Baking complex character animations/deformations and use them as actions

Hey!
Game engines don’t deal well with all the advanced rigging features of a 3D application (like Blender that has mesh deform, constraints, action constraints, driven shape keys, etc).

Anyway, a game engine shouldn’t deal with all that (I think it’s a waste of resources). One blender recent feature is the Alembic exporter wich allow we to export complex character animations, with all the complex rigging methods a 3d application can provide, and play them as an action on any game engine that can also load Alembic.

Wouldn’t it be possible to have something similar? Something that bakes everything in one action that Armory can play, but that we can still edit the animation by entering in pose mode? :slight_smile:

Actually with Armory integrated in Blender you do not need to export 3D models.
Of course Armory can improve to support more Blender features.
But maybe i did not understand, could you please explain better your idea?

If I understood correctly (may be completely wrong on this) Armory does need to import the models and animations from Blender, Blender is just the middle man. It does it automatically do.
By my previous experience, seems to be very hard a game engine support all the rigging features of Blender.
Also feels that would consume a lot of resources even if it could.
So what I’m saying is that it’s only required the final result for the game engine, something like an automatic animation Bake.
I apologize not being able to clarify properly!

You can check here how Armory handle scene exporter:

https://github.com/armory3d/armory/blob/master/blender/exporter.py

Armory scene exporter is based on OpenGex:

http://opengex.org

Here a comparison with Collada:

http://opengex.org/comparison.html

English is not my native language, i asked question to understand better, so no need to apologize :wink:

I’m Portuguese, so my English ain’t exactly one of the 10 great wonders also hehe
Thanks for the Opengex link and info, I knew nothing about it!

Ok, so by what I’m understanding Bones, Shape keys and generic Loc Rot Scale animations are compatible.
Blender at the moment has the following things that are used to deform/animate a mesh (may be forgetting something):

-Armatures with several constraints, including action constraints;
-Shape Keys that may be driven by bones;
-Mesh deform;
-Latices;
-Hooks

My questions would be:
-Will all this, eventually, have a chance to be exported to Armory?
-If not, can all of it just be baked and then export the final result?