Hi,
I wanted to bake my animations, but some people tend to suggest it’s not a good idea
from this thread : Is it possible to bake armature poses into shape keys/ morph targets? - Animation and Rigging - Blender Artists Community
is this still necessary to optimize animations ?
I am planning to make a game with quiet a lot of animated meshes
thanks
Morph targets are not exactly used for optimization… a typical morph target is basically a snapshot of vertex positions so you can use for more complex deformation on skeletal meshes where you would otherwise need hundreds of bones.
I think you’re referring to vertex animation (which is basically the same and sometimes called static mesh morph targets), you can bake animation frames (vertex positions) to a texture and then make a static mesh animate via material world position offset (static meshes can be a lot more performant than skeletal meshes, therefore you can use that technique for optimization).
Note though that animating static meshes from a texture has a lot of limitations… it’s not like you can replace skeletal meshes entirely with this technique.
Here are relevant links.
For those who are still looking for this, just so you don’t waste your day. Here’s how to bake both Static and Skeletal mesh. It’s also as simple way of taking a morph target snapshot, or baking the morph target to the skeleton, without expensive plugins.
You are a life saver! This is very useful for projects that have extensive character creation systems for players & NPCs. I will be using this to bake 50+ facial & body morph targets for each NPC in my game at runtime. Thank you so much
