframes for FBX export
Hello. Been running into some heavy technical difficulties creating a drone show in C4D. The final export is to .PATH files. The plugin that exported directly from C4D does not work, so the work around is to export as FBX or Alembic, import into Blender and then export from the plugin from there.
Colour is currently the issue. It seems to work fine as an FBX if I have keyframed the material. However its a flight of 240 drones so I would not like to hand keyframe each individual one at the end if I can help it. The ideal situation is for my colour effectors on the clone groups to handle this.
I cant get the colour effectors to bake into keyframes, or however you are supposed to do it, so that the colour channel carries on to the FBX (Alembic doesnt seem to carry material info). What am I missing here? is this possible?
I have also tried using vector colour / display colour within the alembic. This seems to transfer to Blender okay, and is working in the viewport/render. But when I export to .PATH no dice.
So I think the baking of the material colour into the FBX looks like the clearest route for now.
Thanks in advance for any help.
– Josh
replied 10 months, 2 weeks ago 3 Members · 8 Replies
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8 Replies
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To bake the Color Effector to keyframes for FBX export, use the “Bake Animation” option in your 3D software (like Cinema 4D), then export. This locks the effect into keyframes.
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Hi Josh,
I think you will find what you are looking for in this article frow Maxon Developers (Read the fourth post).
https://developers.maxon.net/forum/topic/12389/baking-mograph-color-animation-to-keyframes/4
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There is no ‘bake animation’ option
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I dont want to use python to achieve this, there must be a simpler way to bake the colour created from the effectors to either an alembic or an FBX within C4D.
Anyone else have specific instructions on how to do this please?
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Okay Josh, so I hope you could attach a simplified file of the problem so we can make sure we’re on the same page and work towards a practical solution instead of suggesting theories with uncertain results.
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Okay, so here is a very simple example of what I am trying to achieve.
The plain effector is controlling the colour. I need this to be baked into the sphere material to be exported as either an FBX or an alembic (As I then need to import and export as .PATH from Blender)
Right now it is just a standard material with the color shader plugged into the color channel to read the effector. This does not have to be the way, maybe there is a better way to do this. I dont care how it needs to be done, just as long as the color channel is baked into the material much like if I had keyframed it on a material for each individual sphere (which works, but will be impractical for a setup where there will need to be 240 drones)
Please let me know how you would go about this. thanks
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Any help on this one? Anyone have any ideas?
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Hi Josh, I downloaded your file hours after your post and I worked on it for a long time but nothing worked for me. However, I keep going back to it whenever I get a chance. I had an idea but never got around to working on it. I had a suggestion to put the drone group under the cloner (instead of one drone and then copy it with cloner), make a material for each drone, and then use a bake material tag for each one of the materials. You will get a texture group that scale the material change during the animation. Then you could use multi shader on the materials and link the textures for each material. This will work in Cinema by replacing the shader effector with textures for each material, but the question remains: will it work after export? I don’t have idea about the Path file you want to export to However, I thought that having the material textures would make it easier, as you might only need to relink the textures to the materials, for example, after exporting or something like that, . Let me know what you think about this and if it works for you. I will let you know from my side if I come up with anything else.
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