is there a way, to have mesh, and armature setup and lighting in one file, and then to have a blend file, that links all those, but has unique actions and NLA settings… ?
I have these droids I need to animate. different blend file for each action (walk, attack, death etc). but I would like them to share the actual mesh data, so that I could just change it in one, and all of them wuold be updated…
possible?
.b
heh, I posted the same question the day before you:
https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=16428
Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like it’s possible to link the mesh data, or a whole character for that matter, in a useful way. Linked objects cannot be posed, moved, rotated, copied, etc.
hope that helps.
I don’t think it’s possible. How many different blend files are you talking, here? Is this a distributed project (i.e. multiple artists)? If you’re doing this for animation, the actions/nla are all associated with the armature, not the mesh. So you can do the animation before you even have a mesh, if you so desire. Or if a new mesh is created, you lose nothing by killing the old one and parenting the new one to your armature. NLA, etc. should still be intact.
Of course, if you have to do this to fifteen blend files for four different artists, that’s another matter.
I thought NLA strips were associate to the scene?!
Martin
it’s for a game.
i have a droid model.
droid will have several modes. attack, move, gethit, death, wait…
all these files are rendered to those names. so, I have multiple blend files… now, if I want to change the droid for some reason, I have to edit all the blends.
python scripting could be used to move files after rendering to different names, but there are couple of issues preventing this, main one being, that I want the frame count not be fixed. walk cycle could be 5 frames, death 10… whatever. and I want to be able to change that.
so separate blends work best for me now… except if I want to edit the model afterwards 
.b
Hi. I found a solution 
https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=16428
edit:
Basse, I think for your particular situation, it would be better to use just one blend file and have the actions in different scenes. This would allow you to keep things more consolitated, for instance you can check out the different animations by switching scenes instead of loading different blend files. You can also have different rendering settings (filename, framerange, etc.) for each scene.
hmm… scenes… yes, why I didn’t think of that…
can I share object, lighting etc in scenes, but still ahve different action sequences?
well. I try it anyways. thanks.
.b