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How can I bake a sound effector animation for export?
I have a speaker animated by a sound effector with music. I want to bake the movement from the sound effector into the speaker so I can export it as .glb. Someone in a video recommended Mograph Cache tag, but it didn’t work, and I’m thinking it’s maybe an outdated tutorial.
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9 Replies
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you are using the Sound Effector as a deformer? If so you should be able to bake the speaker to PLA (Point Level Animation) in the Animate layout – Functions/Bake Objects… make sure you check PLA
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Hi, Brian
To be honest, I’m not sure if I’m using it as a deformer. I mean that I dropped my object (a speaker) into a cloner, then put a sound effector on it, loaded a sound file in, and the sound is affecting the speaker’s Y position and uniform scale. However, in the animation view, there appear to be no keyframes. I tried as you suggested, and the animation is still not being baked in. It could be that I’m not in fact using it as a deformer, but I’m not sure how to describe how it’s being used.
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ah, not as a deformer….
the mograph cache tag should work if it’s attached to the cloner and that will export to Alembic but I don’t know if that will export to glb/gltf maybe someone else knows. Or knows a way to bake a Mograph Cache tag.
However, you can still do the something similar by not putting the speaker in a cloner, adding the sound effector as a child of the speaker and setting Deformation in the sound effector’s Deform tab to Point or Polygon
– the speaker will have to be an editable object
– the animation would be a different than doing the cloner/effector thing but it will allow you to bake the speaker to PLA (assuming that will export to .glb but I don’t actually know that, I just guess it should) -
Brian– First of all, thank you for your above suggestions! I tried both, and while neither had the intended result, I got something interesting happen on the second one. I exported it as a gltf. It had the checkbox for PLA, so I checked it. This time when I loaded it into the gltf viewer, it did not animate–but it showed 1 animation under the details for the object. Before, it would say 0 animations. Then it shows me some errors that say:
‘Animation channel cannot target WEIGHTS when mesh does not have morph targets.’
(just the same message several times)
I figured this was because I checked PLA instead of Pose morph, but not sure. PLA is obviously necessary, so I can’t change it. This may be more of a gltf issue than C4D, so I will try to ask around. By any chance though, do you know what this error might mean?
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Sorry I don’t (having no .gltf experience or rather the exporter) but it looks like the exporter deals with PLA by using Morph tag targets.
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Thank you, Brian. It turns out .glb doesn’t support PLA. I will look into alternatives!
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^Actually, I’m not 100% sure about that, it’s just what I heard from someone else; I’m reading more on the documentation for the format. Appreciate your help! You got me a lot closer to figuring out the root of the problem.
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Ok, working with R21 I found the GLTF exporter at MaxonLabs and exported the test ‘speaker’ I made (Cloner/Sound effector) and exported as GLTF, checking Bake Animation there and the 3D Viewer in Windows sees the animation. Since you are on R22 and I know the exporter is built in now I don’t know if the settings are the same but I got it to work here (or it seems to)
*edit* missed a step – I Baked the speaker to Alembic first and it was that that I exported to GLTF with Export Morph Animations to Pose Morph (the default – don’t know if that’s important) and Bake Animations checked. *edit* -
Thank you so much, Brian!! I will give this a try! I have R21 now too, since my S22 trial has run out. I’m excited to see the result:)
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