 Work for you or work for your boss or work for whatever the why ever you're trying to use it This is a free rig and it's a mix-and-mode rig So I'll just ahead of time say that nothing about this talk is going to be specific to a single rig or a single workflow and that's both the problem and the cool thing about the NLA and I will get to the slide So who am I and why are you listening to me? This is me also me These are the blender things. I was involved with here since whenever and with all the other animation people so this is not just me doing this and I've been in the industry 25 years and I started learning 3d animation when I was 19 and and Before that I was like I'm gonna be an animator and then as soon as you are wanting to animate you have to rig and then as soon As people find out you rig then you never animate again That's the cycle and then you learn to rig yourself and you're like okay this time And then you're never happy with your rig and then just and now you're here 25 years later And you're like I'm gonna animate one day I took a brief Trip to the Philippines to train a bunch of 2d animators, which was a cool thing And I ended up in game development and motion capture editing and then that led to Weta on Lord of the Rings where I met a lot of awesome people and also realized that everyone has the same problem No matter how big you are or where you are Because I shouldn't have the answer for something that big But I did and that's how I got there and I came back and continued to work with a lot of software companies and then a few years ago. I started looking at blender and stumbled around and I went oh the NLA is cool. This is all the stuff I know for motion-builder and from all these like cool tools some editing stuff and you know making all the stuff and I'm like Oh, I know what this is and I tried to use it and I was like I don't understand a thing So I will continue on about blender. I asked on Twitter a little while ago like who uses the NLA and there was Probably half there like what is that? I don't know so if you know it and use it raise your hand More than the Twitter response. So that's good Okay, I Took away from this that education was a big issue with the NLA because I've used non-linear animation tools for For a long long time in a lot of different applications and help design these tools and that blender NLA tools were very hard to learn And then when you show people the NLA tools, they're like, yeah, I use them and then What how do you use them? So if you use them as an animation layer tool raise your hand One two three four five six seven, okay Yeah, there you go. So as an animation layer tool a law not a NLA It's not very many. So who uses it for just exporting animations for games Hmm one. Yeah, okay. So you slightly outnumber the animation layer crew What are the rest you use it for? I Have seen some really interesting use cases for basically like working around action constraints and working around Some rigging problems and then a bunch of other people just were doing really cool stuff with it that I was surprised by And every time we break a feature they let me know that they were doing something weird with it So animation tool or export tool This is the issue around this functionality is that like at one one point it's a clip system you can Stick clips together and play them back and do cool stuff with them and trigger them and do all kinds of things And if you're an animator, you're like great I just want an animation layer and you go in and you're like, okay, I Don't understand why everything has to be a clip and how to edit things and then the flip side is if you're a game animator And you don't care about layers, but you have to export to FBX This is also the best way to control it And so you're in there setting up all this stuff and then you don't want to mess with all that because you just Set it up for export. So now you're afraid to go in and use it as a layer editing tool And the UI makes this really not friendly The speed bumps that I hit initially as an animator were where are my animations? So, you know, you start to figure out like an object has object keys on an armature It's like a root motion in some games and it's you know It's moving around so you have this layer that lives on the object and you see the keys And then you enter pose mode and now the keys shift and are in a new place And the action kind of has both of them if you let it and So now you're in two modes trying to edit something that's stuck in a clip and now it's really hard to understand The new blender users I found this hard to understand for a while if you've used blender for a while You're like, of course, that's where you know, it's two separate things The actions Hidden away in the UI also makes this problematic Just this you know two days ago. I was talking to someone and they're like, oh, yeah You have to go to the action editor and create and you know, it was just this like ten-step process. I'm like, no you don't so hopefully I'll simplify some things that came up this week and The the naming of things even for us working on it a clip a strip or whatever. It's hard So there's there's multiple issues with the animation system as it is But it's still highly usable and so I hope that coming away from this Class interactive talk slash Q&A session that if you use it for export only you'll understand how to use it for animation layers and Explore flexibility of that if you use it for animation layers and you don't ever export to games Great, but you can start to understand a new way to kind of manage and store these actions And yeah, if you're hanging out by the door and you want to find a seat there might be one or two So just come on in and Then there's also some quirks about the fbx and GLTF export stuff and that interfaces differently And so we have lots of parts of blender that are all looking at this little edit System and using it in different ways and in other tools or even paid add-ons that have cleaned this up It makes it more user-friendly So using NLA for just law or LA linear animation and Animation export are two different things. So we'll look at export first And then we'll get to the better stuff because and I will tell you right now that I just finished sitting in on a Talk from the Nora animation team Yeah, yeah, but as he was Q&A and he's like oh, you know The bottom action is the default action in the export and I was like Taking a note But this will be a little recap if you just came from that awesome talk So if you're using it to export stuff to a game or to send it to fbx to do something with in somewhere else You one have to understand that the export settings when you Get here. It's basically usually by default all actions And then you see this like NLA strips and you're like I want everything everywhere And then you're like, okay, well, but when it exports all that how do I control the name and If you forgot and muted something over here, right these little checkboxes that are clearly mute or don't show or you know Again, the UI has some issues, but we can improve that When that's off you see no animation So those need to be on and you have to have that checked and then you need to understand that the The name of this thing here the strip and We will continue to work on Vocabulary as much as I don't want to these little things that are in here as Strips those names are what go to the exporter So if you see I've checked this box. I have these three tracks selected To say these animations are alive and then I've named these and when I open the fbx that I've exported Here and again we see this because it's a nice note to myself This this bottom Stand idle animation. They're just standing around is the first take in the stack So I have one fbx file now that has three animations in it and they're in order and then I have from bottom to top comes out top to bottom and The name is from that strip You can have the action that is attached to the object named whatever you want, which is a cool workflow He's he was updating the action and renaming it whatever and when you update it You can just tell the strip. Hey look to the new action export and you're not having to constantly rename things Right, you can set this up once and you can continue to push the actions behind the scenes and you have a consistent export but just explaining this and making this slide I Tried over and over again to make it clear and I'm still not happy with what this is and Then you look at gltf and it has its own quirks So I'm not a gltf user But there is someone who's got some code in the audience that we will try to get into both exporters that instead of Having to manage all of this only from the NLA when you go to export this stuff You'll be able to just simply select these are the actions. I want at the time of export and say go I don't need to pre arrange all this stuff. So if we can get those into core blender. Awesome. That's my plan Animation layers now is another flip of the mind you go. Okay. Well now I was using all this for export But now I want to use animation layers. I want to change things I want to stack stuff and do stuff, but if you've got the whole system set up for export Now you're just continuing to add to the chaos and that's no fun so This is where everyone else just gets steps on a Lego brick. They go, okay, I'm gonna use the layers I'm gonna get in there and they open the NLA up and Until we fix this you still won't see any of this stuff and I'll show you in a second But I want I want to I want to preview kind of what it should look like and then we'll go through it together So creating a layer is really creating a new action every time So if in your head you say I say animation layer you say Action animation layer action animation layer. All right, so it's just another action and the action is going to be created in the NLA or As soon as you set a keyframe because if I don't have any keys on an object like this cup when I get when I keyframe it It goes. Oh, I need an action to store it in and so it creates it and There is a setting Here where I have it set to selected and you know the mouse is moving around here so I usually leave it on selected so that I don't see all this stuff show up for the whole scene and This other little checkbox, which is basically like show the invisible hidden action, which is why Number one is there's the armature and then two is no action action And It's basically showing you hey, you don't have an action yet Why do you want that anyone want to take a guess? anybody Because you want to work in layered fashion and if you don't have that shown you don't get to control how the blending starts when you key Who cares? Well You care because if you're thinking I'm gonna offset something and you accidentally scale key key scale and Now you go to scrub and suddenly your character's ballooning and jump, you know You're like I've destroyed this thing nothing works right it's freaking out So you delete it and you leave the layers and you go back to just deleting keyframes and manually working and it's no fun So this is the part of layered animation workflow You need to understand by turning that little checkbox on that looks like you know a diamond wearing a hat You get this diamond wearing hat that says no action and then when you hit the end panel You get to see that there is this setting over here to both create a new action if you were gonna do so and Then there's also these two things here that is what really you need to understand for animation layering extrapolation and blending Extrapolation I'll explain more in detail, but for the most part it has a default mode. I said it's a nothing because I'll show why but the blending mode combine and additive This is where you change what the layer is going to do and if you change your mind later You can't because it will not recalculate if I have my characters Control here in space Yeah, my controls here in space I grab it and I'm gonna do an additive animation offset Well, it's gonna be a an offset from this location All right, it's just it's always going to be where am I and then plus or minus or you could do subtract combine Does like both it says hey? I'm gonna help you. I'm not gonna just be additive which is like an old mode I'm gonna if you're offsetting something that's animated I'm additive, but I'm gonna set all the keys like I'm a replacement I'm overriding everything and it's a it I still don't like it because it's not clear to me what I'm doing But it's it's a cool feature Again, this all needs to be set up ahead of time because you know This is what is going to get this is going to be the way when I set a key that it gets created I'm gonna work on additive animation great leave it combine or add Masking which is a little more conceptually easy to understand Is replace so the blending mode has combined a replace for the most part and if I have animation that I've worked really hard on and The bot I'm like this is I've spent two weeks in the graph editor and all the tangents are really beautiful And the boss comes by and goes Why is he putting why is he ending in that pose that pose was not what we approved and you're like hmm But I polished it already and now it's a nightmare to change Replace lets you just mask off that pose and start rebuilding without Deleting keys and worrying about all the stuff that got you to that final pose And you can go back and forth and test so we'll show that to you, but if you think Replace think mask it's masking out the stack And then we'll we'll talk about some NLA tricks and then I'm gonna finish on vocab So that while we start to do some live demos and I try not to fail in front of you, which will happen I won't just sound like I'm speaking American English to you know the rest of the world which Unfortunately will but these words are also just as confusing as my own languages to me Um, so as long as you think again the Layer is an action and we're basically just looking at actions and containers. That's where you start When I create a strip Which is this little thing out here? the strip just says I'm holding the space right the strip is holding the door open. It's just it's like I'm saving seats for my friends and you can name it what you want to get exported and This the this stuff over on the side the naming kind of doesn't matter and I'll show you in a minute We can rename it to make animation layer editing better but So we have tracks on the side These are the the stack of things tracks You create a place holder like a little space holder save my seat and then inside that strip Is a action clip and the action clip? Shows up under active strip because you want two things that look almost identical right on top of each other Right as you're more and more tired. You're like, yeah a s a c nope wrong so the active strip is Again, it's saving seats. So if you move a seat over you still want to save your seats along the timeline No, no, this is my space stay back And then wherever they sit when you're when they when the animated friends coming the action comes in and sits next to you they're gonna stay within your row you saved and Then you so you lose a friend because they got tired of this talk and left And now you have a space because you trim the end of it You you didn't delete the chair. You just are missing the end of the animation So the global timeline this the the main timeline shows up as where there's the strip here Then you can see that extrapolation is here, but remember if you change it later It's like changing rotation order. You're just gonna destroy things for the most part So just be aware it'd be great if an add-on or core blender could say Oh, you know what you made a mistake and started keying into additive that you want to replace or vice versa Like it's real easy to recalculate that with math Not my math, but with real math and it's a solvable problem with you know, I'm sure geometry nodes I'm sure I'm sure that's the answer You know or or shaders from Goo Blender, which is I'm now jealous. I don't have a better like character up here but That's this is like a bigger higher level control and then there's a bunch of stuff under here that I've got Endless videos that break all this down, but I just want you to understand the areas. We're looking at Then then below it is your active friends that have had too much coffee and they're jumping around and they just came from you know the cool animation talk and and They all have their own start and end right the ones asleep ones active whatever whatever friend is in that space and Laying across the row Because they're tired and animated with too much coffee now. You have this little local thing inside there So when you actually want to know hey Who are you holding seats for? Well, it's in the action clip. It's holding seats for source stand Or stand idle, you know, whatever I've named the action Because I want it to export a stand idle. I can name this like standing around looking Awesome or standing around looking sad doesn't matter. That's his idle. It'll always go out Then there's a bunch of other settings that are kind of local to the action And then there's a new thing that many people don't know about at the very very bottom and that's Outside of the NLA actions can now contain their own start and end frame Great, why do you care about that? Well, if you have a 400 frame motion capture run And you want 12 of those frames You don't want to always load that entire action into the NLA if you're just trying to check the animation So or if you're just exporting all actions, you don't want to have to pre-trim all that so this setting shows up in the NLA because it's it's an owner of the action and What's nice is you can actually see when it's on or off so that When you load it and your clip of 400 frames comes in as 12 you're like, oh, oh, yeah Because I set that somewhere or someone did So this is again more control, but no more clarity over really what's going on When you load that in this little sink link turns off and again the the next thing that's going to mess everybody up is this button and whether it's on or off because When I show you when we jump in to edit your keyframes This thing will either Make you really happy or it will throw a pile of Legos and make you walk across them again Because you've now got your 12 frames and if it's on and you jump in and out It's like oh you want me to save the whole row again All right out of my way and just knocks everybody over and so now it's back to 400 frames You're like no, I lost the thing so just be aware. These are the areas you need to understand action tracks You add strips to the track and the strip holds the clip track strip clip Sam I am green eggs and ham I'm gonna show you you can probably just go get these add-ons and leave now and you'd be fine NLA tools so I found these recently there. This is a small little like Small five-dollar add-on they basically I posted a video about the NLA like three years ago And I was like I don't know what's going on help me and I found this little set of tools and it's like hey I Watched this video from this guy rigging dojo. That's me Brad Complaining about how custom properties don't bake with actions So I fixed that and I added some cool stuff like extract bones and do stuff and it was super cheap and I was like Yes, I will take that and he has a free thing that if you're just using rigify Or you just want custom properties to bake when you collapse layers or actions Then you can go add the free part and just get that functionality until the NLA update team the the masters of time Get the patches push to master Next and I won't name names, but the person who made this is in here If you can figure out who he is by this handsome picture down here or this fuzzy guy He's in disgust this animation layer add-on started very small and I kind of went yeah Yeah, I want to learn the NLA and then I went back before getting ready for this talk and looked at all the new stuff that got in there and I was like Whoa, there's really some cool stuff including ideas that I've done in other software But like one up in really nice ways, so it's not a it's paid But I'm going to work with them to get the tool he built Making it better, and then if he's got some workaround for something that's broken. We want to fix it Learning more. There's a bunch of stuff Again, I've gone over a lot of this stuff in super detail Breaking dojo site has like millions of hours of free learning a brown blender and mostly the NLA Editing motion capture editing around cycles Madness that I've stumbled upon All kinds stuff you can hack it with constraints or you know when I when someone sends me something broken I've tried to put it there There's a ton of stuff. I'm gonna share this on my website, so don't run don't worry about it, but the editing motions this is like all all free stuff and then the Frame ranger add-on is the other one. I'm gonna mention just real quick it's Been updated and it it's a full management system for actions including like Managing what's visible to an object so you can basically say I'm gonna load all the cell phone actions on to here And when you pick it you only see those and you can kind of manage and do some really cool stuff plus batch import hundreds of fbx's and Just it's really cool. It's like, you know motion-builder light is really what frame you know frame ranger Like I don't know what that is, but really it's a full Action management system and it's really awesome like including like when you pick an action It changes the frame range of your timeline instead of you guessing like oh, how many frames is this? Yeah, so All that said Q8 time, but live demo time, so we'll jump over to actual Blender and I'm starting with this rig one. It was free someone shared it. It's the neon rig and I will Again when I post this stuff, I will credit and link everybody, but Mixamo gets used a lot, especially if you're in a hurry or someone's just you know trying to make stuff Mixamo at released a Blender add-on that rigs things and it's compatible with Mixamo Skeleton animation so you can retarget without having to do a bunch of hacks, right? So if you're just trying to pre-vis something and you're already in Mixamo or you've got a bunch of stuff the Mixamo character rig will basically Rig an existing Mixamo armature and then you can load data in and that's documented on their site so what I you know I loaded in like a bunch of stuff and now I have these actions and The first demo of this I'm just gonna kind of go through so there's the stand idle at the bottom and then I decided You know what she's just standing around too long And so now she squats down into the stand to crouch and then pops back up because maybe someone threw something at her She's telling people about the NLA and you know They didn't want to hear it and then she looks left and it almost it's less of a look left than like oh no I ducked and dropped my gum. I'm not sure. I'm not sure what that action is, but This is just a simple. Oh, yeah, that's it. Yeah, it helps if I don't deselect things So I'm gonna turn this little button off again real quick just to show you so right now This is all the actions. I see if I turn this select off. There aren't anything else in the scene So I don't have any more actions, but I also don't have Like a visible control of what's new and coming in and while I can still kind of get to stuff on the end panel And hit new It's just it this makes sense to me to keep on because now I can kind of when I go key frame something I can Do some cool stuff, right? I can I know where I'm visibly adding it and in this case The extrapolation has nothing hold or hold forward These words don't mean anything really to you and sometimes they don't mean anything to me, but For the most part if I have a hold It says both directions when you set a key for the selected object It basically just forever in both directions just like setting a key in time and so I'll show you that real quick So I have blending mode on replace, which is what who remembers what? Masking. Yes. Very good. It's coven friendly It's masking off the animation and when I select all the things and I hit key frame I added 814 key frames for location rotation a New action has appeared Look at that right there a new action called armature action. It's a useless name, but It doesn't matter because this track can be renamed as dumb It's a dumb action because right now it basically just masks off all my animation. It's gone sad I Don't know if this will work, but I'm gonna try because I created. Yeah, so you have this influence No, I just haven't selected so this influence now I can play back my loop and I can kind of basically just dull my motion down and if I Here I'll graph that there so now I can say you know what I like that first pose and I like all this stuff But she you know she's crazy looking with all this like leaning to the side and spitting her gum out and ducking So I just wanted to like tone that down so now she looks more reasonable to be like closer in frame or if your camera is close to her whatever and Once I'm done with like setting like oh, yeah, this one offset or new pose Is kind of just calming her down? Awesome mocap is too, you know, maybe someone was just Caffeinated and running around so this is really fast-weighted basically just Instantly interactively choose how much action is coming from this clip I Said I created it one key I told it to hold and mask everything and now I can basically just adjust this now This is animatable But not right here because this is still kind of just controlling the creation and This is the next place where everyone steps on Legos or gets hit in the face with pie or whatever You want to whatever your favorite cartoon, you know birds spinning around your head? The action editor who uses the action editor oh, there's like a few Who knows how to find it quickly? Oh That's a trick question You can jump to dope sheet and then drop down or like make a script and use brave rabbit shell for like, you know Hope that you remember to jump to dope sheet and then you actually wanted the action editor. I Don't really you know I'm sure there's better ways, but I'm just gonna Say why do we care about the action editor because there's this there's this button. That's completely obvious and it says push down or stash and One sounds like it's hiding from the police and the other is like push down what where and why and And and so you roll over it in the action editor Let's jump over there and see how intuitive this is we dope sheet dope sheet action editor And it looks like nothing's changed and if you blink you didn't know it changed except for There's this little box here that doesn't update the width and some shields to You know arrest it and delete stuff and then there's this giant push down button You want to push this thing down? Where the hell did it go? The what I don't know what that is the NLA. I'm not in LA. I'm in Amsterdam Where did it go? Oh my god this thing. Oh Well, huh It NLA track. What's that? I don't know what just happened. It's gone. It's there, but I don't know why So let's undo and see oh undo works good. So my dumb track is going to Disappear in a second, but I'm going to push this down and Notice two things the dumb track is now NLA track, which is really helpful because that's you know It was dumb so dumb that it was like I don't remember what I was doing. It's gone It creates a new track when you push it down, but because I'm doing it in the NLA with this little obvious button This thing right this this non-fifth it compliant Push down action pushes down to the top of the NLA strike track as a new strip Does it it creates a track? And it adds a strip Hold on Hmm. Let's see. I'm going to add an action strip. Am I or add a track? I added a track And I'm gonna call this Smart Did I spell it right that'd be good? Now it's smart. It's spelled so we're going from dumb to smart. So now I'm gonna push it down huh Now if there's an existing Track the strip gets created in it and it's smart. It says hey, this is a went where I wanted it So the initial name doesn't really matter even though it tells you to name it I haven't yet you have to find a reason why but if you have an existing track there Then it goes where you tell it like a computer does go there. It does it does exactly what you tell it so now I have this little this little blip and Now I'm gonna try to show you the difference between hold nothing and hold forward a Few versions ago. This was impossible to understand because the display said I always look the same No matter what I do So right now If I set this to nothing You saw her update. Maybe if I go back to hold She jumps down a little bit if I go to nothing she stops if I scrub all the way over here So I hit that one spot so right now it's saying do nothing except for exactly what this clip is doing and so I'm going to Move the end of this out and now It's going to Still do nothing once you're off the clip, but it's just like hey, I'm I'm now just holding this table I'm not gonna care about the whole row That you know, and if something happens, it's not gonna just like knock them off the end and shoot them out the window. I Want you to know something else and this is This is still this should be fixed for animation layer stuff The influence value that we had I liked the tone down motion now when you push this When you push it to a track Whether it creates it itself or you add it There's now a little line here and guess what? Where would you find what that is? The animated influence you say yes, that's correct. Where is that? Action clip. All right, we've had someone who already uses it a breakthrough. He knows how to still use it so down here on the smart track Notice that the the clip name is now this is a whoa The track name goes to the strip so Again from the action editor. You don't really see it. It goes away and you're like What did I name it? That was dumb. Yeah, it was that's what I named it It's on the smart track now. This doesn't matter. I can call it smart Something I'll leave it smart the clip is dumb and now there's this new little checkbox Over there animated influence Why is that there? It's because we started with the influence value So we toned it down and when we pushed it. It's like oh, yeah, I should keep that value and it sets a key frame For it and it sets it at the value So now I've started to layer some adjustments To just this like stand to crunch now, right? Like maybe I didn't want to like tone down the whole thing But just this action Or I decided you know what the stand to look left was really the problem. So I'm going to scoot this down So this was fine And then I'm going to turn this off for a second And notice that it kind of has a square bracket around it So now I've got stand to left. This was just the one that was like really bugging me So I'm going to turn this back on And now she just tosses her head. So that's better. I'm happy with that And you know now I can be careful with it and kind of you know extend it a little bit But if I really decide I just wanted to go back to the whole thing I can set it back to hold Or I can say hold forward because the animation up to this point is fine But for my fix forward and anything else I add to it. I want to just keep going so You have the choice to say affect everything or just stay keep to yourself It's masking. It's keeping to itself It's it's a 22 22 culturally aware strip With an animated value and if you don't want to animate this you don't have to keep it animated You can you know unanimated or you can uncheck it And just again you can still compare So this isn't geometry nodes by any stretch of the imagination, but it starts to give you the ability to quickly Test ideas and get feedback and show directors and show animation or show yourself when you come back from lunch You're like, I don't know if I like all these changes. Did I actually go backward? Which I would like to admit that that never happens. I've never worked on something really really hard to find that in the end It was worse Yes way too often don't do it, but you can't help it your artist animator or tech artist So, you know the modelers that's just their jam, but Our stuff looks amazing all the time until you hit spline or you come back and look at it and go who did this So we have these controls and I'm going to stop Looking at this here in a second, but I just want you to understand a couple things If you don't do anything else with the nla This should give you a hint at how to start Testing your ideas faster and iterate on things without destroying all your work Now what if I don't like that pose anymore? Where are my keyframes because you know, I see a key down here, but It's probably not anything but the animated strip time Right, it's probably just like hanging out and if I was to go to the graph editor Which I'm not going to do out of principle Uh, it's it can you know, it's just one key, but what about the whole rest of the animation? What if I grab this, uh, I want to see the stand idle What? Mine what you sound like birds tab tab Cowb Yes Excellent What is that what happened? Yeah, so this white on green text is super readable Beautiful It turns green And now what do I do? Well, I see all the keys selected and I can jump over now to the graph editor And you know I have keys And you know what I don't care about this because I know how to use animation layers The people that spent all week tweaking their graft handles and tangents and weights Are scared to death because that is a nightmare scenario But really if you zoom in this is just the end of all your tweaks Like you know, maybe one or two frames in there that are interpolated But you spent all this time making this mess because the splines were doing The job of undoing all your work you had carefully crafted So tab to find this and I don't want to look at anymore, but that's what you do and it turns bright green And it says like hey now it's editable But What happened to the edits? Huh, I want to see the changes on the base layer based on what's going on above it Who knows the answer? Yeah Ding ding ding But I'm going to try to let someone else answer because I almost guarantee you won't have the answer I'm not going to bet money because he knew it, but That's a that's a trick question so Action editor, but the action editor won't show me what stand crouch looks like when I change stand idle Thank you for playing try again I hit tab and go back under the super intuitive edit menu At the top Full stack Boom Now I'm editing the keys on the base layer The stand idle But I'm seeing it in relation to what's happening above The stack all of my edits So now if I go to the graph editor and I do something crazy like be destructive or just move stuff You know, I will eventually see the changes and Oh Thanks undo we won't do that again But the full stack gives you information about the whole thing So that's cool, and it's not default so when you hit tab you have to know it's there I'm going to tab back out of that because that was scary and a close call But I just again this is we have a 28 page document full of nla improvements and this morning I made 12 more additions to my note on my phone About what we could make better and improve And again, it still is usable as is Unless we break it Which that also never happens So This start tweaking full stack was an awesome addition that the animation module helped bring into fruition And there are another a few things like I'm going to take credit for this because this is my first commit to actually Building blender testing something and submitting a patch and getting committed You can bake action from the nla again I don't know what version this disappeared, but I don't know if it was ever there But I know that I could find it and bake action from the nla and then one day it was gone And I had to go hunt around for it and I was like no no no it should be in there So you can now bake action again from the nla Both selecting it from the menu or searching for it, which is super exciting All of this is is a read the manual, but Um The thing I will want to point out is um If you're happy with this whole edit and you don't have Object and pose keys because you're not doing root animation You open it and you set the frame range to something intelligent and um You you bake it and If you have root motion and I will again not admit how long this took me to see Figure out because I watched a lot of videos Uh, you can shift select object and bake both the object and the pose keys at the same time And if you have the add-on that bakes properties when you have rigify fkik switches All that stuff will also bake so you don't lose those switches Um, and so I'm going to not override a current action. I'm going to hit okay And I think I still had everything selected. We will see what happens Uh baking Still is working a work in progress I I said intelligent frame range, but I really should have just done like 12 frames So while that's working when it bakes and I also picked objects, so you know I I will say I don't open this very often anymore because I used a cool little add-on called brave rabbit shelf And I shoved some code in there that basically just sets up my baking and so I have a bake Object pose selected I have a bake all and I have a bunch of code that's just shoved in the side And then I added it to a quick menu And right now it's not there because I shut off a lot of add-ons just because I wanted to be able to read the shelf but brave rabbit tools You can find some really cool stuff and again, I'll link all that stuff from the rigging dojo blog but brave rabbit has been running around the blender conference And uh has produced some really cool driver tools and really cool stuff, but the shelf is It's great. You want code to run You shove it there and you just add to the shelf and there's no add-on So I have Cleaned up my baking process quite a bit or you've used a paid add-on Like animation layers or nla tools and they've got some really cool stuff to help with baking So I've baked this to the the the action And now the entire edit is in this thing and there's some feet slip and you know, there's some stuff to clean up, but I can turn these off and just make sure that everything worked correctly And so now this edit's kind of done And we do want to be able to clean this up a little more But you know now you're back to a base action and you can just go here and start deleting things You know like animators do and select stuff and and do do do your destructive editing and do your stuff um Or you can come in here and Start layering again And now i'm actually going to turn off a selection just because I don't want this But if I have selection off, there's all this stuff. Oh, that's what's happening. Sorry. There's a bug fix for this, but uh That's why leave selection on but this has been fixed by the way. Thank you I don't know who did the patch, but it was it was like this week um In my version of blender if I click and drag in the like side area here The armature gets deselected And so you lose your selection. So just be aware. That's what happens and why I just went like, uh, why did that go? I I am in lts just for The added danger All right, so Why i'm pointing this out is and then you know, I'm gonna take a break you guys can stretch and ask questions for a second um When we go back to bake I've baked it once and you know what I I don't want to just keep generating action over action over action And you know, I'm sure most of you know this but if I turn on over at current action And I set this much time here now we'll do like whatever And I'm only gonna bake pose So I can bake it and just to overwrite a section of it So I'm just basically pushing back to the current live destructive action because I don't want to just generate 400 copies and it's no good So setting overwrite current action With one live and then you can you know, basically just ignore this stuff It's really handy or you decide like none of it's good and you just come in here and delete it But also notice that the strip Influence was still there. So let me undo that real quick I'm gonna put that back to one and push it down Okay, so that's the full animation And I don't like it and so I come back to dumb and I go, you know what? I This was a bad choice and I delete you and now I can go back to my menu without leaving the nla Because I put it there bake action and I can overwrite Oh, I set it to 250 again This is why I scripted this because I When you go to bake action it always resets the end frame So immediately that was the first thing I did was I wanted to grab the frame range that like for selected strip vocabulary I if I have a strip selected it will only bake that and you know some other stuff But that actually went pretty fast because I only baked pose And so now I just decided like ah that edit was bad and I've deleted and gone back to you know make a new action so This is one way to start working with it as a clip layering tool to create something There are of course ways if you have really nice animation like on norah where everything is just Animated to sync up you can just stack the clips and play them back, but There isn't a good way to offset root motion without kind of hacking the object or putting it in the rig so I prefer to kind of layer it this way as a as an exploration tool to kind of create a new mix of motion than trying to stack Strips in a row But there are patches in the works to allow this to like transform the strip so you can align things and you know have them Align in space and link together instead of jumping back So that's again those are fixes that are coming or you have existing patches hidden away But right now I kind of prefer this as a strip Management tool this still isn't full layered animation by the way This is just kind of like remixing with existing motion capture that I grabbed from mix and mo All right, I don't know how much time I've got left But yes you do Okay Good, so I'm going to show you. Well, so I lied you can stand up when we're over um This is the thing that again came up uh yesterday. Let's see. Do I have it? Loaded no, okay. Let me open my other file real quick Uh, I know but people want to get to cool stuff or beer or something. I don't know Yeah, actually that'd be fine All right, hold on don't save I did have a clip ready that was like finished Oh, no, that's why because I did not name it correctly Uh layer versus okay Cool And I have my workspace hidden away Because again, I have a lot of add-ons So, you know just a few to to work with this stuff But somewhere in brave rabbit shelf is a thing that basically just says like You know action editor or reload scripts or whatever so I whatever you add to it You can add to the quick forever many. All right. That's that's less important. But what I want to show you is Base layer animation layer one animation layer two Um Again, I said you can name these whatever you want So if you're working in animation layers name them and so if this is garbage And this is garbage two And this is garbage three If you have a little snip at a python that I randomly found at four in the morning the other night Uh, you can basically Oh, no, did I not I didn't make an add no, hold on Just kidding animation layer rename. Ah brave rabbit shelf to the rescue So that was a little bit of code and look my animation layers are renamed and I have a new layer ready to push keys to So when I go over here and insert keys in object mode because that's what I wanted to do when I insert keys and I Push it down it goes to the layer I want. Yay animation layers But I still want to export all this So I jump from this animation layer scene to export And my export scene has export control And whatever noise I wanted it and now I can start naming these and organizing the export And how do you do this you say? well I had the idea in a random conversation At blender conference the other day and I went home and I said I probably should test this out And so the way that this managed to work was If I delete this export scene If you've never looked for where the nla tracks live just like actions everything lives under the object or the armature So here you can see base layer animation layer or whatever And I go to create a new scene And if I do new I have nothing and you can link stuff, of course But if I copy settings it's not quite what I want linked is great If you want to have one animation, but you know a bunch of other stuff going on So you can have kind of like scene separation or I'm going to do a full copy And in the new scene animation layer, whatever this will be named export If I delete these strips I say don't hold my seed anymore And I call this Export or whatever it is these don't matter and now I select export And or oh, you know what I should call this default Because that's what it'll become. Thank you. And I can go up to add and I can say add action strip Make sure that the make sure you selected the track and now I can add the crouch and not there I just you know Rewind And I can go to this one and call this, you know, whatever Run or whatever it was doesn't matter at number two animation And add the action and pick the idle And so now when I jump back to animation layers And I come in and I do something like you know what this source idle action is now source idle dot final Because I'm really certain this is approved It's final dude no problem and I go to export And when I look inside this strip and I say hey, buddy What are you holding and it says stand idle final? I'm going to export that to the game. Are you sure? You can rename it final to underscore 15. I slept. I fell asleep. I rekey framed I got a new job. I came back and this animation was still unapproved Dot two and Source stand to crouch will still go to the game and export and you're good to go So you can export this scene And spit it out and as long as you don't update the rig You know you the rig at least is approved because again every time the rig is solid from the start Everything's set. Everything's good ready to go So this is one way to manage export with the nla separate from animation layers To work flow between the two or just choose to use one aspect of it and There's another 12 hours of listening me drone on about this on all kinds of platforms or ranting on you twitter, but You know my goal for this and I want you all to help me is just if someone's not using the nla show them it Like my friend jason who wasn't sure about animation layers, but now he's the convert amen Slash thinking about it really hard Or you're just managing export and you don't want to mess up the animation file every time and you learned a cool trick at the Nor talk so Hopefully you can share these ideas point people to it let them understand it and then the last request If you're already a user and we break it. I don't want to hear about it If we do something awesome Absolutely tweet it to all your friends and if you want input and feedback. I am the The road map master of time keeping of the nla the nla road map unofficial Keeper of bugs and priorities. So please message me with requests the and code That fix cool stuff for both export and the nla and Weird requests say I use this to make transforming werewolves and cool characters because action constraints are hard So I shove all this stuff in the thing and then I use geometry nodes Um, I just have to throw that in there so that maybe someone searching for geometry nodes gets trapped on youtube and into the nla talk And then they're like, yes animation layers, uh, so yeah, that's the that's the pitch and Q&A after or go get a drink and come back um You can find me on twitter the my company is rigging dojo I've taught rigging and animation for over 10 years through that and support companies I'm linked from there, but that's where you can find me easily and all of the resources i've got If you are a converted other software user I have some really nice free information that you can share with your friends that Don't want to hear about it anymore And then you they can watch it and convert and come back and bother you about how cool blender is um Come to the blender module chat and join a meeting And uh stand up and introduce yourself for a second The man the myth the legend Master of time himself I'm super into drawing And that's it