[Experimental Add-on] Goo Anim Utils - Bake to Empties (Patreon)

We've created a few tools over the years to help us with our animation workflow! One of the biggest  and most helpful tools has been "Bake to Empties" which allows us to do all sorts of space switch tricks for easier handling by the animator afterwards. There's several different ways Bake to Empties can work, and each of these options gives the animators more control depending on the situation they're in. It's incredibly powerful despite being deceptively simple.

What does it do?
Bake to Empties is a tool that bakes the transformation data of a bone or object to an Empty. This Empty can be baked into World Space or Custom Space (parented to a specified object). The object that is being baked from will also follow the empty in some way. This ranges from Copy Transforms to Copy Rotation (only) to Damped Track (Point At), giving a large variety of how these Empties can be used to manipulate the animation.

Not only that, but we also have the feature of adding an Additive Layer of animation by having a sub-empty parented to the baked empty, allowing for easy multilayered animation without using the NLA or Animation Layer tools (which aren't always reliable in a scalable pipeline).

How to use

After you install it (like any other Blender add-on), you will have to search the operator in the 3D viewport. F3 is the default hotkey for the search bar! Searching Bake to Empties will give you the operator window with options such as frame range, constraint type, custom space, etc.

Most of the time Smart Bake will be less reliable, but it is there if you prefer it. Smart Bake only adds keyframes to wherever there might have been keyframes on the source object, instead of every frame.

Pro tips:

- Bake to Empties is great for sword tips to clean up arcs with the Damped Track option.

- Bake to Empties was originally made for bone chains. With Damped Track, you can easily create wind cycles or other oscillation by adding noise to the empties, giving you a pseudo IK chain from a simple FK chain.

- More tips at the Blender Conference animation panel this weekend! "Tricks of the Trade" by Raymond Luc

Other tools that come with GooAnimUtils:

Quick Noise: great for adding noise to multiple curves at once. Use in the graph editor.

Smart Bake: this option is available as a searchable standalone operator, as well. It bakes based on existing keyframes rather than every frame.

Convert Euler Order: used for converting rotation order for objects without losing animation

Try it out:

Experimental Goos can download GooAnimUtils pre-release version to try it for themselves!

NOTE: This is an experimental version and not a public release version! But that's why the experimental tier exists--so we can release it early to you guys :) we still hope to clean it up a bit and get it read for a more official release later, but it's already been incredibly helpful for the past few years. Enjoy!