Baking CAT animation to world-space object? (conversion tools -> collapse doesn't work?)

[oyvind3BPMJ]

I have a CAT bone with correct orientation - but there's no keys on it, because it's bone in a spline IK bonechain.

I need to somehow transfer the orientation of the correct CAT bone to a different cat bone.

Look at this gif: this is a CAT bone (thin & tall) constrained to another CAT bone (yellow cube) with position and rotation, before baking. This is in CAT animation mode, btw:

Allright, time to bake. If the bake works, the constraint will break, but the thin bone will still move like in the gif above.

I selected the thin & tall CAT bone, I went to motion panel > conversion tools and hit "collapse"

What usually happens with none-CAT objects is you get a nice key bake, and the constraint is broken.

This is what CAT produced:

I thought the issue was that there still was a constraint on top of the keys. Nope, not that I could see?

I thought the issue was the type of constraint used, so I tried other types (all with weird results).

I just can't bake CAT properly... And since I want to get the data from an IK chain, there's no keys to save & load either.... So what can be done? Does baking simply not work with CAT? Is there a magic trick? Help!

[oyvind3BPMJ]

I think I solved a big piece of the puzzle: As seen in the gif, the bake looks entirely wrong - untill I enable, then disable "Static Matrix Value" of the baked CAT-bone, under Hierarchy > Link Info > Setup Mode.

I do not fully understand what "Static Matrix Value" vs "Animation Controller" does if I'm honest. But this seems to solve my issue!

 

[oyvind3BPMJ · Accepted solution]

Turns out the keys was baked correctly, but the issue was double transformations. When you collapse keys of a CAT layer, you may have constraints in the underlying "setup layer", and if they have "animation controller" enabled, you'll suddenly get double transformations; 1) from the baked keys 2) from the constraint in the setup layer.

Hopefully this helps someone, someday 😛

[domo.spaji]

No. You have fundamentally wrong approach to hierarchy, bone animation...

That constraining and collapsing shouldn't be done in first place.

[oyvind3BPMJ]

I guess you're saying "no" because this process breaks the rig? But that doesn't really matter since I'm saving the keys, not the file itself. Otherwise I'm not sure what this "fundamentaly" wrong approach is? It would helpful if you could actually explain this