How can I join actions?

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hi!

I just looked around the BlenderWiki but the section about the ActionEditor is
not written yet… maybe you can help?!

I need to join the keyframes of two different actions into a single action…
the background is: I animated the legs of my character in one action and the
arms in another; now I need to join these.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance!
Stefan

2

Using “Action Strips” you can have both actions played out together.

Go to NLA editor

  • Click Shift+A.
  • Select action.

Repeat, select the next action.

Then go into Action mode, click X to turn off the editing of the action you have on.

Now both actions will play out together.

3

Hi Calvin!

I know what you mean - but I really need to join the actions because
I export each action using a python script for my game engine and the
engine treats every action as a separate animation.
Now I’d just like to have a single walk-animation in spite of “walk_legs”
and “walk_arms”.

Greetings
Stefan

4

The only way I can think of is somewhat convoluted.

Go into your Wave Action, Frame 1 (or wherever wave starts) then in the 3D window select all arm bones affected by this action and press the “copy pose” button. Then change to the Walk Action, move to the appropriate frame if necessary and press the “paste pose” button.

You’ll need to do this for each keyframe so it will be easier if your keys are aligned, otherwise it could get a bit messy and take some tweaking afterwards :frowning: Also, make sure these bones aren’t already keyed in different positions on nearby frames in the Walk Action.

If the wave action is pretty simple you might be happy with this approach. Hopefully someone has a better way though. It would be good if you could just box select keys and then copy/paste in the Action Editor directly, or combine NLA strips and export back to an Action.

5

But you CAN copy IPO curves.

1 So Select one action
2 select a bone
3 go into the IPO curve editor
4 Select Pose
5 Click “A” to select all the transformations for that bone.
6 Click the little Down Arrow, to copy.

Now go select the other action, repeat the steps 2-4, but click the Up Arrow for paste.

Now do the same thing for all the other bones!

1 Like
6

So the choice really is between:

Do one bone and multiple keyframes at a time (copy IPOs) - or
Do all bones and only one keyframe at a time (copy poses into Action).

7

Hi!

Thank you very much for your replies! I now successfuly joined the two
animations using Calvin’s approach (because I use few bones but lots of
keyframes). It worked great :slight_smile:

One thing remains: How do I delete the old Action? When I press the “X”
(delete links to this datablock) then it is not actually deleted… it is still
available in the list of actions. I even tried to first delete all keyframes and bones
mentioned in the action first - no success yet.

Greetings
Stefan

8

When you delete an Action it will get assigned to a fake user to prevent it from deleting when you close the file. (Note the capital F in front of the name.) This way you can have no Actions open but still use them in the NLA-editor.

To really delete it:

  1. Shift+F4 (hidden Data Browser) in some window.
  2. Browse to your Action and right-click it.
  3. Press F (it will have zero users now).
  4. Save and re-open.
9

Hello everyone, I just want to point out that the instructions here are no longer correct. There is no longer a drop down menu in the graph editor to select “pose mode”, and there is no longer a “little down arrow”. In order to copy the keyframes:

  1. select the bone(s) in pose mode in the 3D viewport
  2. go to graph editor (shift F6)
  3. select the keyframes and go key>copy frames
  4. go into your other action where you want to paste, and paste them. (you must have at least 1 keyframe already for this to work)

I found the copy keyframes feature by pressing F3 (search) and typing copy, which is always useful

out of interest I tried to get chatGPT to help me with this, and it gave me the same outdated instructions, which shows the limitations of AI at this point.

This new method is better as you can do everything in one go. I like how this website made my number brackets into fullstops, very interesting formatting choice.