Reply To: Ryanocerous’ Polybook (Feedback and advice welcomed)

[Wayne Dixon]

Hi Ryano!

I wouldn’t call myself an expert with the NLA, in fact I’ve only recently started using it (very sparingly).

All of the work I do requires all the animation to live in a single action data-block so that is predominately how I work.

However, I have been trying out Tal Hershko’s Animation Layers Add-on recently.

This essentially just makes the NLA more usable for character animation.

How would I recommend using strips and actions?

Well I wouldn’t recommend breaking it different strips for different body parts.  You need to be smarter with the grouping. I would suggest having the entire main action in one strip and then any tweaks or polish in different strips.  This is so you have a solid base animation that you can apply changes and quick iterations to.  Here’s an example or a recent animation.

Imagine a run cycle (character holding a weapon and running)

-The base animation would be the full cycle. (everything is animated)

-Then I added a weight layer to the torso, to push the ups and downs.  (this is animated much further than looks correct because you can pull the influence up and down)

-Added a weight layer to the weapon (same as above)

Looped this 7 times

-added a layer that spans the entire 7 loops and adds subtle changes to each step.  One step is a little bit more this way.  That one was a little higher, etc (just so it’s not exactly the same each loop)

-added a hair polish layer that incorporates all the subtle changes in each run loop (as well as all the other overlappy bits)

Hopefully that makes sense.