NLA - Actions show up in "Main animation"

I’m pretty new to Blender’s Animation system (never bothered to REALLY learn it untill now…)

Why is it that when I create some actions (for armatures), they also show up in the NLA editor and in effect play back in my main animation? How can I prevent these actions from showing up in the ‘main animation’?

Please let me know if I need to be more clear…

thanks

dante

well im taking that they show the key frame not action strips. Anyway. Name all the actions in ACTION EDITOR and just keep making them until u have all the wanted actions made and named. Then go to NLA editor and select a action and press C to convert it to an action strip. Then jus delete the strip. if this doesnt help try explaining more but i think this is it.

thanks headcheese…works perfectly :slight_smile:

now a new problem…

Is there a way to copy only select points in IPO curves so I can copy and paste certain actions in an animation instead of the WHOLE curve?

thanks

now taht u would have to ask GreyBeard. Im not an expert on IPOs

No, you have to copy the whole curve (because the whole datablock is selected in edit mode and it won’t copy if you have some cv’s selected). But once you’ve copied it you can X some cv’s.

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The only problem with that is that I will need certain objects to have unique animations that are made up of smaller generic animations.

For Example: I have 3 balls. I create an IPO data block of the first ball rising, holding, then coming down. The second ball moves up higher than the first and then falls. I want to copy the IPOs of the second ball’s rising motion. So far so good. But what If I then want to add to that the rising IPO of the first.

Perhaps that was a bit hard to follow…let me know if I need to clarify.

Thank you for your help so far. I appreciate it!

i might be reading this wrong but I think you could copy the curve, make it single user (so the changes don’t affect the first ball), then change just the part you want to be different.

That still won’t allow me to combine splices of IPO curves…:frowning:

There’s a way you can do it without ‘splicing’. Make copied IPO’s single user and split your interface into 4 so you see top, front and side, and IPO windows. Then click the lock in the IPO header. Select your Loc Ipo’s (may have to be one at a time) and the key you want. Now, when you grab that key you can watch your object move in the 3D windows and put it where you want relative to the others.

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I’m afraid I can’t tell what your trying to say Fligh…:frowning: :expressionless:

Could you elaborate, please?

Once you have the copied IPO (let’s just keep it one IPO… easier) make it single user so it relates to (let’s say sphere.003) only. Now you go to the IPO window and click the lock. Once you do this anything you do to an IPO (grab, scale, grab one cv etc) will show in realtime in the 3D win. So if you select the LocZ IPO, advance to fr50, select a cv and grab it and move it up, then the object will move up in the 3D window. This way you can see exactly the effect on the object of the changes you make to the IPO.

Therefor, instead of splicing this part of the IPO to that part to get movements 1 and 3 and leave out 2, you can now just reposition each cv using the visuals in the 3d window to place them exactly.

(what I’m not sure about) is whether you can select Loc IPO’s for X,Y &Z then box-select all the cv’s on fr50 (xyz) and move them all together. It depends on LocRotSize of your particular objects when you added the Key. (it works for one of my .blends but not in another.

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Well I’ll be a little more specific then.

I am animating a crane that picks up different objects. The Crane is controled by an empty, which contains all the movement IPOs necessary for the animation. I planned to use the IPOs of that empty that animated the ‘picking up’ action (the rising action to be more specific), moving, and then the dropping. There is ALOT of repeated action, and I was hoping to just copy the CVs that I needed (rising, moving, dropping) to each object that needed to be picked up at their respective places in the timeline…

Now, is there a better way to do this?

Delta Keys; DLoc, Drot and DSize.

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