I am currently looking at the Blender 2.8 Beta and thinking of moving from Maya to Blender. I am working with Mocion capture data and would like to see if I can do the followingin Blender.
I would like to rig and skin a character and then import various animation clips to drive the rig. In maya I can use the time Editor to import these in “blocks” and then trim, arange and “fade” between these animation clips. I am using the same rig as the motion capture so Maya recognizes the hierarchy/names and simply drives the rig with the new animation.
I have been looking into Blender and the NLA to see if a similar workflow is possible. I have been looking for tutorials and information but I havent found anything that made sense
NLA does indeed sound like what you’re after… And we would call “Blocks” “Actions”.
There are several tutorials around on the NLA and I’ve not watched many of them. I do cover some NLA goodness in my rather long tutorial on creating a crowd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvFEtQBvlPU
It has timecodes in the description to jump to the relevant time. I don’t think this is the best tutorial for you, but it’s the one that I have watched, so I can honestly recommend it to ya.
Yeah, NLA will do it. And, there’s one more thing to know about Blender: basically, "anything can be animated." Including the influence of an NLA strip or an action.
Even without doing that, though, it is trivially easy to move between and to combine actions and strips in a very convincing way. Look for “the Blender Way” of doing what you want to achieve – not a direct parallel of how [Maya] makes you do the same thing. Another group of engineers might have approached the same problem in a different way.
