NLA with layered actions

Support Animation and Rigging
1

I’m trying to understand the NLA and how it works. It appears to me that if you decide to use NLA, you will not be able to layer in actions unless you convert them to an NLA strip. What’s wrong with that you say?

Well say I create a character that’s walking along and my action strip includes motion for the head bone. Now I want to move his head around expressively like he’s speaking to someone. I can spend a lot of time to create the expressive movement seperately but I will only know if it looks good combined AFTER I convert it to a NLA strip.

What I need is a way to see the action I’m creating added/blended into the current animation. As it is, if you begin creating an action for the current armature, the keyframes show up in the NLA window and override the strips. I guess I’m asking for an NLA strip whose keys show up in the action window and are subject to editing.

Perhaps what I’m hoping for is not possible otherwise it would have been done that way?? Or perhaps I’m making the whole process harder than it needs to be.

Your thoughts on this are most welcome.

Scott

2

You can edit actions even after they are strips. Go to the Action Editor window and select the action by name. Go into pose mode in your 3D window and change the pose, inserting keys as before. If you only want to effect the bones as in the previous action definition, then be sure to choose ‘available’ among the insert choices. Once your happy, then click the ‘X’ next to the name in the Action Editor window. Now the strip with that name will have the new edits.
Hope this solves some of your problems.
Also, if you want to see ‘verything together’ as you put it, you could put those earlier or later than your NLA strips as regular non/NLA section.