Anima is a true simulator, this means that as you add or edit actors, motions, walkways, areas and so on the different elements act like dominoes, interacting with one another in ways that are not always predictable. Most of the time this naturalistic and elaborate interplay of parts is exactly what you want, but occasionally you might have an element of your scene animated perfectly, and you’d like to make sure that any further changes won’t affect this.

This is where animation baking comes in. It allows you to lock parts of your scene so that they’re not affected by any edits or additions that take place after they have been baked. An important principle to understand is that although baked animations can no longer change, they are still able to affect other unbaked elements. In this way you are able to control which elements have priority.

To see a sample file of animation baking in action, open baked_crowd.ani from the Welcome Screen.

1. Play the animation from start to end. This is necessary because you can’t bake an animation until it has been simulated in full.

2. Open the Project Panel and highlight the elements you wish to lock. You can bake individual characters, areas, walkways, or the whole scene.

3. Click on the Lock radio button next to the element you wish to lock.

4. A dialog box will display warning you that in order to lock a node you must bake the scene’s frames. Click yet to agree.

5. A second dialog will display warning you that locking a node will save the recorded frames, remove your Undo history and save the scene. Click yes if you wish to continue.

6. The selected element will now be baked.

Remember to SAVE your scene after the BAKE process ends, and to re-import it into your 3d application in order to apply the changes made to the scene that will be rendered. If you don’t do that, the BAKE won’t be stored in the description of the file and it won’t be used in the render.

1. Open the Project Panel and highlight the elements you wish to unlock.

2. Click on the Lock radio button next to the element you wish to unlock.

3. A dialog box will open warning you that unlocking the node will lose all the baked animations, if you wish to continue click Yes.

4. The element is now unlocked.