I have been learning animation for some months, and I have found animating facial expressions really hard (or rather, timing and mixing them in a pretty and fast manner that lets me see the whole animation clearly). Today I tried using actions for expressions and the “Nonlinear Animation” panel to time them, but then I realized you can’t use drivers to control the influence of strips, so it does not really work for me (I could just bake them somewhere else and copy the graphs, but I need to mix them in real time while the animation plays).
Is there any way of achieving a “video editor” kind of workflow for animation with driver support?
That is, timing and mixing armature driven expressions with strips while being able to control their mixing influence externally in real time.
Any help would be really appreciated and sorry if I’m not very clear.
Pd: If someone knows of a workflow with a similar feel to this I would like to hear it.
I think that you should be looking at an action constraint. Apparently, you already have the facial actions; now all you have to do is mix them in, and you can do that via driving the influence of various action constraints.
(BTW, I’m not totally sure that you’re correct that you cannot drive the influence of strips. There are multiple ways to control the influence of strips, and I was surprised at how drivable they are last time I looked, but that was quite a while ago. IIRC, I was surprised to find that I could drive the timing of NLA strips.)
The other thing that you might consider is simply turning on autokeying and animating the mix of the NLA strips while playing through. You can clean up the keyframes afterwards as desired. It requires having something simplified enough that you can get clean animation timing though.
Thanks a lot for the reply. As for the driving of strips, the time seems to be drivable, but sadly not the influence (I think it is related to the order in which Blender calculates stuff)
Action contraints do not really fit my needs, as what I’m searching is for a way of timing lots of expressions while having the layers and strips system, which feels way easier to use when making long animations. I am now thinking of using the strips just for moving bones that toogle the visibility of contraints, but that would probably get really messy after a couple dozen expressions and wouldn’t let me see the graphs in a single place, so it’s probably not worth the effort…
