I’m familiar with the process of stacking NLA strips to obtain smooth transitions between two actions … say, a suddenly very-startled youthful girl in Youthville who’s going from merrily swinging her arms from side to side to holding them up (gasp!) to her face.
I see that there’s a “Transition” strip and decide to try it. During the transition, though, the model goes absolutely wonkers … her head is suddenly stuck to her waist and her neck’s sticking out of her head. The set of keys being animated in both strips is identical, but “whatever a ‘transition’ strip is doing” appears to be visually nonsensical. Since it does not appear to be documented: what does the “transition” strip-type attempt to do?
In addition, I have found that “Auto Ease-In/Out” doesn’t seem to work. Two strips (both set to the default of “Hold Forward” and “Replace”), that are stacked on top of one another, don’t appear to ease at all. The topmost strip simply takes precedence in toto. I have to manually specify lead-in and lead-out for both strips (thus seeing the diagonal lines across the strips, which I otherwise do not see) in order to get the expected transition.
It certainly seems to me that this is what the “transition strip” is trying to make easier, which is why I really don’t understand why it isn’t working. If I stack the two strips and lead-in/out, the effect is just as it should be. (No screwy head-relocating.) I would have expected “transition strips” to more or less do the same thing, and I certainly wouldn’t expect it to be doing utterly-wonky things like moving a girl’s head down below her neck (esp. when, as I said, an overlapping-strip of the same two strips works).
(Blender 2.71.2104.) Surely I must be missing something very obvious.
A move becomes an “action,” an action becomes a “strip,” and that’s how all the choreography is done throughout the show … even if an action is only used once.