The Secret to Unlocking Blender's Full Potential: Animation Layers

foreign [Music] so in this video I wanted to take a look at how blender works with animation layers how you can make you know large changes to an animation non-destructively so I've got blender open up here and I first want to show the process that you normally take with blender using blender's non-linear animation editor and then I want to show a plug-in that makes it significantly faster and easier than using blender's built-in tools to do this so so if you're coming from Maya and jumping into blender and you're like me and you use animation layers all the time jumping into blender and experiencing their non-linear animation editor is going to be a bit of a struggle it's probably for me at least probably one of the honestly the worst Parts about blender is how it works with animation layers um I've heard talk that they are working on kind of like revamping this whole system so hopefully that comes soon for me it's just way too convoluted I want a really simple way to work with animation layers unfortunately blenders built-in tools don't really allow that so I will be showing a plug-in but real quickly I kind of want to show the basic process so I've got this simple just idle animation here playing um so with an animation layer let's say I've created this idle animation and I want to really change the pose up but I want to keep the actual animation so I want to keep this breathing cycle but I want to change the overall pose so that's where an animation layer would really come in handy so in this top panel I've got the non-linear animation editor open down here I have the action editor so what I first need to do is I want to take this idle animation that I have here you can see all my keyframes I want to push this down to a clip within my non-linear animation editor so I'm going to do push down and now I actually have got this idle animation onto a single clip so there's lots we can do with this clip and I'll probably make a video talking more about clips and blending Clips so we can quickly make Transition animations like going from a walk cycle into a Run Cycle you can use these clips to basically blend between those animations similarly if you've watched any of my my tutorials where I talk about animation layers specifically on the walk to idle animation transition a video that I have so I've created this new clip within the non-linear animation editor so now what I want to do is press a to select all my keyframes and I'm going to hit new and I'm just going to name this new pose all right so for that what I want to do now is start tweaking this pose so I've added a new action so I've got my clip under it my idle looping clip and I've added a new pose action to my action editor now if you see when I do that we still got our idle animation playing so that's working great so let's go in here and actually start adding in some keyframes so I want to change this pose up so let's say I want to bring the hips down and I can tweak this really any way I want maybe I can tweak the arm maybe bring it a little bit closer to the body make small adjustments to this pose and I can make you know large adjustments to this pose as well all right so we've tweaked the pose but something's happening here the controls that we tweaked it's basically no longer using the animation in the actual idle clip here so you can see we've got like this animation happening on the chest there's still some obviously like breathing motion happening but when we moved the main torso control that basically just removed any of that animation playing on the clip same with this arm so we've got the Torso no longer moving at all it's completely locked in place we don't get that up and down breathing motion so that's kind of an issue that we need to deal with so to fix this let's actually go into the new pose here in the nonlinear animation editor and I'm going to click that and under extrapolation I want to change or excuse me under blending I want to change this from replace to combine and when I do that it's going to break my animation and this is something that I've ran into and if you know a solution to this please leave it in the comments below um so I tweaked my pose when it was in replace mode so I tweaked that pose but now when I set it to combine because I want to combine it with the idle animation that's looping we get this you know strange strange effects happening here where it's kind of moving my pose around so when we switch this to the combine it's not really giving us what we want this pose is kind of completely messed up so what I want to do is Select everything and I'm just going to hit that delete button on the action Editor to delete that new action I created and I want to start fresh so I'm going to press a to select everything I'm going to hit new I'll name this new pose there we go and then in here before I do any changes to the pose before I change any position of the controls I want to select this in the non-linear animation editor I want to make sure it's still set to combine which it is and then I can come in here and start adding my keyframes so I can start moving this around maybe bring the hips a little bit lower grabbing the arm control moving this around bringing it a little bit lower that's honestly a worse pose but I'll just change it just to kind of show show the difference here so all right so now we've got the new pose updated here and it's playing the animation underneath so I can make even a larger change to this to actually really show that it's completely changing the pose but it's keeping the looping breathing animation so now if I do this you can see we still got our hips moving up and down and we're able to basically keep all that animation from the idle clip and just use it and completely change the pose and then what we can also do is on this new pose in the non-linear animation editor and in the action editor we can actually set this to its own clip so I can do push down so we've got this new pose here and then if I wanted to I could you know hide that in the non-linear animation Editor to basically remove that animation layer so now it's only playing the idle animation and then I can turn that back on to see what the change I made looks like so that way we can actually work with these like you would with regular animation layers you can move it down to a clip then you can actually you know hide it disable that from playing if you want to and then you can also you know delete this clip as well to completely remove it if you want to make a big change and you don't like the change that you made so that way you can work non-destructively so this is just a really rough overview of working with animation layers inside of blender this is a method that I find is just a little bit too complex you're having to add new actions in there you're having to move them down to the non-linear animation editor you're having to tweak them you got to make sure that you go in here and you set the right blending option before you actually tweak the pose a lot of things that you need to remember a lot of steps that you have to take in order to simply just create an animation layer so that just makes it too complex so what I want to show now is a plug-in that you can get for blender that basically makes animation layers work very similar to how they work inside of Maya so this is the add-on here it's animation layers I'll make sure to link it in the description below the biggest downside to this add-on is that it is 28 US dollars to purchase this I will say that out of all the add-ons you can get for blender and any add-on that costs money this is probably the one that I would recommend getting the most because it does significantly change how blender works with animation layers and it just simplifies the entire process making it work very similar to how it would work in Maya it's a very simple UI you don't have to worry about making sure you're going in there and you're setting your blending options you don't have to work with the action editor and the non-linear animation editor you can all do it from one simple UI element so again unfortunately it does cost 28 dollars but it is a really great tool that will make working with animation layers a lot easier and hopefully blender changes how it works with animation layers in the future so you might not have to purchase this at some point if blender revamps kind of their whole non-linear animation editor but until then let's take a look at this this plugin here so what I've got here is I've opened the scene up again completely fresh so I'm working with the same idle animation I'm going to keep the action editor and the non-linear animation editor open and once I've got that plug-in downloaded all we need to do is come over here to the animation tab if we open our side panel by pressing n and I just want to select any one of these controls here and then under the animation layers tab which again you download this plugin you'll see it here we can do turn animation layers on so it added this new UI element and what I want to do now is just hit the plus icon to add a new animation layer so when I do that you can see it's still working with blender's non-linear animation editor it's added all these strips in here but it's doing this for us we don't ever need to open this this non-linear animation editor up we can actually just simply use this UI element hit the plus icon to add a new animation layer and it's going to still work with how it would be set up normally but it's just going to do all that for us so as I continue to tweak here so I've got this animation layer and I've got my base animation so my base animation is what is containing the actual looping cycle so I can turn that off and now we've just got our default tpos so that base layer is really important and I've added this new animation layer so I'm just going to name this pose tweak all right and then I can just start adjusting this and I'll just change the pose up a lot just so we can make sure we see a change and there we go so it's that simple we don't have to worry about making sure we set our blending modes in the nla editor this plugin is doing all that for us and all we have to worry about is just hitting the plus icon to add a new animation layer and it's done it for us and we can you know adjust the influence obviously tweaking that will adjust how much influence this specific layer has we can change the blending mode right here if we want to we can also bake these down and merge these when we're ready to if we want to get rid of all of our animation layers and we're happy with with the changes that we made we can continue adding new animation layers just by hitting the plus icon maybe I'll make this like a pose tweak on the head for whatever reason if I wanted to turn the head now I've got that animation layer there and it's still keeping that base animation looping and then if you want to you can hide any of these to remove them and then if you don't like any of the changes that you made simply hit this minus button right here to remove that animation layer and now again we're just working with our base layer working completely non-destructively and we're able to very quickly make all of these changes to our animation so real quickly I want to jump to another scene this scene is a walk cycle so I can go ahead and just show the process on a walk cycle it's going to be basically exactly the same so I've got my animation here I'm going to go to the animation tab I'm going to go to animation layers I'm going to hit the plus icon and if you have any tracks within your nla editor whenever you use this animation layer it's going to have to basically remove all those tracks and start fresh so it looks like on this animation I had some nla tracks created which I don't need so if I'm using this animation layer plugin I can just go ahead and remove all those start fresh I'll hit OK and then that will just allow me to use the plugin here so let's go ahead and maybe I'll select the head here and I'll hit the plus icon added a new animation layer so I've got my base layer which contains my walk cycle which is great and then I'm going to name this like head turn and let's actually do some animation with on within this animation layer so with this selected I'm gonna add a keyframe here let's see uh keying available let me see it might need to actually yeah I didn't add this control to the layer let me actually remove that select the control hit Plus there we go that control was not added to that animation layer and I'll rename this head turn so let's actually start creating this head turn now so what I'm actually going to do is set a keyframe on the last pose here because I want to make sure that at the end of the cycle she's looking straight on so I want to lock that keyframe down same for the beginning I still want to keep the same Loop that it has now I can go in and say like at frame six maybe I'll start the head turn oops she'll turn maybe look to her left something like that hold that for a little bit longer because I'm blending to the keyframe on 35 so it's starting to rotate back but I might want to just hold that there a little bit longer and keep her kind of looking in that direction and then she'll look back now this Loop is probably too short to actually add a head turn in there because during this cycle she's just going to be constantly looking left and then straight and so you'd probably want a longer cycle if you're doing a head turn like this within a within a walk cycle but this is just a way to kind of demonstrate just creating actual animation within your animation layer and not just doing a straight just a pose tweak you can add that animation layer in there and then just start animating with it and of course we can go in here and just delete this layer if we don't like that head turn and then we're just back to our original animation so a great way again to work non-destructively so this plug-in is really helpful if you like working with animation layers it's something that hopefully blender will get something like this built into the software soon but until then this plugin is a really really great option to speed up and simplify the entire process so if you found this video helpful be sure to like And subscribe and thanks for watching [Music] foreign

Channel: Mark Masters

Views: 15,078

Keywords: animation, blender, walk cycle, Blender Animation Layers, Blender Non-Linear Animation Editor, Blender Animation Tutorial, NLA Editor Tutorial, Animation in Blender, Blender Animation Techniques, Blender 3D Animation, Blender Character Animation, Blender Keyframes, Blender Animation Workflow, Layered Animation in Blender, Blender Animation Tips, Blender NLA Editor Explained, Blender Animation Walk Cycle, blender tutorial, blender basics, how to use blender

Id: 91O4uU3qHCw

Length: 14min 29sec (869 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 25 2023