Thanks for the suggestion! I'll look into it. For the time being you can always press "ESC" to stop progress and click the "X" for the progress bar to remove it. Ctrl-Z will of course undo any changes!
This works very well except for when there is a nested hierarchy with non-uniform scale. AE puts a shear on the child whereas this script does not.
Arguably the behavior of this script is preferable aa right angles stay orthogonal but when I need to do a precise bake in this rare circumstance, it will not work.
In fact, I am guessing it may be impossible unless AE allows you to set transformation matrices directly on the baked layer/null.
Either way - great and easy to use in most circumstances.
You are correct. AE does not have shear for a simple layer. Scale only applies along a particular layer's x and y axis. Therefore when the script "unparents" a child layer we lose this effect.
Great script! Thank you! I'm currently using it on many layers at once and it's a bit tedious and slow unfortunately. I just read your description more carefully and realized that if you select only the properties you want baked, it will ignore the others. It would be great if you could have a checkbox in the UI for Position, Rotation and Scale so I don't have to manually select these on each layer. I've noticed though that the script ignores expressions on the child layers. Maybe there could be a checkbox for baking expressions too?
Also, if there could be a way to optimize the keyframes so that at least there aren't any when the layer is static, that would be nice. I found Easy Bake, but that only works on expressions and not parenting.
Will this bake Wiggle transforms? I am making a number of Lottie files for a client and I have Easy Bake but it will not bake wiggle transforms for some reason. I don't understand wiggle that much other than what it does, not how it actually works. Something must be going on inside AE as when I bake a shape layer that has wiggle the expressions appear to be gone but if I make the wiggle control not visible the movement stops so even after baking at least with Easy Bake I still cannot export a correct Lottie file. Lottie (BodyMoving) does not natively understand wiggle.