Thats what I love about blender, you dont NEED the NLA to make animation, the animation workflow sort of goes in "layers".. You can do a simple animation in the timeline, or go deeper and play with the dope sheet editor, or go deeper with the graph editor, or go even deeper and play with NLA, etc. It all works beautifully together
Thank you so much for this video! One thing I noticed: at 10:50 it would have been super helpful to show that pressing N will show the side panel. Took me way to long to figure this one out.
I think the fact that you implement these into finished projects really makes these tutorials some of the most valuable on youtube, each one is just so eye operning.
dood , I can't believe how the beginner tutorials do not point out that an action IS where the animation is stored. U'd think that would be in a first steps tutorial... yet it is not talked about at all !! This had me sooo confused as I wasn't aware that my animations were being attached to random objects. Once I learned this fundamental information I went back in the project and fixed everything up. It went from >> being confusing and weird with unexplainable odd occurrences to >> everything making sense + orderly + revealing new possibilities. I think it's more confusing to learn animation without learning the NLA.
Hi, this video is really helpful, let me understand what is Action, and what is NLA, Action is a animation clip, a shortly clip could be reuse it again, even across different object, it means use object A create a Action A, then Action A can be apply to object B, the object B animate itself follow the Action A. NLA editor like a video tracker editor, you can place and combine Action togather to create complex animation.
one of the most underrated and misunderstood tools in Blender, if the foundation could polish it up and incorporate it into a character animation workflow then we could really get blender further out the door
Thanks! That was really helpful. Would love to see more tutorials with those pieces in blender that help bridge the gap from enthusiast to professional. Long time (+10yr) enthusiast here with aspirations of professionalism :)
I discovered how to do all this in the Timeline bypassing the NLA editor entirely. Crazy stuff but it can be done regarding blending animations aka their keyframes. So I no-longer need to waste time creating actions. Dope tutorial though I will surely be using these techniques as well to layer my animations whenever I seek to create far more advanced transitions. What's tough is animating the camera as well after you apply them actions to get a more refined and finalized animated short film project. I done some camera marker animation edits in the past, but gotta get back into experimenting with it all.
Really useful video. I'm just a blender enthusiast that's been concentrating more on arcvis and modelling. Just started animation and was having trouble with walk cycles and reuse. This pointed me in the right direction. Thank you.
This morning I knew almost nothing about the NLA aand I was faced with a daunting task of animating 2 characters dancing to music. I was afraid I was looking at failure dead on. After watching this video (I love all your videos btw) suddenly the animation because much simpler! Poses make Actions which are used and reused in the NLA. Combine that with a little creative camera work and viola! 8 hours later I have the animations done and the rendering is just getting started! Thank you CBailyFilm! You're a life saver.
This video sums up everything about Blender animation features. It seems like the animation features need a better UX; Blender just needs to benchmark some of the video editing software like premier and visually integrate those blend in and out functions into the NLA strips
Wooh, So you're saying that my character could have separate upper body and lower body animation and can do whatever he wants with his upper body while walking or running 🤯🤯, for me this is the best tutorial i've even seen man, keep up the good work, and btw Liked and Subscribed 😁
some part are confusing for someone really new to blender specially NLA, but some part are well explained which I didn't understand in other tutorials.
thank you very much, ı couldn't understand while listening to lectures in my language but thıs tutorial is perfect even for someone who dosent understand much English , thank you 🙏
😀Great video by the way Chris... it seems when I push down that rotate action like you did in the video at 7: 57 ...that it adds it to the same NLA track as the first one we pushed down ...why is that... I just created a new track above selected and move my rotate action up to that one to match yours... but I just wondered why that is I couldn't find any information on Google... I'm in blender 3.1
It took me 7 years to find out this feature exists. I'd been animating things the hard way, until a few months ago when I discovered the action editor, along with all these systems.
I have been messing around with NLA and action strips with mixamo, some stuff behaves strangely, but one thing I noticed from your vid is stretching the length of the action can be done without using the side panel. If you tab to edit the action, then go to the dope sheet and and work with the keyframes there, you can add keyframes beyond the length of the original action strip. Then when you hit tab to close the action it will change the length to match the last key frame you added. I bet this also will shorten it if you take keyframes out and make it shorter. One thing I dont get is assigning an action to a new object. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. I have some mixamo dances saved as actions and sometimes I can use them with a new rig sometimes I cant. Another thing is if I do the add function on an action strip the character will blown up like a balloon sometimes. But I have committed the scale prior to rigging the character. So I dont know why it would be adding up scale info. But it also doesn’t look like scale as the character is distorted and not just bigger.
I learned so much and I'm not even halfway through thanks for the vid! Such a good timing as I already started working on a droid (not like your) Great vid
This is probably one of the most comprehensive explanations of NLA I've found so far! However, I'm hitting a brick wall in trying to animate 3 separate objects and baking out one linear animation to export to fbx. I've tried with and without armatures but to no avail...
One thing I always miss in the NLA editor is the option to combine animations together that use the same bones. I know there is the add and combine blending functions but it seems none of them works as I want it. For example, let's say you have a breathing animation for a character that uses the spine bones. But now you also want to have that character move to the side with his upper body while breathing. This might work with combine or add on a normal standing character, but if the pose is a pose in which the default rotation values of the spines aren't around 0 (for example an old man that walks on a stick while bending forward), you will get the wrong result no matter which blending mode you use. Combine will use the average value which weakens the whole animation while add will add both values which result in the bending forward pose being way too exaggerated. The only way I found to get the result I want is to copy the spine bones, parent them between the spine bones and use those copied bones for the breathing while the original bones will handle the turnaround movement. But I'm almost sure that such a situation can be handled with the NLA editor somehow. I'm just not sure how.
Excellent deeper dive into blender. Thanks 🙏. Your content is most definitely a cut above. The sci-fi orientation is a perfect fit for my own direction. Haven’t yet gotten to epic space battles but I’m getting there...it’s an incentive! (Noobie to blender but veteran to pencil & paper.) Awesome stuff & love your channel. ✌️☕️🎩🎩🎩
Subscribed based on this video alone, of all the videos and forums on this topic this is by far the best as it gave practical examples. One question remains though, other than extending the timeline , what is the purpose of the main timeline? Do people primarily use this for more effects type stuff, camera work / lighting etc?
This seems mounstruously complicated! Question - if you use 2 separate animations for walking, won't it look unnatural? Because the character will apear to glide and the bottom foot will move even while still in the ground
Thanks for the tutorial! Will you be making any additional character animated vids in the future? If so, could you cover in it a bit about the animation libraries and how to create, store and combine them with multiple characters in a scene/project? Cheers!
From what video is the tutorial you put in at the beginning ? I feel the tutorial you showed was much more helpful to me as a beginner than what you are showing in this video, thus I'd like to continue watching the tutorial you showed rather than this one before going a bit more advanced with this tutorial here.
This is a game changer. My timeline has been a absolute mess thus far. So nice that I can separate, label, and reuse my actions now. Hope to see more tutorials on NLA. If we have multiple objects with synchronized actions, is there a way to combine them into 1 NLA track? or do we have to keep editing each one separately? Also when would you use "Influence" to transition between tracks vs the Blend in/out?
Thank you for the tutorial, very useful. What I cannot find anywhere is how I then get these actions onto the timeline so I can place them relative to the overall animation of my scene. Any help much appreciated!
Thank you for sharing your experience! It’s amazing 😍 Can I ask you, maybe it’s stupid question, but I’m a new in animation, but I just wanted to ask, are you doing all objects in one file or you do it in different and after import to a animation file? For me it’s a problem now, I don’t understand how it’s better to do!?🤷🏻♀️
Lego animation system ;D Cool Tutorial. Would be nice to see how well this actually works if you try to create something polished. As an Maya user this tool remembers me of the time editor but on a much more earlier lvl of complexity which could be game-breaking when playing around with different ideas. And later you could then stick them together and finalize your animation. Is it possible to change the keys set of each given action afterwards?
![[Blender] Un-confusing the NLA Editor (Nonlinear Animation)](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/tAo7HxxxA08/mqdefault.jpg)
Fantastic tutorial. By far the most comprehensive NLA tutorial on youtube.
I listened to the first 1 minute of this video then I instantly subscribed subconsciously.
The most instructive tutorial about animation I have ever encounter
You're an amazing teacher. I FINALLY understood NLA. Thank you so much for sharing this!!
Thats what I love about blender, you dont NEED the NLA to make animation, the animation workflow sort of goes in "layers".. You can do a simple animation in the timeline, or go deeper and play with the dope sheet editor, or go deeper with the graph editor, or go even deeper and play with NLA, etc. It all works beautifully together
Thank you so much for this video! One thing I noticed: at 10:50 it would have been super helpful to show that pressing N will show the side panel. Took me way to long to figure this one out.
I was getting so frustrated how hard it is to manipulate a character on a single layer, but this makes it so much easier, thank you for this tutorial!
Thank you so much... You just saved me from Copying and Pasting THOUSANDS of Keyframes.
This seems to me to be the greatest authority on nla Blender, he knows a lot.
I think the fact that you implement these into finished projects really makes these tutorials some of the most valuable on youtube, each one is just so eye operning.
For me, this cleared out a lot of confusion regarding how to play and blend multiple actions in a time sequence. Keep up with the excellent content :)
Thanks, will do!
From the start to minut 8 i learned sooo much life change stuff , thanks here we Go to the Full vídeo ! 🖤🖤🖤
Excellent presentation of NLA stack and application.
dood , I can't believe how the beginner tutorials do not point out that an action IS where the animation is stored. U'd think that would be in a first steps tutorial... yet it is not talked about at all !!
This had me sooo confused as I wasn't aware that my animations were being attached to random objects.
Once I learned this fundamental information I went back in the project and fixed everything up. It went from >> being confusing and weird with unexplainable odd occurrences to >> everything making sense + orderly + revealing new possibilities.
I think it's more confusing to learn animation without learning the NLA.
Hi, this video is really helpful, let me understand what is Action, and what is NLA, Action is a animation clip, a shortly clip could be reuse it again, even across different object, it means use object A create a Action A, then Action A can be apply to object B, the object B animate itself follow the Action A. NLA editor like a video tracker editor, you can place and combine Action togather to create complex animation.
You are a killer Blender contributor and teacher amigo! Love your stuffs!
one of the most underrated and misunderstood tools in Blender, if the foundation could polish it up and incorporate it into a character animation workflow then we could really get blender further out the door
Most things in blender were new to me but NLA etc really surprised me lol thanks!
Glad I could help!
Really amazing!!! I was extremely lost on how this work that I would just animate with the timeline only but that will change now, thankyou!!
You're very welcome!
Thanks! That was really helpful. Would love to see more tutorials with those pieces in blender that help bridge the gap from enthusiast to professional. Long time (+10yr) enthusiast here with aspirations of professionalism :)
Great, my animation skills will get way better thanks to this video
This video was SOOOOO HELPFUL!!! I had to watch it a few times but each time I learned a lot. Thank you so much!
VERY INFORMATIVE for NLA editor... RECOMMEND.
So informative, intuitive, and concise! Thank you so much
I discovered how to do all this in the Timeline bypassing the NLA editor entirely. Crazy stuff but it can be done regarding blending animations aka their keyframes. So I no-longer need to waste time creating actions. Dope tutorial though I will surely be using these techniques as well to layer my animations whenever I seek to create far more advanced transitions. What's tough is animating the camera as well after you apply them actions to get a more refined and finalized animated short film project. I done some camera marker animation edits in the past, but gotta get back into experimenting with it all.
Really useful video. I'm just a blender enthusiast that's been concentrating more on arcvis and modelling. Just started animation and was having trouble with walk cycles and reuse. This pointed me in the right direction. Thank you.
This morning I knew almost nothing about the NLA aand I was faced with a daunting task of animating 2 characters dancing to music. I was afraid I was looking at failure dead on. After watching this video (I love all your videos btw) suddenly the animation because much simpler! Poses make Actions which are used and reused in the NLA. Combine that with a little creative camera work and viola! 8 hours later I have the animations done and the rendering is just getting started! Thank you CBailyFilm! You're a life saver.
This video sums up everything about Blender animation features. It seems like the animation features need a better UX; Blender just needs to benchmark some of the video editing software like premier and visually integrate those blend in and out functions into the NLA strips
Wooh, So you're saying that my character could have separate upper body and lower body animation and can do whatever he wants with his upper body while walking or running 🤯🤯, for me this is the best tutorial i've even seen man, keep up the good work, and btw Liked and Subscribed 😁
some part are confusing for someone really new to blender specially NLA, but some part are well explained which I didn't understand in other tutorials.
Hi Chris - great video. This helped clear up some of confusion I've had with the NLA editor. Now I just need to dive in and get comfortable with it😮
Like your Videos Mann
@@matin4595 like when doesn't?
thank you very much, ı couldn't understand while listening to lectures in my language but thıs tutorial is perfect even for someone who dosent understand much English , thank you 🙏
😀Great video by the way Chris... it seems when I push down that rotate action like you did in the video at 7: 57 ...that it adds it to the same NLA track as the first one we pushed down ...why is that... I just created a new track above selected and move my rotate action up to that one to match yours... but I just wondered why that is I couldn't find any information on Google... I'm in blender 3.1
thank u , u literely changed my all animation procces , bless u
Ive been Blendering around for 4 years now and the NLA editor is an area Ive been scared to enter, lets see if you cure my fear of it with this video.
It took me 7 years to find out this feature exists. I'd been animating things the hard way, until a few months ago when I discovered the action editor, along with all these systems.
The best way to explain these things ! really appreciate it! 🙏
I have been messing around with NLA and action strips with mixamo, some stuff behaves strangely, but one thing I noticed from your vid is stretching the length of the action can be done without using the side panel. If you tab to edit the action, then go to the dope sheet and and work with the keyframes there, you can add keyframes beyond the length of the original action strip. Then when you hit tab to close the action it will change the length to match the last key frame you added. I bet this also will shorten it if you take keyframes out and make it shorter.
One thing I dont get is assigning an action to a new object. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. I have some mixamo dances saved as actions and sometimes I can use them with a new rig sometimes I cant.
Another thing is if I do the add function on an action strip the character will blown up like a balloon sometimes. But I have committed the scale prior to rigging the character. So I dont know why it would be adding up scale info. But it also doesn’t look like scale as the character is distorted and not just bigger.
This is one if not the BEST blender tutorial i have ever seen! You helped me so much!
Couldn’t be any more clear! Thanks brother
I learned so much and I'm not even halfway through thanks for the vid! Such a good timing as I already started working on a droid (not like your)
Great vid
Finally a good explanation of the once confusing editor :) Thanks a lot for an amazing tutorial!
Thanks for making this, it's quite an unexplored feature for me. And I was looking for something exactly like this for animations
Awesome!
This tutorial just saved me a lot of time. 😅👌
Thank you, I'm just starting to learn animation in Blender and this was exactly what I needed to understand the NLA editor and workflow!
This is probably one of the most comprehensive explanations of NLA I've found so far! However, I'm hitting a brick wall in trying to animate 3 separate objects and baking out one linear animation to export to fbx. I've tried with and without armatures but to no avail...
One of the best tutorials i've seen (on any subject) really well explained :)
Packed full of info, sir. Thanks very much! I can see myself coming back to this many times as I venture into the NLA
Great series of tutorials, thank you!
I did find this super helpful & applying it on my current project. Thanks for this video it is excellent! Much love!
17:30 That explains a lot!
Man, I spent so much time looking for a good tutorial, I think I finally found it!
Fantastic tutorial! Thanks so much for taking the time to share the NLA anim workflow. So many possibilities!
i wish my brain understood this
this cleared up so much for me thank you
really. the most demonstrative. though not being a youtuber i suppose him as one of the best
Amazing tutorial! Thank you :)
Crisp and clear. Excellent tut, as always! Thanks!
Very helpful feature and a very good explanation and demonstration. thank you.
One thing I always miss in the NLA editor is the option to combine animations together that use the same bones. I know there is the add and combine blending functions but it seems none of them works as I want it.
For example, let's say you have a breathing animation for a character that uses the spine bones. But now you also want to have that character move to the side with his upper body while breathing. This might work with combine or add on a normal standing character, but if the pose is a pose in which the default rotation values of the spines aren't around 0 (for example an old man that walks on a stick while bending forward), you will get the wrong result no matter which blending mode you use.
Combine will use the average value which weakens the whole animation while add will add both values which result in the bending forward pose being way too exaggerated.
The only way I found to get the result I want is to copy the spine bones, parent them between the spine bones and use those copied bones for the breathing while the original bones will handle the turnaround movement. But I'm almost sure that such a situation can be handled with the NLA editor somehow. I'm just not sure how.
This has been really helpful, subscribed!
Extremely helpful good sir.
woot!
Feel like the is an under represented blender topic.
Thank!
What a great tutorial. everything is so clear now! thanks.
ah helped to demystify actions and nla, thanks !
Great tutorial and very helpful 👍
Excellent deeper dive into blender. Thanks 🙏. Your content is most definitely a cut above. The sci-fi orientation is a perfect fit for my own direction. Haven’t yet gotten to epic space battles but I’m getting there...it’s an incentive! (Noobie to blender but veteran to pencil & paper.) Awesome stuff & love your channel. ✌️☕️🎩🎩🎩
16:47 Bookmark.
Extrapolation: Holds the end of an action strip indefinitely.
Thank you Chris. Very nice!
13:14 Pose > Clear transform all. Resets rig to default pose.
Great video! Is there a way to export, or turn the resulting animation into a new Action?
This video was amazing. I learned a lot and it was very clear and concise!
Great tutorial! Clears things up
thank you this is very helpful
pixar shall tremble in fear as i animate my cube with this NLA tool
pretty advanced topic, but really good explanation. thanks!
Great tutorial, many thanks
Subscribed based on this video alone, of all the videos and forums on this topic this is by far the best as it gave practical examples. One question remains though, other than extending the timeline , what is the purpose of the main timeline? Do people primarily use this for more effects type stuff, camera work / lighting etc?
1:16 Master Chief is in da video 😎
awesome as usual indeed
Thank you! Cheers!
Thanks CBailey!
Thank you for your tutorials.
You've been so helpful
VERY helpful! thank you!
Such a useful video, thanks mate.
Bro it is awesome tutorial, thank you soo much.
This seems mounstruously complicated! Question - if you use 2 separate animations for walking, won't it look unnatural? Because the character will apear to glide and the bottom foot will move even while still in the ground
This video was very helpful, thanks for making it!
Great video. Very helpful. Thanks!
Thanks for the tutorial! Will you be making any additional character animated vids in the future? If so, could you cover in it a bit about the animation libraries and how to create, store and combine them with multiple characters in a scene/project? Cheers!
From what video is the tutorial you put in at the beginning ? I feel the tutorial you showed was much more helpful to me as a beginner than what you are showing in this video, thus I'd like to continue watching the tutorial you showed rather than this one before going a bit more advanced with this tutorial here.
The NLA looks very similar to a multitrack MIDI/audio sequencer, would that be a fair comparison? Excellent tutorial BTW!
Maybe. If we take in account that almost all Blender developers is music enthusiasts, so it's very nice comparison👍
Cool stuff, thank you for sharing!
This is a game changer. My timeline has been a absolute mess thus far. So nice that I can separate, label, and reuse my actions now.
Hope to see more tutorials on NLA. If we have multiple objects with synchronized actions, is there a way to combine them into 1 NLA track? or do we have to keep editing each one separately?
Also when would you use "Influence" to transition between tracks vs the Blend in/out?
Light bulb moment! Thanks :)
Thank you for the tutorial, very useful. What I cannot find anywhere is how I then get these actions onto the timeline so I can place them relative to the overall animation of my scene. Any help much appreciated!
Thank you for sharing your experience! It’s amazing 😍
Can I ask you, maybe it’s stupid question, but I’m a new in animation, but I just wanted to ask, are you doing all objects in one file or you do it in different and after import to a animation file? For me it’s a problem now, I don’t understand how it’s better to do!?🤷🏻♀️
Very interesting! I had no idea this existed and WOW does it look like a powerful tool!
A crucial tutorial. Thank you.
Hi please make more tutorial on NLA
Animation 😘 thank you I'm waiting your next NLA tutorial 😭
Lego animation system ;D Cool Tutorial.
Would be nice to see how well this actually works if you try to create something polished.
As an Maya user this tool remembers me of the time editor but on a much more earlier lvl of complexity which could be game-breaking when playing around with different ideas. And later you could then stick them together and finalize your animation.
Is it possible to change the keys set of each given action afterwards?
Super helpful!!
Thank you. so much. You solved my problem