After spending more time with it - it appears that the hiccough occurs when baking animation while in character is selected. The Autodesk documentation refers HIK and the Trax editor here:http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/maya2013/en_us/index.html?url=files/GUID-559933C3-DFBD-4EA9-BC27-1D8E6B634D13.htm,topicNumber=d30e231208
However the links all go to the generic set-up which isn’t currently working for me. It must be something about how I create the character set.
If I have my rig set up, set source to reference animation and then Bake to Control Rig it works as long as I do not have a character set selected. If a character set is selected, the bake fails and the rig goes to a broken version of the stance pose.
If I do NOT have the character set selected the Bake to Control Rig works as expected, but when I go to create the Character Clip I get the “No clip created since character has no keys.”\
I can get a proof of concept if I complete the to control rig before creating the character set. When I create the character set as before the Keys do appear on the Character and I can create a single clip via Trax editor. The problem is All subsequent Bake to Control Rig fails unless I de-select the Character Set.
So I’m stuck in a catch-22 where the bake works as long as I don’t key it to the Character Set, but if I don’t key it to the Character Set I can’t make clips.
EDIT: I’ve go back to the drawing board and created a test HIK rig from scratch and a new Character Set that has allowed me to make 2 clips by Baking without the Character Set selected, then selecting the Character and the keys actually appear. The only difference is that I wasn’t targetting a new layer in the Bake to Control Rig settings.
If any of this points to an obvious error in my thinking I’d love to hear it, as I’ve spent hours doing essentially the same thing rebuilding character sets.
EDIT EDIT: And Thank you for the reply - just hearing it should work gave me the kick to give it another shot from scratch. Just seeing anything work, even in a test makes a big difference.