I have a bit of a gap in my conception of blender animations that I’m hoping someone can plug.
As I understand it, the NLA editor is only for armature actions.
The NLA editor has a nice strip interface that makes it easy to pick up, move and duplicate actions at various points in the timeline.
I’ve yet to find anything similar for say vertex animation. Is a RVK action (say a group of vertex manipulations that form a mouth going ‘ooooooooo’) actually an ‘action’ like a character/armature action that I can repeat elswhere? If so, is there a handy strip editor like the NLA editor for such actions or am I limited to copying and moving bunches of IPO curves and hoping I don’t miss one out?
in the action editor there are sliders,…if you change your absolute keys to relative keys ( assuming you are using absolute keys ) you can go into the action editor ( not the nla editor ) where you will find, for each of your keys, a slider. you can use these sliders to key your RVK anim, with alot of control over the values, and combined values of the keys.
<edit> btw, a keyframe is created every time you adjust the slider/s. so, no keyboard commands ( such as ‘I’ ) are needed. a tweak of the slider does the job. good luck.
And in order to get to the Action editor simply press SHIFT+F12…
To tell you the truth, I haven’t played with NLA much yet, but I think that it’s not only just for Armatures… Anything that has an IPO curve can be handled with NLA, so I guess every action could be easily manipulated with it, as well…
Well, I have an IPO block that has keys with a curve that simply pulls a vertex out of my cube over 20 frames. If I understandd you correctly, with the object selected (the cube), I should see action strips or at least something in the NLA editor. I don’t - it’s completely blank.
I’m not looking for something like keys in the action editor. I’m looking for the action strips in the NLA (although the manual says strips can only be used for armature). With strips, repeating a vertex animation further down the line is as simple as copying it and moving it. Is there soemthing like that for vertex animation (and other types of animation) or does it only exist for armatures?
NLA is not only for Armature actions, but you can also handle any action keys (Loc, Rot etc.) you insert for any object…
Unfortunately and AFAIK (I hope I’m wrong on this) rvk’s can only be handled in a “Linear” way, through the IPO curves window and the Action Editor window…
depending on what animation you’re doing through RVK’s, you might be able to replace it by bone deformation. this way, you can animate - of course - using the NLA.
for facial animation this should be quite easy.
what you could also do is using the newly introduced hooks ( i love hooks - it’s almost like a divine gift ), parent them to bones and also use the NLA. i made some quick tests for phonems with hooks and subsurf turned on, and they were quite promising.
in general, most of blender’s animation tools can be combined in different ways. i managed to drive a pre-made bone animation through the use of RVK-sliders. it involved some parenting, constraining and and stuff, but it works nice. here is the thread, in case you’re interested:
), parent them to bones and also use the NLA. i made some quick tests for phonems with hooks and subsurf turned on, and they were quite promising.