Baking Inherited Animation

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Do this:

Create an Xpresso tag on your child object and pull it out of the hierarchy. In the Xpresso editor, drag in the parametric object and create a “global matrix” out port. Drag in the formerly child object and create a “global matrix” in port. Connect the two ports.

That will move your objects together. Now you can bake the former child’s motion to keyframes (make sure the expressions box is checked in the bake dialogue).

[Michael Bernard]

Thanks for your help. I think due to the nature of the rig, that route didn’t do what I needed it to but could definitely be helpful in the future. Expresso is an intimidating beast. I ended up getting a great plugin called NitroBake. It’s awesome. I’m pretty sure it bakes anything and everything into keyframes.

[Matthew Ingram]

This doesn’t work for me.

1) add expresso tag to the child
2) unparent the child (a null in this case)
3) drag both parent and child to the xpresso window
4) open up both global matrix ports
5) BUT – as soon as I connect the global matrixes the child snaps to the position of the parent

[Matthew Ingram]

a) if i create ANOTHER null

b) and then use the same method to acquire the global position from the (still-parented) child null that does work.

[Matthew Ingram]

Went looking for this in 2025 and find 2018 me answering my own question. Thank you, young me.

[Matthew Ingram]

For 2032 me if I’m still kicking around. This is what I needed (the Camera Morph Tag).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wDHe0t8hic

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[Kouraib Abdmalek]

Hi Matthew,

Thanks for sharing this with us, in the Adam’s method even if the child jumps to the parent’s position but in the end this succeeds in baking the PSR data of the child. As for the method you mentioned to maintain the child’s position by using Null you will be able to bake the Null data and not the polygon one which we basically want to transfer the keyframing to from the parametric object. Please correct me if I missed something.