Now I want to copy the animation and let another set of bones play the same animation. The set of bones is identical as the first one, except for the names, they are even in the same armature.
Now why is Blender making this so damn hard… I love working with Blender, but I can hardly ever say I am working without problems…
So, what I want to do is take the animated keyframes from a certain group of bones and then copy them to another group. Why can’t I just pull them up in the Action Editor… And what exactly is the difference between the action editor and the dopesheet? Since when can’t I pull keyframe up in these editors into different channels… I remember having done that tons of times…
Well, Blender relies on bone names to know what exactly you want it to do. It can’t paste onto a different bone (with the exception of pasting a pose flipped, and even then the names have to be similar, e.g. arm.l and arm.r).
You can, however, manually tell Blender which keyframes to copy, and to where. Do this by selecting keyframes on one channel of the Action Editor, hitting Ctrl+C (or Key -> Copy Keyframes), and selecting another channel, and going Key -> Paste Keyframes. However, you can only do this one channel (one bone) at a time, but it helps if you wanted to copy many keyframes. Note that you have to first create all the channels you need; this can be done by selecting the needed bones, and inserting a LocRotScale keyframe for them; they will all appear in the Action Editor.
You could also manually copy properties between bones (select the bone you want to give the property to, and then select the bone that’s already been posed. Right-click the property (such as Rotation) and hit Copy to Selected, and all bones will receive the property from the active bone). However, this is likely going to be less convenient than the Action Editor method, unless you only had one keyframe and wanted to duplicate the same bone pose many times (e.g. on a creature with forty legs).
