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Simplify Keyframes

Thin a wall of per-frame mocap keys into a clean, hand-editable set — same motion, fraction of the keys.

Tier: Free for all Menu: Polish → Simplify Keyframes

What it does​

Mocap and baked clips key every bone on every frame. That's perfect for playback and terrible for editing — try to adjust one pose and you're fighting hundreds of keys that all disagree with you.

Simplify finds the keys that actually matter — the ones that define the motion — and removes the rest, keeping the result within a tolerance of the original. The motion looks the same; the timeline becomes something you can actually work with.

The panel shows a live before/after key count and the reduction percentage while you drag, so you always know the trade you're making.

The slider — Light to Aggressive​

One honest slider:

  • Light — removes only the keys that are pure redundancy. The motion is mathematically near-identical. Use when you plan careful hand-editing afterward.
  • Middle — solid reduction (often 60-80% fewer keys on mocap) with no visible change at normal playback.
  • Aggressive — maximum thinning. The broad strokes survive; subtle micro-detail may soften. Use for background characters or heavily stylized motion.

The viewport previews live — the keys visibly thin out on the timeline the moment you Apply.

Workflow — making mocap editable​

This is the standard post-capture chain:

  1. Capture via Vision Capture → the timeline is a dense wall of keys.
  2. Smooth first — melt the jitter while the data is still dense.
  3. Polish → Simplify Keyframes. Drag to the middle, check the before/after count, Apply Simplify.
  4. Now the timeline has keys you can grab, move, and adjust — REC-fix individual poses, retime sections, the works.

Smooth before Simplify is the right order: smoothing works best with dense data, and simplifying jittery data wastes keys describing the jitter.

Non-destructive​

Apply commits through the editor's clip-level undo — Ctrl+Z restores the original keys entirely. Experiment freely.

Edge cases​

Already hand-keyed animation​

Simplify is built for dense baked data. On a clip you keyed by hand (where every key is intentional), Light might trim a stray key or two but there's little to gain — and Aggressive could eat poses you placed deliberately.

The count barely drops​

If the before/after readout shows little reduction, the motion genuinely needs those keys (fast, detailed action). That's the tolerance doing its job — it won't break the motion to hit a number.

  • Smooth — run it before Simplify on mocap
  • Range — operate on just a marked stretch of the timeline
  • Vision Capture — the source of most dense clips