3D Art
Separating the flare blender animations
Monday, February 20, 2012 - 16:15
Hi. I'm making my first 3D game, and I'd like to use the flare blender files. I need to be able to access individual animation by name, but it seems that the flare blender files have every animation (running, attacking, dieing,) Stored in one animation called "my_animation." I've never used blender, and I'm wondering how easy it would be to seperate this animation in to multiple animations with different names. If it's not too hard, can someone explain how to do it, or point me in the right direction? Thanks!
Hi, open up a dope sheet window (window type is the icon in lower left corner of each window) first.
Next to the menues (View Select .. Key) you can change the window type again, choose here action editor.
A bit more to the right, after the magnifying glass icon, is the list of the available actions (starts with a icon consisting out of 3 "diamonds", one yellow, others white). Right after this list there are 3 buttons, F, +, X. If you press the + button, you create a new action that is a copy of the action you viewed before. in the top area of this window are all the keyframes. Hover mouse here and press A 1 or 2 times, until all diamonds are white (deselected). Then press B and draw a box selection around the part that determines the first animation. Maybe you can get a list like "Animation A goes from frame X to Y", or you figure it out by watching. After selecting the animation, press ctrl-I to invert selection, then press X to delete the selected keyframes. After that, rename the animation (just click and type into the list field), and, important, press the F button next to the list, or they might not get saved with the blend file.
After that, go back to the action that contains the whole animation, and grab the next action.
That was kinda brief and 3/4 off hand, if something appears to be different to you or you have more questions, feel free to ask more.
Wow, thanks a lot! I don't have time to try this at the moment, but I'll let you know how it goes when I do. :)
Side note. Currently I have all the animations mushed together because I didn't know better when I started doing this.
I assume having each animation separate is more standard. I'd like to do that with new models moving forward.
I'm not sure how it's going to affect my Python script. Right now I run the script and it generates all the frames for all animations, in order, each direction. If I had the animations separated I'd have extra frames on some animations (just keyframes to get the pose to and from the standard Stance), and I'd want to ignore those on output. Anyone do this before?
I haven't done this before and I don't know anything about python, but if each animation starts and ends with a keyframe for each bone and does not contain any interpolation frames, there shouldn't be any interpolations created? But maybe I am just not understanding the problem fully.
Thank you so much riidom! Worked perfectly! Just one more problem. I believe that the looping animations are supposed to go back and forth. What I mean by this is that instead of going through the frames like this:
1>2>3>4>1>2>3>4>1...
They're supposed to go like this:
1>2>3>4>3>2>1>2>3>4>3...
So, I need to make it happen like that in the blend file. Any idea how I can do this?
EDIT: Also wanted to note that I'm a big fan of Flare and your artwork, clint!
B-key to box-select a single frame (there is also a hotkey/menu item to select all keyframes on the current frame, you can examine that from one of the menues that are on bottom of this window.
Shift-D to duplicate the selection (move mouse and click to confirm new position of duplicate)
G-key to just move the selection.
I am not 100% sure if it will work like this, since the frames are not completely baked (means: a key for each bone in each frame), as I have seen it. Give it a try, if the results look strange, I am pretty confident there can be found a solution for it as well.
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"EDIT: Also wanted to note that I'm a big fan of Flare and your artwork, clint!"
+1 :)
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