Learn Blender's NLA editor in 3 minutes | Blender 2.9 Animation Tutorial
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 2 ต.ค. 2024
- Learn how to use the Blender NLA (Non-linear Animation) editor to manipulate, repeat, and blend animations together.
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underrated tutorial, short and simple, thank you!
Working with NLA is like walking in a minefield, there is so much that can go wrong if you don't monitor and carefully plan out every step in advance. Thanks for helping me grasp the fundamentals
Yes, it is fair to say it can be a little more nuanced and when things get out of alignment, it's not trivial to undo. Tradeoffs one way or the other, definitely a power feature once you can wrangle it to your advantage!
When a 3 minute video explains better than any other with 25 minutes or even more
So first wevimprtwn our character thwn we make a pose [5 minutes] and now we come to the mehical trick...
When a 3 minute video explains better than bigger experts
you are a life saver!!!! I am animating a rig and I want making it breathing non-stop but I had been adding a lot of keyframes to the chest bone and it was mixing with other keyframes that I also needed for the chest bone... it was a whole mess but now you saved the day for me!
Okay what the hell is this, Been using blender for years now and never understood half of what the action editor could do or how to do it... you just explained in few minutes something thats had me stumped...
I... Thanks man this helps, a lot
I just discovered this menu today, and I've been using Blender for over 7 years!
I've been using Blender for over 7 years now, and I JUST TODAY found out about this!
Edit: 9 years now!
Edit: 10 years!
litterally same, been using blender since 2.59 and just now figured out how to use the nla editor
i feel you man
@Kittikun Kongsin You will be able to manage complex animations easily and efficiently.
Its the nature of these tools.. been using After Effects for umm early 90s.. and there are still parts I am unclear about. & Blender is much more complex... sigh.
So True, I had been using Blender for a few years till I found out about this. Incredible. Blender truly is such an insanely complete app - almost oo much packed into one single software
I just found out recently that this feature exists and this tutorial really makes me feel like I could do it.
It's crazy how basically no one talks about this. I have more than 20 paid Blender courses and ZERO of them mentions this. Amazing video, man!
Because the NLA is unintiuive hot garbage...its never been ezplained very well until this video
bro paid for blender courses 💀💀
@@fluffehpancakes1102 paid for the "effective art of rigging" no one has been able to infuriate me this much in years. I want to reach through my screen and choke this guy for making everything so F-ing convoluted.
Learning a bunch from this, thank you!
these strips are tearing me apaaart!
Wow finally somebody that covers a crucial aspect of animating in Blender. Thank you!
FINALLY, I understand how to use the NLA, after however many tutorials. This one was simple and to the point.
Thanks!
Wow! Thanks so much!!!
This is GAME CHANGING!!
Bless you. This has everything I need. I'll probably have to watch it multiple times before it settles in my brain, but at least it's not a 30-minute tutorial that talks about everything tangentially related to what I need to learn.
thank you- wow!
Oh, Hi, Mark!
0:46 im trying to figure it out what does that "PLEASE" doing in middle of your video , are you begging someone to do something that is present ?
Tysm this helped a lot
2:35 is that a the room reference? XD
2:02
"from replace to combine, nice"
me: "from replace to..."..oh right im on 2.79...nice....(proceed to redo the whole animation by hand)
#potatopc
What if we want to reuse the same animation after some time. Like: we need walk cycles mostly in an animation. So do we have to start it all over again?
A great example of the use and power of the NLA editor! From file, append (or link), you can load actions (ie animation strips) saved in other blender files.
No, you save the walk cycle as an action and just reuse it as needed.
once you save the walk action to an nla strip you can duplicate and paste it wherever you need it in the timeline as many times as you want
4:37 I've been wondering why when I press Tab my selected strip is not opening in the Action Editor - strip just becomes green and I had to manually select the desired action: the mesh is supposed to be selected in the main view!
But there's more:
When you press Tab to start editing the strip of the selected mesh you can immediately see the results when you play the animation even before you apply these edits to the strip - for some reason (ver. 2.92), when you edit a strip of mesh that is not selected currently, you have to apply edits pressing Tab in NLA Editor again in order to see the results of your edits in the animation.
Thanks for sharing that nuance!
2:35 oh my god thank you! I couldn't find a SINGLE tutorial that told me how to edit those strips, I've been looking for that for such a long time. This makes working with NLA strips way more practical
This was so so so needed, it's amazing how little there is on TH-cam about the NLA editor, especially for 2.8 and up.
you did in 3 minutes what a 40 minute tutorial had to do
bro i have been racking my head trynna figure this program out and you just plugged my mind into the matrix and loaded 5 years of animation experience into it. thank you SO MUCH
Its kinda like graphic symbolos in flash then
Thank you! I had a bunch of scenes with prebuilt animations I wanted to view all strung together but importing the next animation would overwrite the previous animation. Using the NLA editor, I could plop down those animations into the timeline and have them play back to back! So much better than importing one set of animations, recording, and setting up the next animation to record, etc etc.
I'am a beginner in blender animation. That was the best NLA Explanation I´ve seen so far! Thank you!
Dang, top notch tutorial! Do you know if there is a way to only push down selected keyframes and leave nonselected keyframes?
Thanks! And not directly - but the workaround would be to duplicate the current action in the action editor (press the little number icon next to the name), then in one of them delete the keyframes you don't want to push down. Copy paste select keyframes also works fine from one action to another.
@@TheDuckCow ok thanks!
This was a super helpful, concise tutorial. Thanks and keep up the good work!
It is a simple explanation but I can't see what I do wrong. I add the other action above one to combine it.
However even if I didn't add it, it still is "action and keys" the character goes to another location which I don't want. When I put it above like you, it still does the same thing.
Is there another solution?
"Oh, Hi Mark!" xD
I was missing the TAB!!! I could not figure out how to edit what I had. THX!
man.......this is the best animation tutorial
hey there how to combine shapekey action (with drivers on it) + actions ? all combined in NLA ready to create different clips from my actions to export in fbx? thx
This tutorial was actually amazing, thank you!
I was searching for a year to get my head around nla editor and here is a video explaining it in 3 minutes? So many thanks man!
This is extremely powerful, thank you very much.
Kudos for a clear, concise enjoyable tutorial. This is what the fans want.
wowwww so great i don't ever think NLA will best choice and don't repeadly animations
this is great, thanks. The only thing I want to know is how to choose to not push down an action. Like I wish there was a third option other than stash or push down, just forget, because as soon as you select an existing action you have to either stash it or push it
wow, thanks bro, you saved me, I was suffering, stuck on the animation
Hi if am exporting, lots of useless animation clips coming with FBX inside unity why that happens? I want to create 3 animation for 3 objects (2 are transform, other 1is scale ) but it comes like 12 animation clisps with similar name
what is the proper way to export.. Should I use NLA or timeline or which correction needed to proper export..
Could you suggest any video?
Excellent and concise but not so fast that I have to play the video at .5 speed with captions just to process what is happening
Hello nice tutorial, can i ask some question
but first sorry for my english
i have 2 object and they have modifier, how to make to single NLA for export to unity?
please help :( thanks
Thank you, after hearing Sir Wade ranting about animation layers in Maya I had to find a Blender equivalent.
Glad to hear it! Another TH-camr also covered that point of comparing to Maya more direclty if that's helpful, including another addon that polishes the experience a bit more (personally, I just go "vanilla"):
th-cam.com/video/tOx_SAG7gl4/w-d-xo.html
Great video! Is there a way to push up back to the graph editor. Say you are happy with what you have in the NLA but want all the animation back on the graph editor? Is this possible
There's sadly not a very easy way to do this. The closest equivalent out of the box is the "bake all keyframes" tool, but that creates 1 keyframe per frame per channel (as opposed to sparse keys). There are some tools to clean up keyframes to make it sparser again, like what mocap artists use, but won't be the same as the individual keyframes you might expect you'd get.
To be frank, this is definitely a drawback of this approach, but there are ways to make it work if you need to bake keyframes and then go back in and edit.
how about different amatures with different variation of animation move but sharing in 1 action(e.g. 2 pillar model (amature.1 and amature.2) using (walking.action) but amature.1 is spinning in vertical and amature.2 is jiggling.) someone teach me how.😵💫
Hello can you help me how to merge 2 NLA action from 2 object with one object use array modifier to single NLA Strip for use in unity?
Hi and good day friend.. actually i have one problem..i am unable to change bezier curve motion using an action editor combine with the dope sheet window.i had done creating two object using blender 3.0 which was braid line and also the hook.actually,I want to make animation about fishing knot unfortunately it comes out failure.i tried to set "combine blending" in active strip as well,but it still won't work.. appreciate your advise🥰thank you
I can imagine that comining NLA strips on objects vs bones within an armature could be problemenatic, since they can have different spaces (ie if they are parented to something else which has its own transform). My best advice to is to clear/apply all parenting so there are no parents, and make sure all scale/rotation are applied ahead of time too so you are starting int he same world transform space essentially (this will already be true once you clear parent essentially though).
Woooow!!! thank you so much, this is an incredible explanation.
When i scsle move or try to literally anything to a clip in the nonlinear animator it disappears.
Thank you for your video, the NLA editor does look promising but I'm running into issues whenever I try applying [Blending: Combine] to two NLA layers.
In my scenario, one repeating layer has the model's hand shaking, the other layer has the same hand moving from their waist to their nose. These layers behave fine on their own, but once I go from [Blending: Replace] to [Combine] the hand rig snaps to a completely new location. The resulting motion does appear to combine the layers but the arm is now broken.
I'm using Blender 4.1 and I've tried this with three different models and the motion breaks every time [Combine] is used. Am I going about this wrong?
Is by chance one of them animated with IK and the other with FK? It also could be that the two motions are both additive in the same direction. so if the shaking is bending the arm up say 60º, and the waving also goes up 60º, then that's telling the nla editor to combine them to a total 120º which might be beyond realistic bounds for instance. Combine works best when the motions being added are modifications from their respective *rest* positions. For the same reason, that's also way it's helpful to do the minimal transforms as far down the chain as possible to get the same motion effect.
NLA is definitely finicky, and as you get used to using, you realize there's a difference between animating normally and designing animations to be combined per above. Hope that helps!
I have two different cube
i added two different animation moving on them. the animation work fine in the blender but when ever i export it to unity as a fbx file only one cube shows it's animation
how to fix it? (very urgent)
Sweet tutorial thanks for all the info. I'm having trouble combining my edits to my animations when I do the character gets all deformed. Any suggestions?
Likely a matter of too many layers of "combine" instead of replace, as an offset or rotation will just continue around. I will admit that things do get tricky and hard to fine tune when you a large number of layers at once.
@TheDuckCow seems like it may have been user error. I got it to work now, thank you for the tut once again. Is there any way to combine this with faceit?
Is there a crush course to this. I will pay to learn this.
This is my entire motivation of learning blender
Thomas Frank Taylor William Davis Kenneth
Most others take 15 mins to give a list of what each of the buttons do without really explaining when and why to use them. You showed how, when, and why to use the tools as part of an effective workflow in less than 3 minutes. Incredible.
Nice and sweet! Very useful workflow!
Out of all the tutorials this is more convinient and more faster way to learn how to loop ur animations
CONTENT OK, BUT DUE TO THE SPEED IMPOSSIBLE TO THE RECIPIENT. FEET DOWN.
how do i make my character walk forever because when i put repeat it starts from the beginning i just walk the walking to keep going
зачем всё усложнять сразу? накидывать новые и новые сущности для человека, который впервые осваивает редактор? Хуйня урок. непонятно из-за нагромождений.
Thanks for the brilliant and helpful video.
FYI, S to scale does not alter the speed but rather the start and end frames of the clip
Excellent tutorial! Straight to the point. In 3 minutes you've explained what others do in 40!
Why I couldn't find you before? Thanks man!
Been looking around for a plugin that allowed some form of this for blender, and no one in the blender community even suggested hey it has it.
whatif we dont wantt o render it to a video and save it to the fbx
I was asking, like a stupid, for Animation Layers and Blender had it since ever
Short and most advance NLA tutorial I ever seen
Something about the NLA is a complete nightmare. I've used it 20 times and it's still luck if it works or not.
I'm not going to exactly argue with this statement - you definitely get a feel for how it can be useful and how to avoid the pitfalls.
It's not the first go-to you should have for fresh new animating, but if you know you need to just quickly layer a few pre-existing animations on top, it's an amazing tool that works within some constraints.
What if my walk cycle is not in place and when I put the repeat up it just goes up and down?
I'm coming from Unreal, reminds me of Sequencer, but I can't figure out how to animate transparency of object (fade in/fade out), is it possible to do that from NLA editor?
Transparency is only a property of shaders, so you'll have to add keyframes to a node which drives the transparency level. I think you can then push that down into an action strip, but might not work exactly the same.or as expected since it's not animation on bones of a rig. Not sure how blending and layering will work, though in theory it should be fine.
This is so good that I'm going to open it on my phone to watch an ad
This just saved my hide, thank you so much for this video!!!!
Really helpful I always wanted this
clear and concise with good examples in as short a time as possible, a perfect video my dude
As soon as I start watching a tutorial my creative juices flow and i can't concentrate on the tutorial so i have to watch it again at least once
Yeah thanks you are really good at teaching and animating
is that possible to bind multyple layer become 1 layer? for example I have 3 action
1.walk
2.run
3.jump kick
so in nla editor I have 3 layer walk layer,run layer,jump kick layer
lets say I already have complete walk -> run -> jump kick action in nla edtor with 3 layer walk on top layer,run on middle layer,jump kick on bottom layer
then I want to make it only 1 layer from 3 layer walk layer,run layer,jump kick layer is that possible?
Late reply, sorry. Yes, though it becomes hard to work with afterwards. You have to 'bake' the NLA strips to keyframes, so it becomes one keyframe per frame on all animation channels. I find I don't have much luck working with that though, so I do what I can with the NLAs themselves.
Imagine I havent found the nla editor and would try to put the action in there without what a way to save alot of pain
NLA where have you been in all my life??
this is BASIC INFORMATION FOR VIDEO GAME ANIMATION! how is it possible that a 6 part tutorial does not talk about this?
Yeah a year ago there was almost nothing covering the tools out there, now I see NLA videos showing up all over in the last 3 months. Glad to see more people using it.
at 1:25 how do you do that to your rig? i can only mobe the position it doesnt show the other, im at pose mode
just press tab to edit - Thanks duckcow!!
Stark Fall
Wow Bro, Great For Blender Intermediate. Can You Make 1 Minute Tutorial More?
I'm planning to! A few parallel projects in the works, including MCprep updates, so I'll be balancing my time between that and new tutorials.
Oh thanks man, this is gonna useful 😏
WOW that's amazing stuff. Just quickly combining animations like it is nothing. Thanks!
very valuable tips. Does this save location? Lets say I have a character standing on a map, and Action A takes place in one place of the map, and Action B takes place in another place. If I load the saved action, will it load the character in the precise location the action takes place? If someone knows, please and tnk u.
Depends on what is keyframed. Generally, rigs have a "root" bone so it all maters where that is at the time the initial keyframed are made. But also, as this video shows, you can always add another NLA strip layer which just applies an offset to that root bone to get your character in the right spot (but for reusable actions, it's far better to just try and animate the character near the position of the root bone itself)
Ok so NLA strips is like a Unity animation controller and actions are like Unity animation clips. in other words NLA isn't useful for Unity dev unless theres a way to bake a strip down to another action
Using the NLA editor can be a nice simple way to preview and bulk export your animations to unity. But generally yes you wouldn't export one combined set of strips unless maybe you were doing a cinematic? Btw you can bake down to a single strip, you just end up with a keyframe for every bone transform channel on every frame
can you make those strips into a single action? I'm animating and idle pose with lots of movement and some repeating actions
You'd have to bake all strips to key frames and then use that as a strip, but will not be easy to tweak afterwards.
If I've gone too far to undo.. I've decided I don't want to use actions. How do I reverse the action strip and get my keyframes back in the timeline?
You can delete all actions from the NLA strip, and then to recover some primary initial action, just have the armature/object selected, go into the action editor, and select it from the dropdown. It will then become the primary action and work like normal. It should show up still in the NLA editor, but with a differently shaded orange color than those action NLA strips which got "pushed down".
I've been using blender to make crappy animations for little games for years. I literally had no idea this exists and it's amazing and life changing!
Love teachers that are straight on point
A good Blender tutorial. That's a shocker!
so somthing that has screwed with me is why i had a billion actions automatically added to the action editor. turned out multiple armatures do not seem to be on the same nla strip so it kept making a bunch of different actions. that screwed with me for a long time making things like this tutorial confusing
As in, you imported characters which each had their own stack of NLA strips already?