Okay, I have an action where a bird is flapping his wings. It takes 20 frames using Armatures. How can I get it to loop?
-Thor
Make it an action. Then put the action in the NLA editor and select it to repeat.
+in the Action Window name your action, if you want, to something like ‘BirdFlap’
+hit the ‘X’ next to the name you jsut created, or could have created.
+go to the NLA window
+hit ‘Shft-A’ and select your ‘BirdFlap’ action from the list
+hit ‘n’ now you can choose the number of repeats for the action and over how long a time. You’ll probably want to start with multiples of 20 for the number of repeats. BUT, if you find you want the movement to go more slowly or faster, just hit ‘s’ for scale and drag your mouse - the longer the strip the slower the wing beat.
ALSO, if you find that you don’t want the first few or last few frames of the action after all, you can change the ‘Action Start’ or the ‘Action End’ frame to fine tune. ALSO, you can reverse the action by reversing those two numbers.
WELCOME TO NLA!
Worked perfectly, thanks for the advice.
-Thor
Thor and all,
inspired by this post I have tried to do a skeletal animation like yours, a flapping wing, but every time the loop begins, the wing stops and then begins to move again.
Did you face that problem? Can I see a .blend or something to figure how did you do that?
Thanks in advance!
The length of the loop must be very precisely set so that the object position in the final frame exactly precedes its position in the first one. There must be no repeated frames whatsoever, and the length of the action (and any NLA strips) must be exactly correct. (For instance, you do not want it to “hold” the final frame.)
Step through the animation one frame at a time.