I’ve followed this bones tutorial and everything works great. The only thing is that I can’t get Blender to animate in between different posses. I’ll press ctrl+tab to enter the posses mode, change the character, press ctrl+tab to exit posses mode, press i to enter key frame and i don’t know which one to use. i think I’ve used them all but none are recording the change. i even have the ipo curve window open, i can see where the key frames are being set but they don’t change. this is also happening when i try to animate the default monkey head to wink… key frames don’t seem to pick up on an eye lid opening or closing.
You need to add Keyframes to the bones themselves in Pose mode in order to animate. Select the bones that moved, and hit “i” Loc , Rot, or Scale.
These are bone keyframes. You have to be in pose mode to add them.
adding a key frame in posses mode doesn’t seem to be working, i can’t see it added on the ipo screen =/. I have a bone selected, and none of the options are doing anything. i notice that when i do add a keyframe to a bone, the color will change.
That means it should be working.
Make sure you also add a keyframe for the Default position at frame 1, then add a new keyframe of movement at say, frame 20. That might be why.
i added every key frame option to every bone, moved down 30 frames, moved an arm and gave every bone every key frame and it saved the animation. still can’t see the key frames in ipo screen and can someone please explain the different key frames and when they are needed? will i have to add a certain key frame to every affected bone, and not just the moved bone (using ik)
Wait, does the animation play?
Thats completely different. Bone animation cannot be seen in the IPO window until they are baked I believe. You have to use the Action window and NLA window to control the bone animation. Or bake them to get IPO’s.
yeah, it plays when i move the frames. i don’t know what the action window or the nla windows are and i have no idea what the term bake means.
Well, basically the action menu and NLA are used for bones and shape keys. The Term Bake means converting the actions and shape keys into IPO keys. However, action editor in my opinion, is much better than the IPO for bone animation, since you only have to make a single animation once, and then duplicate it over and over again when you need it with the NLA editor. With IPO’s its much harder
hmm, right on. do you know where i can learn more?
Hmm, to be honest, I don’t know much about Action + NLA -> IPO baking, I never found a use for it.
If you need help on the action menu and such, ask away. Lots of people know lots about that.
Is the IPO type set to Pose?
what you can do is add the action window and the timeline at the bottom of your screen layout. like that you will see the keys. once you are happy with animation change a 3d windows to ipo, and select in action windows a keyframed bones . In ipos change for pose in the scrolling menu and you should see the ipo curves for the selected action.
hope it help
can you please advise how to add the timeline at the bottom of the screen?
found something a whole lot easier than manually adding key frames… it’s having blender do it. in 2.44 you pull the top most horizontal line done, choose edit methods and there’s a few options under auto key frame.