I’m animating a bird. I have an action of it leaning down to peck at the ground Only the spine and legs have keys in the action. I have another action of the bird pulling its wings in from full extension to close by its body. Only the wings have keys in that action.
Can I layer them so that the bird pulls in its wings as it leans down to peck? Early experiment don’t seem to blend both the actions.
Second question, can you combine ipo animations with action strips. I want to use an action strip that tilts the birds body down to peck and an action that raises it and repeat the strips for repeated pecking. And I want to vary it a little by moving and rotating the birds head with an ipo so it pecks a slightly different place each time.
What works?
Yes
You can cick the little man icon in the NLA beside your actions, and it should change to a Layer icon, or strips, and then the layered actions will blend together in the time line.
2nd Q, I think as long as the action doesn’t prevent the reassignment of the location, it should work keying that seperately. Depends on your actions’ details, I think.
Hope it works - sounds interesting!!
As Craigomatic inferred, you have to use the NLA window.
Open an NLA window, select your armature, then press SH-A to add your actions to the window. Then turn on NLA mode by clicking the icon in the left panel of the NLA editor.
As for combining IPO’s and action strips , yes and no :). When you keyframe an armature in POSE mode, an Action is always created. The NLA editor only works on the Action level, i.e strips that contain the IPO’s. Just make sure that the bird’s head bone(s) are in a separate Action, and you can then have that NLA strip running as long as you want, while the other strips repeat (or not).
Mike
Thank you for the help. I was using the NLA mode to try and get the multiple layers running at the same time, but it wasn’t working. After a little bit of fiddling, it was working.
@ Mike_S - could you clarify your answer to the second question (combining IPOs and actions) a little or direct me to a tutorial on the topic. I posted a question earlier in a similar vein and I think your reply may help me. I have layered actions and want to tweak the actions with keyframes in the NLA to without actually adding keys to my original actions (hope this makes some sense)
Wrong thread
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