What is the difference between baking an animation and not baking it before exporting it (from Max) into fbx format? I seem to get the same result in Unity; that is, I can still split, duplicate, and/or edit the animation either way…just wondering. Thanks.
I don’t use Max, but it’s one of two things I would guess.
Either:
a) It bakes a keyframe for every bone at every tick, so there’s no “interpolation” between frames in the final animation
OR
b) It’s baking the motion on the armatures of the figure to the “mesh” so rather than the armature moving the mesh, the mesh now animates on its own.
Thanks Redbeer. But if so, would there be corresponding keyframes at each tick/frame in Unity or an absence of keyframes for the bones driving the animation in Unity respectively (neither are there)?
Unity does animation compression with keyframe reduction on import by default, which might be why even after baking an animation you don’t see all of the keyframes. For simpler stuff especially, there isn’t much difference between baking or not baking, since Unity can read the animation curves out of your FBX files just fine. However, things like IK chains and constraint setups that you can set up in your animation software will not come into Unity the same as they were originally; for these you would bake the animation into the actual bones that are skinned to the mesh (which is to say, save a keyframe for the bones’ final positions, rotations, etc, at every single frame so it matches the original perfectly).
Got it, makes sense. Thanks so much Gio.