I don’t understand how works the two new solts in Action editor ?
I can make two animations idle and run in slot 2.
I got editor only showing character run animation a,d it’s keyframes whatever i choose idle or run. I had to create another “charRUN” in slot 1 to be able to select and play the right animation idle or run.
Could not Blender 5 make this optionnal, and propose only one slot like Blender 4 for most people that really don’t need second slot ?
This is the difference between simple apps like Cascadeur streight forward and Blender that is very unclear on lot of stuff many people don’t even need, but come into the way of the user unfortunatelly.
don’t make a new slot for your animation, instead make a new action
Just key things and a slot will appear
You only need the slots if you want to animate two data blocks with the same action. In case you need that just remember:
The slot should be named after the thing animated, not after the action performed. E.g. Action is named “walk”, slot is named “Ellie”. The slot name will be set automatically by Blender after the animated thing. So just don’t change it unless you know what you are doing.
I’m actually dealing with that in an add-on I’m writing right now, which keyframes custom properties attached to a TextCurve data block, lol.
The slots are automatically named after the data-block type with the custom property.
If I drop a “Text” object into the scene and animate its location, the slot is named “OBText”.
But if I animate the custom property attached to the Text’s Curve data-block, the slot is named “CUText”.
Interestingly, it seems Blender strips off the block type when displaying the slot name in the Action Editor, so in both cases the slot appears to be named just “Text” — and is presented in the UI as a single available slot, when there are actually two underneath.
The action for both cases is “TextAction” (which I could probably rename to something better).
I’m not convinced I have it exactly right in my head, but I understand it well enough to frob with Python for my needs. And yargh for what it took for me to learn what I needed to do it.
Moral of the Story: normal people don’t have to care. Script writers now have it harder to not mess it up.
about the OBText: that is the identifier of the Slot. If you want the display name use slot.name_display
This basically follows the logic of data-block names where you can have identical names as long as the type is different. Having the type baked into the name enforces that separation per type.
and is presented in the UI as a single available slot, when there are actually two underneath.
We always filter to the slots you can actually assign to the data-block. That follows the design of actions before slots which were also restricted to the type they were created for. What slots you see depends on where the picker is. The action editor picker always only deals with objects. In the newer versions you should see the icon for the datatype next to the slot
