C4D: Bake Spline Mask

[Junior Taxi 0]

Hi all,

I'm having a bit of a problem as I have a bunch of small animations that need to be exported in FBX format, however many of them have Spline Masks which cannot be exported in this format. So, my question is - is there a way to bake a spline mask? I've tried the Nitobake and Steadybake plugins but have not had any luck so far. Could Xpresso be the answer? I've tried but failed to create a spline that replicates the Spline Mask inside Xpresso but my knowledge in that area needs some sharpening.

Here's a c4d file that shows an example of the kind that I'd like to export in FBX format: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ar9hlyt2kio14zt/Abstract_29_Prepared.c4d?dl=0

Any ideas?

Thanks!

Edited February 19, 2016 by Junior Taxi

[Mylenium 0]

Forget it. XPresso cannot create objects. What you need is an FBX Morph or Pose object containing the individual steps and you would have to create a Python sxcript to create those sequences or manually convert the current state to object for hundreds of splines and dump them in a pose morph. that said, since this stuff is handled differently in every program, your chances of actually getting it to show up in another 3D program are close to zero. It's simply the wrong approach. If at all, you need real polygonal geometry, but then I suppose given the specifics of your animation and the limitations of the process you can stop messing around in C4D and do it in "that other program" right away.

 

Mylenium

[Junior Taxi 0]

Hi Mylenium,

 

Thanks for the feedback.

 

Looks like I'm in a bit of a pickle as 'that other program' is MaxMSP - a program which it's nearly impossible to make such animations with. Dang.

 

I was hoping to take some of my artworks (http://blog.lumiko.com.au/post/121266475956) and make them generative, picking random FBX files to play out over a grid system. Many of my animations have been fine with FBX formatting, for example https://www.dropbox.com/s/bk5fz6ouncsf5f8/Abstract_FBX_22.fbx?dl=0, but unfortunately it looks like i'll have to rethink any that make use of the Spline Mask (which is about half of them!). Ooh well.

 

Thanks again, at least good to know I wasn't missing something super simple.

 

Chris

[Mylenium 0]

Well, apparently it supports XML and JavaScript, so wouldn't it make much more sense to e.g. create an interactive SVG file or something that can be derived from a Processing project or a HTML Canvas? I haven't found any info on what it actually it supports, but this seems much more logical to me and might even be possible to plug together from a few nodes, assuming they support some drawing primitives.

 

Mylenium

[Junior Taxi 0]

Thanks again Mylenium.

 

I've since discovered Bodymovin for AE https://github.com/bodymovin/bodymovinwhich allows you to export shape layers to JSON, which is perfect for my needs. Ta!