How to Bake Rigid Body Physics to Keyframes in Blender

Baking rigid body physics to keyframes in Blender converts dynamic, procedural simulations into permanent animation keyframes on the timeline. This process is essential for locking down physics calculations, speeding up viewport playback, preparing assets for export to external game engines like Unity or Unreal Engine, and allowing manual fine-tuning of individual object movements.

Step-by-Step Guide to Baking Rigid Body Physics

1. Prepare and Test Your Simulation

Before converting the physics calculation into permanent keyframes, ensure the simulation looks correct.

  • Press the Spacebar in the timeline to play through the simulation from start to finish.
  • Make any required adjustments to mass, friction, bounciness, or collision shapes in the Physics Properties tab.

2. Select the Objects to Bake

  • In the 3D Viewport or the Outliner, select all the rigid body objects you want to convert into keyframe animation.
  • To select all rigid bodies quickly, you can select one and use Select > Select Grouped > Type or simply box-select them in the viewport.

3. Bake to Keyframes

With your objects selected:

  1. Navigate to the top menu of the 3D Viewport and click Object.
  2. Hover over Rigid Body.
  3. Select Bake to Keyframes.

4. Configure the Bake Settings

A pop-up menu will appear in the center or bottom-left of the screen:

  • Start Frame / End Frame: Define the specific frame range you want to bake. Match this to your scene's simulation range.
  • Frame Step: Set the keyframe interval. A value of 1 generates a keyframe on every single frame for maximum accuracy. A higher number reduces the number of keyframes but may reduce precision.
  • Click OK to execute the bake.

What Happens After Baking

Once the process finishes:

  • Blender automatically removes the rigid body physics properties from the selected objects.
  • Standard Location and Rotation keyframes are applied to each frame within the specified range.
  • The animation can now be edited in the Timeline, Dope Sheet, or Graph Editor, and the file can be safely exported without losing simulation data.