Baking Selected People

You can select people in a Populate animation and "bake" them into a standard 3ds Max animation.

To bake Populate characters:

1. Set up a Populate animation, and Simulate.
2. Select the people you want to bake.

   The people to bake must be displayed as Textured Skin or Custom Skin—you can't bake stick figures. See Display Panel (Populate).

3. In the MAXScript Mini Listener or a MAXScript Listener window, enter this command:

   pop.bakeselpeople()

   3ds Max converts the characters you selected into standard geometry: Each person becomes an Editable Mesh object with a Skin modifier applied, and with the animation keys that Populate generated.

   If all viewports are orthographic views, you might see this warning:

   

   If this happens, switch one of your viewports to a Perspective or Camera view, and run pop.bakeselpeople() again.

Baking needs at least two frames of simulation.

Baking is one-way only: You can't move baked characters back into a Populate simulation.

Scaling an Idle Area with Baked People

Idlers are linked to their seat or idle area. This helps when you are editing your scene, or even animating the idle area. But it means that after you bake characters, if you scale the idle area, the character meshes will distort.

To uniformly scale the idle area, you can prevent character distortion by doing this: Go to the Hierarchy panel Link Info tab Locks rollout Scale group, then turn off the Z lock checkbox.

Using non-uniform scale on the idle area will always distort the characters. In this case, you need to unlink the baked people: Select the baked characters, and then on the main toolbar click (Unlink Selection).