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…)