Animate Like A Pro In Blender | NLA Non Linear Animation Editor Tutorial 

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 :)

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

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😮

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.

😀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

You are a killer Blender contributor and teacher amigo! Love your stuffs!

I'm basically first so...

Fantastic tutorial. By far the most comprehensive NLA tutorial on youtube.

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 :)

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.

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!!

i wish my brain understood this

Thank you so much... You just saved me from Copying and Pasting THOUSANDS of Keyframes.

Hii, its great video i have a question how to merge many NLA to single NLA from different object, its for export to unity ? can you help me please?

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.

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.

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

pov: AW MAN I DON'T HAVE AN $$$ PC (MOM PLS BUY) Mom: no because you don't ahve good grades in school

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

You helped a lot...THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!!

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

The NLA looks very similar to a multitrack MIDI/audio sequencer, would that be a fair comparison? Excellent tutorial BTW!

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...

Where did my f curves go? Are they destroyed once you push them into the NLA? Edit: Found them....after flaming the NLA editor for about 15 minutes. Previous Layer/ Next Layer arrows on the Action Editor if anyone else is wondering.

Amazing tutorial! Thank you :)

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.

Anyone knows why actions that aren't in a track (0) get deleted when reopening the file? I don't get the logic to it. When, for instance, you link your character in another file and you make a proxy of the armature, the armature has the tracks from the original file, and those can't be move up and down in the NLA editor. I thought it would be could to have the NLA editor clean and I just removed the tracks from the original file, only to discover all data is lost as the actions themselves get deleted.

I don't get it. I can't get my action to repeat. I set repeat and I see the new "action chunks" but when I press ALT+A it only plays the action once. WTF is going on. Why is blender animation tools so crap to use.

If you want to export your combined NLA animation to UE4, do you need to collapse it or bake it down into a single file somehow?

woot! Feel like the is an under represented blender topic. Thank!

Is there any way to make an action from multiply objects animation? I just want to make such simple task as grouping animations into 'folders' to keep the dopesheet understandable and this simple task seems to be impossible in Blender........

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 😁

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.

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?

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.

16:47 Bookmark. Extrapolation: Holds the end of an action strip indefinitely.

Why the hell are you twitching your mouse like crazy The mouse pointer focuses on important things !!!

Hi please make more tutorial on NLA Animation 😘 thank you I'm waiting your next NLA tutorial 😭

If we wanna render multiple animations turn by turn from the same blender file. Could we do that by checking off and on the checkbox button of nla tracks?

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 🙏

this is the most helpful animation tutorial ive seen. ive seen a bunch where they show you how to do individual animations but this seems way more practical and time efficient. thanks man your duh best!

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?

That’s gold

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

MAn the fact, that the Keyframes just get straight up deleted is so bad... i messed up my entire project by trying the NLA shitetor

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 didn't understand the difference between the Replace and Combine mixing animation modes in NLA editor (?)

how to add new for action look around in 23.17. because in my project there is no new button.

thank you this is very helpful pixar shall tremble in fear as i animate my cube with this NLA tool

i like your videos, just wanna ask if I can merge two NLA to only one? I will use that to transfer to unity for our game. hope you notice thank you.

I have an issue that when I push down something in the NLA, I can't see the keyframes in the dope sheet even if I select my NLA track then go into edit mode. Any way to fix that? I'm getting a bit desperate

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!

I guess you need to animate directly the bones for this to work ? Like, all the animation you want to push down into an action needs to be made on a single object, the armature in this case, so if I animated the armature using many curves as controllers, I'm a little bit screwed ? 😅

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)

How can you retroactively insert an action into the animation without having to mess everything else up? Is there a way to do this in blender? I'm really struggling here.

what if the action editor does not show every key frame point that can be moved for a given control bone ... what would cause it to not work or to not let me move key frames for a given movement after initial keying

Thank you! Would we use the work flow for building animation that will be sent to Unreal?

From the start to minut 8 i learned sooo much life change stuff , thanks here we Go to the Full vídeo ! 🖤🖤🖤

I listened to the first 1 minute of this video then I instantly subscribed subconsciously.

Excellent presentation of NLA stack and application.

thank u , u literely changed my all animation procces , bless u

Dude when the fuck did you add in that second Hold pose at 24:40 and how? Whenever I try to repeat the hold pose the character jumps back to the original location instead of holding at the new location it ended up in after walking

Great video. Very helpful. Thanks!

You say in order to save an animation you have to "assign it to something" or "protect the data block". How do you do these things?

So informative, intuitive, and concise! Thank you so much

When I mark pushdown is it normal to lose the f-curves in the graph editor?

Got stuck at the first step. Pressed I but it didn't set a key. Frustrating to use this program.

This video was very helpful, thanks for making it!

Great video! Is there a way to export, or turn the resulting animation into a new Action?

We love this tutorial... errm I mean I yes we definitely mean I!

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.

Is there a way to combine Multiple strips into 1 single strip?

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!

Couldn’t be any more clear! Thanks brother

This seems to me to be the greatest authority on nla Blender, he knows a lot.

13:14 Pose > Clear transform all. Resets rig to default pose.

Great, my animation skills will get way better thanks to this video

kindly create more animation Content videos if possible

Why do his feet lose so much friction while walking

how can i scale the animation and make it longer without slowing it in (nonliner animation)

The most instructive tutorial about animation I have ever encounter

Thank you. so much. You solved my problem

what if someone models the whole thing and rigs the droid and sells it for half the price.

Great video, i'm from 3dsmax and Maya. Is that some sort of visual animation layer for Blender? If so , i feel like that graph window is a bit overkill since only element you need is 3 buttons ; ['offset'] and ['repeat : on-off'] and ['push down'] ,is there a simplified version of it?

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. ✌️☕️🎩🎩🎩

Extremely helpful good sir.

Hello Chris, great video, I have a question regarding the NLA tracks: how about exporting as glTF2 for a game when you got multiple actions in different tracks on the same armature? I am having an issue, I have a human with full armature into flight simulator, I need in game to control 2 arms for joysyick and throttle and legs for pedals. In order to do this, I have 1 armature with multiple tracks and each track has 1 action. The issue is that I end up having animations mixing up in game (moving the right arm animation, will also affect the left arm animation). If i bake the single tracks one by one, I solve the arms mixing issue but still animations are somehow mixing (the animations lenght for all the moving bones is shorter and different as in blender). If i export 1 track at the time, the single animations look correct in game... Am i missing something within NLA?

Such a useful video, thanks mate.

This has been really helpful, subscribed!

ah helped to demystify actions and nla, thanks !

How do you modify actions, let's say I wanted it to gradually slow down the animation via some type of modifier...?

VERY helpful! thank you!

Bro it is awesome tutorial, thank you soo much.

this cleared up so much for me thank you

awesome as usual indeed

Thanks for making this, it's quite an unexplored feature for me. And I was looking for something exactly like this for animations

I did find this super helpful & applying it on my current project. Thanks for this video it is excellent! Much love!

Hi, How can we synchronize the forward animation with the walking cycle?

Great series of tutorials, thank you!

This tutorial just saved me a lot of time. 😅👌