Save and RE-USE your animations!

wondering why blender doesn't have an animation Library like Maya you're not alone while the developers are working on it I've got a work around for you in this video I'm going to show you how to use the action Editor to save and reuse animation just like an animation Library let's hop in so to access the action editor which is what we're going to be using is to change this window to the dope sheet then we're going to change it from the dope sheet to the action editor and right now our current action is this Max walk which if you press play you can see it's Max walking and for us to make a new action what you can do is press this x right here and then you can press new and now you can make an entirely new action and when you press play you can see that there's no action on Max Max isn't doing anything there's zero animation because it's a brand new action what you want to make sure is to name your action properly don't make the mistake of giving it some random name because later on when you want to use it you're going to have trouble because blender creates a ton of different actions by itself so you really want to make sure that yours is named differently and it's something that you're 100% going to remember later on goty so for example let's just name this angry walk animation I'm going to press enter and if you want blender to not delete your animation you want to make sure that after you created the action click this little Shield this it's called a fake user this saves your data even if the action isn't being used in your animation you'll know that your action is being saved if it has this F right in front of it as you can see here in the list it says F angry walk animation now if we get rid of the shield and then press the X on it and we go back to the list and scroll all the way down you can see that now it says zero angry walk animation so pressing the X didn't delete it but it adds a zero to the beginning which which means that the next time you open up blender your action is likely not going to be there anymore because it's not going to be saved another way to create and change a file is to let's go back to our walk animation the original one again when we press play you can see the walk animation starts playing instead of pressing you know X on this and then new what you can do is click new action by pressing this button with the two papers which then makes a copy of that previous action so now now we have Max 001 but the animation is still there so we can make changes to this animation and name this differently Max you know let's say we make this Max Happy Walk and we make this a more happy walk and we press the shield on it now you have two different actions one is a regular walk and one is a Happy Walk so that's just all to get the technicalities out of the way I just want you to be on the same page as me now to transfer actions to your blender file right now we really only have the camera action which is just the action on the camera and we have the max walk action which is this animation right here everything else we just created and it's empty so to bring in actions you can go to file append and then find the file where you've saved your animations so that's right here we're going to go to actions and uh this is again exactly why you want to name things properly because blender has all these different actions for all these different things but what we want is here we have a looking around and we have a Max Run we already have the max walk so I'm not going to bring that in but what you can do is append and now when you go here you can see that we have Max looking around and Max run but you'll also notice that there's a zero in front of it which means the next time we open this file it's not going to be there so I'm going to go ahead and click on it press the shield make sure it's saved same with the Run press the shield and so here you can see that when we're on the max run we have the Run animation uh playing and when we go to looking around you can see that we have an animation just on the face so if we go from the max walk here to the looking around you can see that the rest of the body stays the same but now we have that looking around animation just purely on the face you can apply any animation to any rig if the rig has the same naming conventions and obviously similar proportions just by clicking on the rig going to pose mode you all you do is just apply that action to the rig I could bring in May or other character here and apply the same action and it'll work with may as well we also had this when we were working on May and the three we were able to borrow actions from one character and apply to another character obviously if the other rig has very different proportions the animation might not work well but you can still use it as a starting point now if you're familiar with actions you know that we have a problem the problem is you can only apply one action to each character you can't have multiple actions unless of course you use the nla edit sorry use the nla Ed use the nla editor oh my okay you know what who wants to use the nla editor what you can do that'll also give you a lot of flexibility is you can select all your controllers I'm going to make sure that I have the graph editor open so let me open a new window graph editor going to make sure all my channels are selected by pressing a and here I want to make sure all my keys are selected what I can do is copy this run animation and then let's say we go to one of our empty uh channels here I can then set a key just so we have uh a key on every single controller then you can just paste that run animation right into this new layer and we can even rename this let's say run and look around press the shield so now we have this run animation in this new action that we created so we could have animations before this we could have animations after this and then we can just contrl + V paste a run animation before or after so let's do another action from scratch what I'm going to do is press X on this one create a new action and call this walk to run now again what I can do is go to Max walk make sure all the controllers are selected all the channels all the keys here and then I'm going to copy paste this and bring it into this new action that I made this is where I have my main animation for example and then I I got to make sure there's a key so that the the keys know that the information knows where to go crl + V that's it now we have our walk in this new action now if you want to do a walk to run we can then you know let's say let's give it a little bit of space because we have to uh animate the in between afterwards now let's go to the Run animation that's the walk let's go to the max run animation same thing make sure all the keys are selected just pressing a everywhere copy go to our walk to run right here and then paste those keys here so now we have something like this again obviously it's not perfect we have to animate the in between here but just with a few clicks and just like an animation Library you can have all your animations stored in one file and then bring them in as actions one by one and copy paste them wherever you need as you please the animation layers add-on now if you have the animation layers add-on you can also use that instead so you can layer different actions on top of one another instead of being limited to having one finish and then having another one start this is a paid add-on but it's super super handy and to plug into animate a little bit all of our students get a discount when purchasing this add-on if you're thinking of taking animation skills to the next level and really learn blender animation tools Inside Out consider taking our ultimate animation course and on top of getting access to all of our Rigs and all of our lessons you'll also get discounts on some really good add-ons as well all right so to use the animation layers I'm going to go ahead and turn on the animation layers then I'll press the plus button and let's just say let's just delete this top layer so now we have this walk cycle as our base now if we want to add a brand new action we can go ahead and press the plus button we see that we have a new animation layer let's go ahead and name this look around and what you can do is in layer settings down here you can go ahead and change the action to some other action that you've appended into the file so in this case we're going to do look around you can see that it's giving us some weird results so what we're going to do is we're going to change the blend mode to replace so we want this look around animation to replace the bottom layer our walk cycle and since look around only has animation on the face the rest of the body isn't going to get affected so here when we press play you can see we have our walk and then we have Max looking around which is amazing to see and then the walk continues because it's cyclic and then repeats and then the look around animation plays on top of the Walk cycle with just a couple of clicks another thing you can do with layers is affect their influence so here we have this look starting off right away but if you want to still have some of that head Bop in the walk cycle in the beginning of the look animation we can set the influence to let's say zero so if it's at zero we just did a walk cycle and let's say over 10 or so frames we have the influence let's go to one and so now you can see we have some of the headbob and it takes a little bit longer for that look around animation to kind of kick in it kicks in more slowly it's a little bit more smoother alternatively you could use the nla editor and the nla editor is basically the same thing as the animation layers and it's built into blender for free it shows you the actions as kind of these layers on a track hence n laay editor but it's super confusing and not intuitive to work with so I don't recommend it if you're not already familiar with it the nla will eventually actually be replaced by a built-in animation layers system in the future this is something blender is working on so you might as well wait for that and in the meantime maybe get the animation layers add-on now creating your own animation library in blender it's great it's fantastic but first you have to make sure that your animations look good so make sure to watch this video and not make these seven animation mistakes

Channel: BrianKouhi

Views: 9,098

Keywords: animation tips, animation tips for beginners, animation library, animation library in Blender, how to transfer animation in Blender, How to use an animation on multiple characters, how to reuse animations in Blender, how to save and reuse animations

Id: 7exhib2WN8c

Length: 11min 1sec (661 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 31 2024