Cineversity

Hi there, I have a simple motion-capture-driven character scene I’m looking to push to a render farm for Redshift rendering. However, the character armature is being driven through the character solver tag, which is not compatible with the particular render farm I’ve been looking into (Rebus Farm), and I’d guess it’s probably not compatible with most render farms since it’s such a new C4D feature. I’m wondering if there is any way to bake the character solver information onto the character’s armature, eliminating the need to have the solver tag there at all.

I’d imagine this could also be useful for pushing to game engines, as I think they take baked model files like fbx. (I’m also looking into this as a future state for our team)

Some details if it helps: I’m on C4D S24, and I’m using motion capture data from an Xsens suit that I’m cleaning up and retargeting to the character’s armature in Motion Builder. From there I’m exporting the armature from Motion Builder and importing it into C4D as an .fbx (just the skeleton). The reason I’m going through Motion Builder is because it’s way better/faster at cleaning up mocap data than C4D, and at translating the capture skeleton to my character skeleton, which has a slightly different layout of bones. That way the Xsens data is clean and the armature that I import to C4D is set up exactly the same as my C4D character.

Thank you for any assistance!

Hi bmmorehe,

I would select the Null (root) object of the joint rig that you like to bake.

Then call up an Animate> Add Animation Clip… Check Expression to on.

You can then disconnect the solver from the source.

In the Motion Clip timeline: Motion System> Convert Layer to Keyframe animation.

The Motion System allows to combine, re-time, and position the motion.

I hope that works for you. If not, I would send you an upload link to check your scene.

All the best

Thank you very much, Dr. Sassi! This is definitely a useful technique to keep on hand. It seems to work, although baking takes an incredibly long time, and it has no meaningful progress bar to track against. ~900+ frames might not work so well with this method haha

Thanks for the feedback,bmmorehe.

Perhaps try this; the Rig that receives the data needs to be selected.
(Object Manager> Edit> Select Children.)
Then export this as FBX, “selected only” in the export settings.
After that, re-imported (File >merge.)
Works here, but I don’t know how well it would work with your data.

Cheers