Hi,
So I’m having a lil problem understanding what tools to use when creating an animation scene.
What I want to do is to make a character walk zigzag between some obstacles until he reaches a table where he stops and picks up a cube in his hand and then walks away.
So I made a walk cycle in action editor. Now my character walks on a path to zigzag the obstacles and when he reaches the end point of the path he keeps on walking still. So I’ve reset him into a standing pose in dope sheet so I can start with the pickup animation, but noticed it as I edited him to a standing pose it automatically edited my walking cycle as well in the action editor.
I hope i’m not being to confusing on where my problem lies. I just want to use my walk cycle on a path for a while, then switch to manual animating without ruining my walk cycle animation.
Should I maybe just ditch the Action Editor and just keep pasting walking frames 1000 times in the dope sheet to have a manual walk cycle?
Personally I would copy paste out the walk cycle, but it depends how long the scene is and what sort of media you are producing.
I think you could, in theory, use the NLA editor with your current setup. Duplicate your walking action - edit that new action to be a walk to stop then pick up the cube. You would then need to chain them together in the NLA editor. I work with blender in production so we generally just use the graph editor and copy/paste out the cycle.
Ideally-- in the future Blender will have features similar to other 3d packages where you can define the range of a cycle all within one action. Without need of baking/NLA editor. eg. specify what keys will cycle and the frame range where that cycle starts/stops, then be able to key before and after without having those keys part of the cycle.
It Sounds like you were editing the same walk action when you made the T pose. In the header of the action editor you need to hit the little “+” sign and create a new action to work within. Now you can do whatever you want in the new action without affecting the walk action.
Once you’ve Animated your new action, you hit the little “push down” button in the NLA editor to turn it into a strip with it’s own track. You can blend the two strips now using the parameters in the properties window of the NLA.