how to animate the same object in many scenes differently?

Hello everyone,
I have been using your help anonymously for a very long time, as I hate taking other people’s time with my problems, but finally I have got a problem I just cannot find a solution to by myself. Thus, I have registered and here I am… with a question :slight_smile:

Could someone suggest some workflow for creating different scenes with the same objects but animated differently? Let’s imagine I have an object and five different surroundings. The thing is supposed to behave differently in all five of them, so I have made five different scenes. Now I want to use the object in all of them (thus I can change its appearance, eg. tweak the mesh, in one place and retain consistency throughout the file). I would like this object to move around, get posed by an armature, morph due to shape keys, and who knows what else.

I have read various suggestions and tutorials, but nothing truly answers my problem. I know I can make five copies of the object and animate them freely in different scenes. I can set five different movement sequences in five different places in the timeline, whether it is in a single scene, or cut into five separate ones. The solution I have found the most promising is linking objects from an external file, but I do not exactly understand how to retain full editing capabilities for the linked object’s behavior.

I would appreciate any tips and guidelines, and if I failed in finding some tutorial that solves it all, believe me, it’s not for the lack of trying :slight_smile:

P.s. I am gaining confidence in my “blender skills” very slowly (and the projects in your galleries do not help me believe in myself :slight_smile: ), but I hope I will be a valuable addition to the community, and maybe some day I will create something worth showing to get your opinions… And maybe my first contribution could be a tutorial resolving the issue above :slight_smile:

when you make your new scene choose ‘full copy’, then it will be fully independent of the other scenes, and you can alter the individual scenes as you like. Hope I understood your question correctly.

You may want to look into Blender Proxies.

Thank you guys for the tips. I thought I had written something utterly stupid so people won’t answer :slight_smile:
Copying scenes is actually something I would like to avoid. I am trying to create many scenes sharing one object but behaving differently in each of them.

Atom’s suggestion comes the closest to my goal:

  • create a source file with the object and its armature;
  • create a file with different scenes;
  • link the object and the armature to every scene;
  • turn the objects to proxies and control their movements and shape-keys via drivers.

I guess it is possible to change most properties of the proxy through drivers…

I am wondering how one would approach recreating a short by Ralph Egglestone “For the Birds” in today’s blender. There are several scenes, I believe, lots of birds looking the same but acting differently, and a huge potential for mistakes in setting up the whole animation…

I’ve been gradually getting into this linked workflow over the last year, and it’s pretty liberating, once you learn the pitfalls.

Key things I’ve found:

-Work out a sensible directory structure for your project and stick to it. This way all your relative paths will work happily, even if you need to copy your project to a render farm or another hard drive, say
-‘Edit linked library’ addon is your best friend!
-setting up drivers for shape keys is a bit of mission (if you’re not too good with drivers, like me). But once you do it a few times, it gets easier :wink:

If you want several birds that all look the same, I think you still need to create different source files for each.

Good luck!