I was wondering how to refine animations in the NLA. I have a couple of actions like a walk cycle and a layered on raising of the hand to point at something, but when the hand goes up to wave the elbow bends unnaturally. It does the same thing when coming down. My rig does include elbow targets and generally they work well, but I was wondering how best to layer refining keyframes on top of layered actions. I don’t want to add keyframes in the actions themselves, such as the walk cycle, since I may use the walk cycle in other parts of the animation, but so far the only way I can seem to add refinements is to create a new action for each fixup I want to do. If I do this I forsee having a fair number of little actions all stacked up on top of eachother in the NLA, which seems rather messy to me. Please tell me there is an easier way to do this.
You can use a Shape to ‘help’ shape the elbows where they go wrong.
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It’s not that the mesh gets messed up, rather the elbow points at a rather unnatural angle. I’ve tried animating my elbow targets, which helps a bit, but it seems that the pointing action is close to the body and the blend causes the arm to move straight up to that position. I’d rather have it move up in a bit of an arc, which would be a little more natural. The problem is when I move my arm IK bone it either adds that movement to whichever action is active in the NLA editor or if I create a new NLA strip (and action) it totally overrides the previous action in the NLA editor (am I making any sense?)
One Strip should only override another if you have the Action icon on for one of them. If you click that icon to change it to a Strip icon they should blend. Try moving the ‘faulty’ strip above the other (or below if it’s already above). If you post the blend we could look at it to better understand the prob.
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