Open the Graph Editor after a bake or a Mixamo import and you'll see the mess: a keyframe on every single frame, tangents that jitter, and the odd rotation channel that flips 360 degrees for no visible reason. Curves like that are almost impossible to edit. Here's how to clean them, starting with what Maya already gives you.
The built-in tools
Maya has two workhorses for this in the Graph Editor:
- Curves β Simplify Curve removes redundant keys β the ones that sit exactly on the interpolation between their neighbors and add nothing. You control how aggressive it is with a tolerance value.
- Curves β Euler Filter fixes rotation channels that flip or wind up past 360 degrees, which is the usual cause of sudden spins after a bake.
Between those two, most baked animation becomes editable again. They're free and built in.
Where they get tedious
The built-in tools work per selection and you eyeball the result. On a full character β dozens of controls, hundreds of frames β you're running Simplify, checking curves, adjusting tolerance, and re-running, control by control. You also can't easily see how bad a scene is before you start: how many redundant keys, on which channels.
A faster cleanup pass
AnimKit's cleanup tools add two things on top of the built-in commands: stats that show you what's actually messy (key counts and redundancy per selection) so you know where to look, and a set of batch operations so a full-character pass isn't one control at a time.
Honest framing: Simplify Curve and Euler Filter are free and do the core work. The cleanup tools are about seeing the problem and clearing it in bulk instead of curve by curve.
Try it
Cleanup is one part of AnimKit, a Maya animation toolkit. It's paid; the full tool list is on the AnimKit page.
