I have run into an problem that has thrown a wrench into the gears of my project…
I am trying to set an action with a copy location contraint. It is so that an object can follow my characters hand starting a certain frame. So, naturally, I keyframed the influence (0 when its not following and 1 when it is).
Problem is, it doesn’t display the keyframed animation in the 3d window. It displays the keyframes in the action window AND the ipo editor just fine. Goes from 0 to 1. But in the 3d window, it just renders whatever influence was last selected when I hit ALT+A, not the animated influence.
I don’t know what to do and am starting to get very frustrated. Any help is greatly appreciated.
try moving from frame to frame before rendering. When you change the influence blender keeps that influence assuming you are going to click “Key” to record it. If you want to see the recorded influence you need blender to refresh it’s screen. You can cause the refresh command by switching between frames.
Thanks for the help Calvin, but that doesn’t alleviate the problem. Actually, I haven’t even “rendered” the scene yet. What I meant by render was the rendering of the display in the 3d window. It doesn’t show up there. So, naturally, your solution is actually how I discovered the problem in the first place (when I would be moving back and forth from frame to frame.)
the action editor does weird things when trying to place the keyframes. I’ll have one action selected for editing to add the influence keyframe and channel, then when I keyframe, it adds it to another completely arbitrary action somehow. It’s acting really screwy and doing unexpected things.
There are two separate objects I’m animating. It seems the whole time I’ve been animating and actioning one of the objects I have had the swimming guy enabled in the NLA, not the strip mode. Could this have to do with this issue?
Problem is though, now if I switch that object over to strip mode everything is thrown off and out of sync. Is it possible to fix that somehow without having to redefine every action?
I’ve found a workaround by placing the constraint keyframe in an old, previous action and just putting ‘hold’ on that action. But if I do it this way, I guess I’ll have to leave the swimming guy enabled on my other object. I hope that I can make it to the end of the animation this way without any other conflicts from this.
(when I would be moving back and forth from frame to frame.)