Bake Rigify

Strips rigify-styled rigs down to their deformation bones and bakes their animations.

How it works

In essence, the operator

• Duplicates the selected armature
• Creates a bone for each deformation bone (called DEF- bones) in armature (called EXP- bones)
• Parents each bone to the root bone (that bone must exist in the original armature)
• Parent constraints the new bones to their deformation bone counterparts
• Bakes the selected set of actions (all | selected | active)
• Discards all but duplicated bones
• Renames remaining EXP- bones back to what they were called, so assigned weights will work etc.

Installation

• Download the Latest Release archive zip
• In Blender's add-on manager (File-->User Preferences-->Addons), using Install from File, install the zip downloaded.
• Now enable the Bake Rigify addon.

Usage

• Select an armature in Object mode.
• In the Properties Panel, under the Armature data tab, expand Rigify Bake and hit the button there.

Using a non-rigify rig

This script is making use of rigify conventions, where

• There is one root bone named root.
• Deformation bones are called DEF-. These are the only bones that will be exported apart from the special root bone.

Caveats

This tool discards all hierarichal information. All bones have a single parent, the root.