Saving a Frame or pose of a rig

[amanandink]

Hi All, does anyone happen to know of a script for saving out the current frame you have selected of a rig, so you can save just the pose and not the animation? I have looked at the animation scripts but I want to try one that is just hte pose or that can joint the animation to a current scene and not wipe it.

thanks
Jeremy

[heyvern]

You could save a "pose" into an action without a script.

Okay, follow along. It seems like a lot of effort but in reality it doesn't take long and is quite simple. It only took a a minute or so to do this and it's the first time I tried it. With more practice it would probably go even faster.

1) Create a new action for your pose and make sure it's "active"
2) Right click the "main line" in the action palette and "insert copy".
3) While still in the action, go to the frame that you want to create a pose from. It's the same frame from the main timeline.
4) Under the "Animation" menu, select "copy current keyframe".
5) Type in "1" in the "Copy to frame" box.
6) Depending on the complexity of the document you would select the channels you wish to copy or to make it easy simply check the all channels box and press okay or hit the return key.
(there is an issue with v9x and the copy frame window. Depending on how complex your document is and your screen resolution you can't see all the channels to check, and you can't see the "okay" or "cancel" button at the bottom. It still works and you just hit return but you can't cancel if this happens. This is fixed in v10.)

7) After you copied the frame, select frame 1 in the action timeline
Under "Animation" menu, select "Clear Animation" and choose "from document after current frame" or "from layer after current frame".

That last step clears all the keys except frame 1, from ONLY THE ACTION for the entire document or layer including sub layers.
This process outlined above will probably add keys you may not want or need but it gets the job done.

Of course, a script could be created to do this with one click and only copy channels with keys... it might be fun to try it but in my head it would require a lot of effort to script and since it's relatively quick and easy to do this by hand there's not much motivation.

[amanandink]

Hey Vern, thanks for the help and your right it doesnt take too long and I like it, but i cant load the pose into another model in another scene from there if its in this model. I problem is the animator animated 2 scenes that dont hook up and he wanted a way to copy the last pose from one into another but he has already animated both, our current approach is too match by eye but I was wondering if there was a better way.

J

[Breinmeester]

I'm working on a script that saves the current pose from the timeline as an action at the press of a button. I have been lobbying for being able to exchange actions through the Library. That would be very handy for exchanging walkcycles, runcycles, blinks and character typical poses. If you'd like to throw in your weight on that one, Jeremy, you're very welcome to. I submitted a mantis report.

[heyvern]

Hey Vern, thanks for the help and your right it doesnt take too long and I like it, but i cant load the pose into another model in another scene from there if its in this model. I problem is the animator animated 2 scenes that dont hook up and he wanted a way to copy the last pose from one into another but he has already animated both, our current approach is too match by eye but I was wondering if there was a better way.

J

What kind of animation do you have? If it's just bones I created a script to save out bone animation that can be loaded into any file of the same character. I haven't updated this script to do vector animation, just bones and layer animation of the bone layer. Basically follow the steps I described before, but save out the animation first and load it in another file.

save-and-load-bone-animation-menu-scripts

[neeters_guy]

For the sake of completeness, both ponysmasher and rudiger posted solutions that might be of interest:

Load and save bone animation between characters

Import Animation Script (Content Paradise product)

[amanandink]

Hey Vern apologize for the late reply but this is exactly it, this works like a dream, although i see some good things are coming for testing soon.

thanks again
J