I am making an armature for our game project, and I want to have several instances of the armature running around in the game acting as both pedestrians and enemies.
(In the Unity engine)
But I also want animation sequences where two characters interact by touch, like hugging, shaking hands, throwing the other over the shoulder etc etc…
How do I do it? I have tried duplicating the whole character to set them up against each other to time the animation, but things happen with he datablocks, or strange stuff like I can’t click select the yellow diamonds in the nla editor for the duplicated character, or the main character gets messed up when I try to move the duplicate…
Is there any straight forward approach that is safe?
First, make sure you specify which version of Blender you’re using, since there are differences between 2.49b (& earlier) and 2.5a2 that can be significant.
For 2.49b and earlier: It sounds as if you’re not creating separate IPOs or Actions for your duplicated characters. When a duplication is done, certain aspects of an object and its animation are not duplicated (i.e., a discrete new datablock is not created) but rather shared between the original and the dupe. Using an IPO as an example, this means that if you adjust the key values in an IPO that’s shared, the changes will affect both the dupe and the original.
The solution is to make the shared IPO a “Single User” datablock for the dupe, by clicking the field in the IPO Editor window header that shows the number of users of the datablock. This should generate a prompt: “Make Single User?” to which you’d reply Yes.
This can also be done with Actions.
You’ll then have to set up new NLA strips using the duplicated datablocks rather than those being shared earlier.
A tip when working with numerous IPOs and Actions for character animation – label them as soon as they are created, so you can keep them more sensible than “ActIpo.024” or the like. That makes it a lot easier to tell when a datablock (IPO or Action, for example) is being shared. When you make a single-user copy of something, rename it accordingly as well. Helps keep it all straight once you start to generate dozens of Actions and perhaps hundreds of IPOs for a cast of characters.
Also, check the User Prefs for options regarding what is and isn’t duplicated when using SHIFT+D_KEY.
