BoneBake Lite - Free Cloth & Shape Keys to Bones

BoneBake Lite is a free Blender add-on that turns any mesh animation into bones and skin weights. Shape keys, cloth sims, modifiers and Geometry Nodes become a normal armature with a baked action, ready for FBX or glTF export to game engines.

• Bake up to 16 bones from any animated mesh with a constant vertex count
• Max 4 influences per vertex, the limit most game engines use
• Game preset: engine-safe names for Unity, Unreal and Godot
• Error report: RMSE, 99th percentile and worst frame, in % of the model's size
• Error heatmap painted on the mesh, plus Select Worst to find the worst-fitting vertices
• Quick Start: one click adds a waving flag, ready to bake
• Runs in the background with a progress bar; Esc cancels

1. Install: Edit › Preferences › Get Extensions › Install from Disk, and pick the zip.
2. Press N in the 3D viewport and open the BoneBake tab. Click Add Demo Flag, then press Play.
3. Click Bake to Bones. You get an armature, a skinned copy of the mesh and an action. Your original is hidden, not changed.
4. On your own scene: select the animated mesh and bake.

• Raise Frame Step for long animations; keys stay linear between samples.
• If detail lost is above 15%, the panel tells you. More bones is the fix.

• Demo flag (693 vertices × 48 frames, 16 bones): 0.015% RMS error, under 1 second.

• Blender 4.2 LTS to 5.2; Windows and Linux tested, macOS not tested
• The vertex count must stay constant (no remesh per frame or fluids)
• Bones are rigid transforms with a flat hierarchy: right for baked effects, not for hand-animating

Lite stays free. The full BoneBake is a separate paid add-on; search BoneBake under Add-ons here on Blendkit.

• No bone limit (cloth flag: 48 bones, 0.29% error)
• Suggest Bones: tries 16, 32, 64 and 128 bones and picks the smallest count that keeps the detail
• Roblox Dynamic Head preset: ARKit shape keys to FACS poses, 18 checks before export, FBX with Roblox's settings

Remove Lite before installing the full version.