How do I store multiple muli-object animations in one blend file?

Support Animation and Rigging
1

I think I’m missing something very basic here.
My current scenario, I have an airplane for a videogame that I want to render different animation sequences for. The caveat is that I want to link different camera animations with the animations of the airplane.

So for an example. I want to be able to render a turntable of the airplane and then without loading in another blender scene, I want to be able to render an animation of the airplane doing a barrel roll, another animation taking off, landing, being blown up etc.

I thought having multiple scenes inside the blend file would be the answer and it gets me nearly there but whatever action I have set in the action editor for the camera, gets set in the linked camera in the other scenes.

I made the extra scenes as ‘linked copies’ because I didn’t want to use the ‘full copy’ setting because I still want to be able to edit the materials and meshes in the first / master scene and have them propagate through.

I guess the usual film workflow has a unique camera per shot but I want to use a linked camera in different scenes within a blend file and have the camera action set differently for each scene.

Is this possible?

2

The caveat is that I want to link different camera animations with the animations of the airplane.

Use an armature for your animation, including a camera bone. Parent the objects to the armature’s bones. Now it’s not a multi-object animation, but a single object animation. You can assign any actions you’ve created for it to this armature.

You don’t want to be messing with multiple scenes for this-- at least I don’t think so, but then I’ve never bothered learning how multiple scenes work, I’ve never seen the use-- but you should be looking into NLA (non-linear animation) editor tutorials. NLA is all about integrating multiple actions into a single render.

3

Ok thanks for the reply bandages.
In my head when I think of armatures, I think character skeletons but you’re right, I shouldn’t be so limited with my definitions.
I’ll look into the NLA editor - cheers.