Algorithm for reducing animation curves form baked keyframes

Coding
1

If I have a bunch of animation data that’s translation and rotation (quat) info baked into every frame,
are there reliable approaches to reducing the data back into nice curves?

2

Not exactly. There’s no guarantee that the input data is continuous, so there’s no way to reconstruct the splines using a piecewise curve fit. If you can identify the cusps you can try to fit sections and stitch them together – but there’s no lossless way to recreate the original data. There are a lot of different curve fit algorithms for different situations, you’d need to have a good idea what your data looked like and what kind of errors you can tolerate. If you look at the controls (and performance) of the fit b-spline tool in Maya you’ll get an idea of the limits of curve reconstruction.

if you just want to sample your curve continuously you can just use the Catmull-rom spline algorithm, which will guarantee that the spline runs through the original points. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1251438/catmull-rom-splines-in-python

Here’s a decent reference: http://kobus.ca/seminars/ugrad/NM5_curve_s02.pdf

3

thanks!