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I have an object (with some keyframed animation) parented to an empty (also with some keyframed animation), basically a rotating object rotating around an empty.

Now I need to get rid of the parent but keep the same animation, with all properties keyframed in the child. How?

The reason for this is that the object is a control object in a fluid simulation, and it does not seem to work with an animated parent.

The file is here

The relevant object is the Torus parented by the Empty. There is no need to bake the fluid, because that is not pertinent to the question.

I tried the answer in Children of parent maintain current position after parent removed? but it didn't help, but then again, that question was a bit different.

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You can do this by baking the keyframes. This will overwrite the current keyframes of the child object and replace them with keyframes of both its own animation and the parent animation combined, so it retains the same movement but without having to be parented.

Select the object and choose Object> Animation> Bake Action. Set the range of the animation to bake, the Frame Step (to insert a keyframe on every nth frame) and enable Clear Parents (for some reason, for your example you also have to enable Visual Keying to get it to work correctly). After that you can click 'OK' to bake.

enter image description here

The baking process will then begin (which could be time consuming depending on the range of the animation and the Frame Step value).

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  • $\begingroup$ Thanks! But alas, it didn't work. The object ends up doing a much bigger loop than before (the child-object starts from the point where it was originally created). I tried applying location as well as rotation, but there was no difference. I must have missed something basic. $\endgroup$
    – Jbergman
    Oct 13, 2016 at 23:01
  • $\begingroup$ Are you able to upload your file? If you are, upload it to blend-exchange.giantcowfilms.com/b/1934, add the embed link to your question and I'll take a look. $\endgroup$
    – Ray Mairlot
    Oct 13, 2016 at 23:14
  • $\begingroup$ Thanks again! I have updated the question with the file. $\endgroup$
    – Jbergman
    Oct 13, 2016 at 23:37
  • $\begingroup$ @Jbergman I have updated the answer. Enable Visual Keying as well and the baking should work. $\endgroup$
    – Ray Mairlot
    Oct 13, 2016 at 23:50

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