Hi,
I have read somewhere (but could not find it atm) that modifying the scene is generally considered a bad idea, but we have to bake the animation before exporting.
How are you handling this?
You might be thinking of the CVEI methodology.
Whether or not you follow is ultimately up to you, it’s a general guideline that doesn’t apply to all circumstances. That said, baking is typically done on and during export, and normally doesn’t affect the scene. E.g. from Maya, the Atom file format support baking on export, which doesn’t actually change the scene. Likewise with the Alembic export of animation.
For baking requiring scene change, the formal method would be to publish from a background or server process. E.g. publishing happens on a separate machine or Maya that launches the scene, bakes it and publishes it, without saving the scene.
A guerrilla version of that could involve (1) save the scene, (2) bake, (3) publish and (4) automatically re-open the scene.
Alternatively, a more pipeline related method could be to not export what you animate, and instead have an “output” of sorts, that gets baked and can get re-baked, without affecting the original animation.
Finally, maybe destructively baking isn’t an issue for your specific case. There are likely more ways to handle it, but hope this gives you some idea of what’s possible! 