Dynamics "baking"

[supernovavfx]

I asked Tomas a while back and I could not completely understand or implement what I was supposed to do regarding this so I'm asking the question again in a more straight forward way.

 

In order to render just the last 5 seconds of a simulation...  I need to "bake" the dynamic elements a certain way.   Tomas told me what to do and I 

had close to a thousand elements and could not do it properly.

 

here is my question.  Since selecting the dynamic elements is so time consuming... can I simply bake the WHOLE EI FILE...??  I'm happy with it all....

Im hoping the steps involved in doing THAT are far easier for me to follow.  How do I do that?

 

At the quality level I need,  I average almost 30-45 minutes PER FRAME... so baking the simulation would save me days and days of rendering as I'm doing

multiple camera shots of the scene.

 

Scott

 

 

[supernovavfx]

Tomas?

[Tomas Egger]

Ola Scott,

 

I did not understand the doubt, Do you want to bake the Bullet simulation or bake the rendering?

 

Thanks

 

Tom

[supernovavfx]

i want to bake the simulation... but i struggled selecting JUST the dynamic elements like you told me originally.   There are so many of them.

 

I thought it may be easier just to bake not only the simulation... but the whole EI file.... I'm happy with it as is.   The ONLY thing I want to do after baking it..

 

is render various camera moves at various times along the simulation.   I figured it might be easier, Tomas, for me to bake everything, simulated or not.   Just 

 

because i was getting confused.

[Tomas Egger]

Ola Scott!

 

Steps:

 

1) Your project need to have as default in the preferences, all created objects set channels to ”Explicit”, otherwise, you will be not able to change all groups at once to be baked, only manually one by one (btw: this is one of my own feature requests in the contextual menu).

 

2) Select all groups in the Project window

 

3) Go to Menu Bar / Animation / Fit Selected Objects to Curve

 

4) Use Maximum Fit Distance something like 0.001, it will tell to Animator to create one keyframe per frame in the bake, you can test yourself using 1.0 and see How few keyframes Animator creates.

 

Thats it

 

You will have all frames baked and you can drag them in the Project windows.

Sample projects attached here, before and after bake.

Bullet_bake.zip

 

Thanks

 

Tom