Hi,
I have a flower, a background and a camera. I think I have correctly applied all their parameters and parented all correctly. I am new to the NLA editor. I am trying to animate the camera to move the length of the background in1646 frames and separately, animate the flower to move the same distance. The flower is also animated to jump up and down and change shape.
I can successfully make actions for all three, but when I try to switch from one to the other in the Action Editor, something goes wrong with the objects. The flower may suddenly go to the camera’s origin and its action will appear under the camera in the NLA editor. Or the camera may suddenly point downward (see attached picture).
I’m also trying to figure out how do delete unwanted NLA header tracks from the editor. I can delete strips and tracks but not header tracks. Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
Zaffer
Hi Stilltrying,
Thanks for your help. The file is attached. When you open it, the camera action will be chosen in the action editor. If you change to “cross_stage.001,” the camera will jump to the origin of the flower.
Actually, I did find a workaround. I discovered that if I use the Outliner to navigate, all the objects behave and stay where they are supposed to be. I click on the “dope sheet” icon (triangle thing) in the Outliner and go from action to action that way. I can further further refine what action I want to work on by right clicking its strip in the NLA editor. As long as I don’t click in the actual Action Editor, all is well. The problem seems to affect mostly the camera being animated. Don’t know why. Seems like a genuine bug to me. Thanks.
Zaffer
You have keyframes on cross_stage.001 with that first in the stack. It be the boss in the NLA. You can watch the camera move by selecting it and watching it in the 3d window and cycling through the actions. Watch the timeline and you will see keyframes. The keyframes cross_stage.001, that have the camera in the wrong place. If you using the NLA to positioning the camera, use only that one action, don’t put keyframes on another action on the camera unless you are trying to blend it in. Check out Camera and camera action which also have keyframes on them. You can delete the actions with shift X, save the file and reopen and they will be gone. You read NLA top to bottom. Your non-nla actions will play as you keyframed them in sequence if that makes sense. You haven’t packed any textures so I really can’t tell what is going on for certain, but I can see the keyframes that are moving the camera, not the objects moving. Good luck. If you need more help send me a message.
Thanks Stilltrying. I experimented with this for about a day and a half. Sometimes when I selected an armature action, it would show up in the NLA editor as a camera action and also as an armature action. Do you know how to tell Blender where to put a new action?
Zaffer
Only select what you want. Make sure you haven’t selected two or three objects, A to select all and A to deselect and then right click. The object selection with a keyframe initiates the action. When you add an action, don’t just hit the plus sign. That tells blender take what you have on this action and start another with these keyframes in place. Hit the little F to save it and then the X. Then new to start another action. You may wonder why this is so. If you do layers on actions, that is what the plus sign is. For instance you have say an armature on a person and you want to just put in keyframes. You put them in, mark then as keyframes and then hit the plus to start the next layers say extremes. That copies the first layer and gets you a new action. In pose to pose keying it works well. If you need to tweak just keyframes, you return to that layera and start over. If you don’t want to copy keyframes, X and then New. Gets real confusing sometimes. But if your animating your probably confused anyway, LOL.
