Seriously, What am i doing wrong with the NLA Editor?

Okay i made a post a few days ago asking how to work it… and thank you motimo for being so helpful, but i feel like that thread is getting a little unorganized…

Okay seriously, i’m about to either cry, or rampage through my house destroying furniture over this NLA Editor…

I’m working on a fairly long animation that involves two characters fighting some monsters.
I wanted to learn the NLA editor so that i wouldn’t have to worry about animating the walking and running around and just drag and drop those bits in and then animate the rest as i normally would… You know… save myself a ton of time by not having to worry about animating the walking around.

But this editor… for days now has been the bane of my existence…

For 1… I use Jumpcuts for alot of things… Positioning things to better match the new camera angles, changing influences on constraints… all sorts of things that happen within 2 frames to create an instant change.
If the playback is dropping frames and happens to skip that frame of the Action Strip, it wont acknowledged that it ever happened. And this will make it so characters will be doing correct walk cycles over in random locations… When even technically, all the animation is set up correctly.

Next i have no idea how to add in new animation data after using a Action strip in the NLA editor… it appears that if their is a Armature action at all whatsoever… All the strips are useless. they will never move…
So i’ll push down the new action i’m trying to create… and that restores the old strip to be able to move… but now the new one does nothing… i can open it in edit mode and it’s all there… and plays just fine… but once i leave the edit mode… It’s just frozen and refuses to animate…

Then the worst part of the NLA editor is how it just does things if it “feels like it” …
sometimes if i change what layer some strip is on… the armature will disappear, change where it’s at… or explode the size of the universe…
Sometimes a strip will play and sometimes it wont… and if i click on a different strip and then back to the frozen one it will suddenly play correctly…
Or if i add a keyframe to a random tree in the scene, one of the character’s animations just break and don’t work anymore.

My progress on this project has come to a dead stop and i am going absolutely mental trying to learn this… but there is nothing …not one thing that seems to be consistent about this editor… what works open time doesn’t work another time…
What the manuals say will happen, doesn’t happen for me…
I can keyframe an influence to go from 0 to 1 in two frames and then it will only do .06 instead of one no matter how many times i re-keyframe it to 1, but then i can go rotate a rock and now the keyframe for the influence is just fine.

I have no idea what i’m doing… again i’m about to cry or go on a rampage…

Can somebody… please… help…

I just want to animate like usual… but drag and drop in walk cycles i can scale and repeat to save myself time…
(which i’ve already failed at cause i’ve lost 3 days…)

1 Like

Have you set “Only Insert Needed” in User Prefs > Editing tab, under Keyframing heading? if you have that can cause keyframes to be dropped. For example, if you have an influence set to 0 in frame 30 and 1 in frame 100 and you then try to set it to 1 in frame 35, Blender often says - you don’t need that because the next keyframe setting is 1, so in this case you should turn this feature off and then insert your keyframe. This of course does not happen if you have no keyframes after the one you are trying to put in, it only seems to happen to me if I try inserting keyframes between two existing ones - hopefully this will help you somewhat.

As for your other questions on the NLA - I cannot really help you here - I do all this kind of work in the Graph Editor, which may not be right, but I get on better with it.

Cheers, Clock.

If a strip is doing nothing, in general it means another strip has control. The highest strips replace lower ones unless set to some combination like “add” or their influence is reduced. If you have a strip A that controls say the leg bones, then a strip B above it that controls the leg bones, B will override A if set to “replace” and A will do nothing. Also you may or may not want a strip set to “hold” which maintains its last keyframe.

An Action does indeed override until you push it down. Once it is a strip, just select it and hit Tab to edit it. Other strips will remain active for playback. Make sure your Timeline is not set to “frame dropping” which will indeed drop keyframes.

It’s all rather confusing at first, but it makes sense once you get used to it and is a more powerful way to work than with just one Action.

Also as a general rule, if you’re baffled and/or learning a new feature, it’s often worth creating a simple blend file with a couple of cubes and bones etc to play with and test the feature rather than using a big complex one with all your meshes and armatures in it to deal with.

Clock-

You can (and should) use the Gaph Editor with the NLA editor. It is particularly useful for editing repetitive cycles (e.g. walk) since you can have the character for instance actually walking along while adjusting the curves, rather than just “jogging on the spot” if you see what I mean.

I am currently fine tuning a walk, and using the NLA I find it a much speedier workflow than just editing an Action on its own. I have one strip with the cycle and multiple repeats, one moving the origin, and one controlling the IK bones which keeps them planted firmly on the floor rather than skating about.

Thanks @jaxtraw - I can see I have some homework to do, in my spare time. I have not really played with the NLA editor, maybe I should start learning it! Thanks for that, I am sure my animations will improve if I can get my head around it.

Cheers, Clock.

Clock, I didn’t mean to imply that your animations need improvement! I meant to mean that it makes work faster in some situations :slight_smile:

Yes my friend - that is how I saw it also - I need to look at things that will make my work better and this is one of them. Just to make sure I am absolutely NOT offended! Sorry if you got that impression from my reply.

Cheers, Clock.

Well, glad not to have offended :slight_smile: As far as the NLA editor goes, I find it might look intimidating but is quite easy to pick up once you get started. I found it a lot easier than the Graph Editor personally, which had my head spinning for quite a while.

@jaxtraw however no replies yet. I ask this because seems like you are seem to be doing something similar with NLA (walking with in place clips?).

Is the only way to create root offset between consecutive NLA strips to add separate action for root node only?

I came to conclusion that most obvious way to offset root is to create separate action for root object, that is parent of rig.

Then animate it at end of clip / first frame of new clip to position where new clip should start.

The reason I’m asking (see my thread) is that it seems like there is no built in method to create root offset animation when transitioning from one NLA clip to next. I’d like to produce animation that are in place, that’s easy in any software but root offset animation can get tricky if you want to test how one clip joins to next one.

@Razc said. I’ve built simple layout for learning Blender animation. NLA editor on top, then Action Editor, then 3d view and finally timeline. That way you’ll immediately see, what effect selection in 3d view does to Action Editor / NLA view and what a selection of action in action editor does.

I’m a bit afraid to say thanks for the help because it seems whenever i do, that’s when some new problem pops up i can’t get pass xD

But really thank you very much for all the tips… It seems that the NLA Editor is just way more advanced than just dopesheet and timeline… which i suppose makes sense and that is what it should be…
I’m one of those guys that always just LocRotScale’d every part of a rig on every keyframe it changed…

I was running into alot of problems regarding the scaling of stuff. such as if i was trying to add a location animation of a rig to a walk animation… i thought layering them wand putting them on Add would do the trick… but that seems to add the x1 scale to the other track’s x1 scale and things double in size… so i had to go through and delete the scaling on all the keyframes for the cycle and that fixed that.

Someone gave me a really fantastic tip for using rigs and the NLA editor which is to parent them to an empty over their head and animate the empty for all the running around and stuff because that is easily done in the timeline and keeps all the location data hassle out of the NLA editor.

I have made it a habbit now to change everything from hold forward to nothing now anytime i add any strip or stash whatsoever…

when in edit mode for the strips, that pinning and unpinning the keyframes is very important to know how to do… i can’t say i’ve quite wrapped my brain around why it does exactly what it does, but at least knowing about that pin has solved alot of issues.

Problems i’m running into now, but arent particularly anything ad, is that sometimes when i animate influence data it misses it’s mark… i keep animating transparencies or child of constraints and when i keyframe it to reach 1 at some point, it usually winds up keyframing a 0.97 or something and i have to go in and tweak it till it listens right…

but what tripped me up the most and probably cause all my rage and frustration the past few days was the fact that if i can’t just randomly click times in the animation anymore because certain changes made in Action strips won’t load unless i make sure to go back and view those keyframes. So most of the time, what i’m seeing isn’t actually what is going on. All my frustration of people never standing in the right spots is because the lagged playback, or random scrubbing through the time line had made it forget the changes i do during jumpcuts. and so i would get so frustrated wondering why on earth some guy is standing in the wrong spot, move him back and add keyframes again, which made it so what was correctly animated but incorrectly being viewed, is now incorrectly animated and being correctly viewed…
So next time i watched it from the beginning he was standing in a newer wrong spot.

It’s pretty annoying that i have to go back and play jumpcuts frame by frame to make sure all the data gets moved as it should… but now that i know this… It’s been so much better.

i really hope there’s some sort of add on or something that can fix that issue but in the meantime, finally understanding how that works is a life saver…

Anyone else have that problem though?

Say frame 1-10 he is sitting in a car, then i want him to suddenly be outside the car for frames 11-20.
i will add a keyframe at 10 and 11 to change his location… but if i’m viewing frame 8 and he’s in the car, and i click on frame 15, he will still be in the car, but now doing whatever pose is on frame 15 because i skipped over the data that said to move out of the car.