In the Action Editor, I will select an object, select an existing action-name, insert a keyframe and find that – as expected – a new line appears (in blue) with the keyframe that I selected underneath it. So far, so good.
But later, I come back to the same file – the file that I wish to link, not the file linked to it – and suddenly find (unassigned) next to it. And furthermore, as I continue to fiddle with it, the set of blue lines that are “unassigned” changes! I’m still working on the same action, and here we are.
Furthermore, I now look at other actions that I had not touched … and now they, too, are “unassigned!” They used to work, and now they don’t.
I have also noticed, while clicking back and forth while writing this post, that if I click on certain actions in the Action Editor, this causes one of the other actions to forget its “Slot name” and thus become, right on the spot, “unassigned.” But, the various other actions (in the certain ones that I was clicking on) still have slots that are “unassigned” even though they reference slot-names that are in the dropdown list.
Obviously, what I need right now is a very clear explanation of exactly what “(unassigned)” means. And what to do about it.
I select the Action in the editor. It involves three objects. In the Outliner, I select the first object. Now, two of the others are unassigned. I select the second object. One of the other two is unassigned. I select the third: the unassigned settings do not change from the second.
Within the Action Editor window, each of the three blue strips lists the action-name and the correct slot. What is causing the display in the Action Editor window to change is: which object I have selected in the Outliner. The slot-name in the “Action” section of the Outliner is consistently correct and does not change as I flip between objects. But the Action Editor track display does.
I also notice that, when I flip between objects in the Outliner, the Action Editor will switch on its own to another action. I know to watch for this and switch it back, but even this behavior is not consistent.
The action editor always displays the action of the active object which is why it changes when you select another object.
I assume you are talking about unassigned in the context of slots. That means the slot assigned to any datablock (meaning it has 0 users and is thus unassigned)
Perhaps one problem that I’m now having is: where do I see the “slots,” except in the Blender File View under “Actions,” and where do I see a “user count?”
I am ultimately trying to create two actions which animate the same set of objects.
Nonetheless, when I study very carefully the “Blender File view” set of Actions, I now see that one of these objects lists only one of the actions underneath it. The others also list only one action, and it is “the other action.” This must be the root cause of my issue. This fully explains what I am now seeing in the Action Editor.
My obvious intention was to define the same two set of actions for all of the objects. And somehow, I didn’t succeed in doing so.
Further point: When I examine each of the actions in the same file-level view, all of them contain the same set of slots: one per object-name. Each action contains an identical list of slots, corresponding to all of the objects that I expect to be participating in it. Even though one of the objects, in its “Animation” section, sees only the one action, and the others see only the other.
Further Discovery! There are “NLA Tracks.” One is for one action, the rest are for the other. This must be the reason!
Well, I want to report back, as promised. I finally decided that the original file, after all the whacking I’d done to it lately, was hosed. So, I created a new file, imported most things, re-created a couple of things, and started creating actions but not pushing them (in that file) to NLA strips.
It turned out to be problematic to try to work with actions in NLA that involved more than one object. (Maybe I was doing something wrong again.) But I simply decided to create individual actions, identical though they be, for each of the objects in question. I then tested from a file that linked to the actions in this one. And, it worked.
(As it turns out, “individual actions” actually seemed to work a little better, because I found myself “nudging” the actions in the NLA so that they didn’t take place at precisely the same instant. It seemed to feel just a little bit more realistic.)
So, I created a new file, imported most things, re-created a couple of things, and started creating actions but not pushing them (in that file) to NLA strips.