I’m getting ready to start animating a small project and have a question on whether the approach I plan to take its the best…I plan on having an individual character blend file with all of it’s basic actions animated ( walk cycle, climbing ladder, etc.). My other blend files Will be different scenes\settings. I plan on linking my character into the setting, with it’s animations and parented to an. empty to move thru the setting. In those scenes that require more interaction with the setting, I’ll create New animations in the setting blend files and use proxies. I hope that made sense… Is this the best approach? Other/better ideas?
IMHO linking in characters makes sense when you’re working on a big project where several people are working in a pipeline - for example if the animator already animates while the final modeling/texturing still takes place, or if it is a big project with many scenes.
If you are a one-man-show, it takes quite some discipline to keep up the structure. I usually end up mixing animation and design files up in the long run :-/
To me, having all the actions in a master file definitely seems a good idea.
As I mentioned - just my opinion
I’m starting to develop my project into something that’s going to require using multiple files due to the memory constraints of my computer. I’m still learning Blender so I don’t know yet if there’s a standard procedure to follow, but in my case I’ve decided to keep my character in a master file and then create a new file for each scene and link him in. As I create new characters or objects that are to be used in various scenes, I’ll keep them in their own master files as well. I have no idea at this point how I’ll manage actions, since I’m working strictly off the cuff, not planning too far ahead as to what will take place in the scenes. I don’t expect to use too much repetition since that makes it look that much less realistic. It works well enough for games where things are repeated over and over, but I don’t expect it will work so well for animated videos.