Blender NLA - ACTIONS clips DEMYSTIFIED (2021) [Export to Unity, Lens Studio, Spark AR, etc]
Why Blender Stack Exchange recommends it
Blender Stack Exchange users link it when someone is confused about how Actions and NLA tracks relate, or needs a walkthrough of pushing actions to the NLA.
Recommended by 2 people across 2 different months, 2020 to 2022.
What it is
A 22-minute Blender tutorial explaining how Actions, the Action Editor and the Nonlinear Animation (NLA) editor fit together. It covers pushing actions down to NLA tracks, naming clips with frame ranges, and export settings for Unity, Lens Studio and Spark AR. Presented by the Activemotionpictures channel.
What people said
Recommends Pierre Schiller · 2020-10 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Is there a way to take keyframes and snap them to the value of neighbors keys?”
You use the NLA for this. Maya also has one. Here's a walkthrough: [this video] You animate in your Fcurve. Open a dopesheet window, switch it to ACTION. Set your first keyframe (it doesn't matter where) and name the action: Breathe_1_10 (if you want to identify the duration for your keyframes, this is very helpful as you will produce ACTION clips). When you're done animating, press PUSH to NLA. Open an NLA window, you will see an unnamed NLA track, double click it. Name it the same as your action (Breathe_1_10) and now your character's OWN NLA will be available to you wherever you port your character with your breathing animation. While in the NLA window, press N, go to STRIP tab on the right si
Recommends Mentalist · 2022-08 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Actions seem to overlap when animating”
I can relate. How actions affect other actions can be tricky to understand at first. (It's similar to the concept of blend modes with layered images.) The best advice I can offer is to watch several video tutorials on Actions / the NLA Editor. Here is one such tutorial [this video] that I have personally found helpful. So I encourage you to start with video tutorials, and if you find out how to solve your problem, consider posting an answer to your own question. It might help someone else.
Cites frostymm · 2021-01 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Animation Keyframes only appear in "NonLinear Animation" window”
Only just starting to learn blender animation so I'm trying to follow some basic tutorials with the FBX I'm using for my game in unity. I was looking at this: [LINK] But when I perform the steps to add a keyframe, neither the dope sheet, nor the timeline populate. The keyframe does get added somewhere though, since my character still moves when scrubbing between frames. Eventually I found them in the "Nonlinear animation" window. So of course I started trying to figure out what that even is which led me down a whole different rabbit hole in which most people don't actually understand what it is either. So I tried to learn more about "NLA" which is... at least related if not the nonlinear ani