Action Constraint - Hidden Animation Power! | Blender Rigging For Animation

hello everybody welcome to a level pixel level and today I'm going to show you how I use action constraints I have two bones that appear one called base and one called controller I'm going to take the base bone and I'm gonna right-click on the location I'm going to insert a keyframe go to frame 20 I'm just gonna move this on the y-axis doesn't really matter where and I'm just gonna insert another keyframe it's not have this very simple animation again you can find all these files on my Gumroad account and you can follow right along with me as I go through this tutorial down here I actually have a dopesheet open and I've flipped it to an action editor what this allows me to do is to rename this action it's gonna read out my action actions are how blender stores animation data and they can be transferred just like a texture to a material and actually something that makes blender really awesome compared to other 3d animation packages let's change this now into a constraint though so what I'm going to do is actually click this X right here to remove this action now I'm going to come to the constraint tab and I'm going to add a bone constraint and I'm going to add an action constraint the target is going to be the armature and the bone is going to be the controller I'm going to use the bone in let's do Y rotation and let's do local space by default it's in world space and that means at any time the bone the parent or the rig or the object move its gonna activate I wanted to only activate when that bone itself gets value on the rotation for the two action I'm gonna use my action now I started animating that on frame 1 and I ended it on frame 20 and for the target range let's do a minimum of 0 and maximum let's do 90 so now when I grab the controller bone and rotate it on the y axis I'm actually activating that action and I can do a lot of things like this where I can actually bake an animation into a rig this is a very simple example and it may seem a lot like a driver right now or a very restricted driver so I can even key this now so I can key this at 0 and move to frame 100 and type in 90 and now I'm activating that other animation with this constraint let's look another example here I have something like this a fairly simple animation really easy to create but let's say I wanted to bake this into the rig now select on the first bone now I'm going to come to the constraint tab and I'm going to add a bone constraint and I'm going to add an action and I'm just gonna open up a dope sheet again down here and I'm gonna flip the dope sheet to action editor I'm just gonna rename this to my action and the target is going to be the armature and the bone is going to be controller again same name from the other one this time I'm gonna do X location and local space and the to action my action again and I'm gonna do start at 0 and end at 74 that's the end of that cycle animation there for the target range I'm going to do 0 to 2 now when I grab this controller and give it value on the x-axis it's going to rotate that bone the nice thing about an action constraint is it can be copied to all these bones without having to enter this information and again so if I select all of these bones here and shift select on this one last and do control C and do copy selected constraints I can do action if you do control scene you don't see this copy attributes menu you have to enable it today you go edit preferences under add ons type in a copy and you're gonna do copy attributes menu just turn that on when you do and you do ctrl C you'll have this copy attributes menu here but now each of these bones have that action constraint with the correct range here and now I can grab this controller and I can drive bad animation let's talk about one more use for this and more of a real-world situation so I had this animation and I want to use that through production hundreds of times and I pretty much want to bake that into the rig now you could do it with drivers but that would be a lot of drivers to maintain and that'd be a lot of math you'd have to do to figure out how to activate that all exactly the benefit to an action constraint is you can use the actual bones themselves to give it really nice animation and then convert it into an action that's going to isolate these bones here and let's add an action constraint so I starts on frame 0 and it goes to about frame 50 so I'll just click on one of these bones up here and I have this top controller up here called action driver that were actually going to link it to so you're gonna go to the constraints I'm gonna add an action the target is the armature the bone here is action driver to action is going to be the main action I'm gonna do the Y location and I'm going to do local space the start of the action is a zero and the end is at 50 let's do the target range of 0 to 10 let's just test it out first so if I grab this controller up here and move it on the Y it's going to activate that animation just great now I have to do is copy it to all these bones so I'm going to select them all and I'm going to shift select on that top bone the one that I added the constraint to and I'm gonna do ctrl C copy selected constraints action now when I move this controller on the Y I'm activating that entire animation which means that I can actually send this rig to an animator with that action applied I'm just going to remove this animation from my dopesheet action editor just so it doesn't ship and play automatically now any time an animator wants to access this like say this ship powers up and goes through space and oh some cool things and now they can just grab this and power it down as well it is an extremely useful constraint I use it a lot when I'm trying to pre-bake things into rigs exactly like this like more mechanical move it's something I use a lot sometimes in a face rig like on an eyelid I'm going to be doing in tutorial on that coming up in the future where I go over how to do an eyelid with an action constraint anyway let me know if you have any questions in the comments below big thank you to my patrons it's because of you guys that I can keep making these videos I really want to keep making content for you guys and keep putting it on YouTube as well for everyone to have access to anyway talk to you next time bye bye [Music]

Channel: Level Pixel Level

Views: 15,004

Keywords: 3d, rigging, modeling, surfacing, grease pencil, blender, blender 2.8, tutorial, blender 2.8 tutorial, rigging tutorial, level pixel level, level, pixel, cg cookie, blender guru, creative shrimp, blender nation, best rigging tutorial, amazing, new cg, grease pencil rigging, machine making, robotics, robots, game development, game vlog, game dev, indie dev, action, constraint, animation, cool, new, rig

Id: 5JmPFsIEgHI

Length: 7min 11sec (431 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 18 2020