wow. that sloughing part blew me kilometers aways, basically additive NLA has the power of using just 1 keyframe to completely change personality, mood, energy ,etc. damn!
10:55 The reason combine fixes the idle to walk overlap is because you were previously replacing, and when an animation is not fully weighted in, it is effectively being "blended" (aka Lerped) between the actual pose and the model's reference pose (conceptually the "zero" pose if you think of every bone's pos/rot/scale as a massive multidimensional vector). When you switch to combine, it's taking the weighted average of each track that is overlapping, and combining them together. The math is something like "Store the sum of all weights of tracks you want to blend between. For each track, divide the track weight by the sum of all weights, and store this biased weight. *Add* together each track's pose with biased weight. (i.e. lerp between reference pose and actual pose using biased weight)". Essentially the combine is a sum-of-weighted-averages-of-sources. But the weights might have a "normalize" step so that even if you are blending a track with a weight of 0.5 with a track of weight 0.25, it will scale those weights so that they add up to 1 (0.66 + 0.33). Done this myself with unity playables, which are the underlying API for Unity Director Tracks, which are very close to these NLAs. The math is basically the same.
I think you can prove that a semi-weighted in track lerps towards its reference pose by changing the influence of the track to zero - but because the control rig setup might be complicated it may look like garbage.
I was beginning to lose interest in animating because of my frustration with the NLA. I found your video's and you really explain it so well. I can't wait to put to practice what I have learned! Thanks so much!
Dude you just unlocked level 99 for me. Now I can create my own Animated films using Mixamo animations :D Thanks a billion! That Hold Forward thingy was my biggest problem especially with flip animations. Thanks to you I puzzled together a animation tweak like no other, my new techniques sure are sloppy but it works like a charm now.
You are my hero. Please pardon me while I shower you with complements. Superficially, I have to say, while your accent is fun (but very understandable), your English is immaculate. Thank you for your clear, logical progression of instruction. Just when my brain asks a question, you answer it-clearly and completely. You are a master-level instructor of concepts. There is simply no better A-Z Blender animation tutorial playlist than yours. I feel like I can now accomplish anything with Actions and NLA. So many artists (Ian Hubert) blaze through one-minute tutorials, showing how fast they can do things, that you're left almost more confused than if you hadn't watched the video in the first place (as if they're showing off how fast they can do things). You teach at the pace, and with the level of detail, that I reckon makes the most valuable difference to your followers. There is one missing piece for me that would help... I can see the value of using rigify to manipulate characters; however, when I watch these tutorials, the actual manipulation of the character goes by so fast, I end up lost. I would love a simple video on how to efficiently manipulate a rigify model. Those controls look fancy, and I have inferred from your tutorial which control is the chest, for example; however, I would love it if you would make a simple video showing which controls are which, and how to effectively manipulate the rigify model to engage in various poses. I get G, R, S for move, rotate, scale-I just don't know which control to grab to quickly manipulate the model-and, this whole thing about IK, and switching from IK to FK and back, and key-framing that it is still very fuzzy to me. For all I know, you already have videos on this subject on your channel, so I’m going to go through your videos and see. :-) That being said, your description of some of the shortcuts you use in the interface, and alternate methods to accomplish similar results is SO helpful. I'm going to re-watch this video several times just to pick up on those nuggets of gold. Thank you, thank you, thank you! SUBSCRIBED! LIKED! Now I have to figure out this Patreon thing.
Hey, thank you for the thoughtful comment. Appreciate it! If you don't mind I may use parts of it as "praise for the CGDive" at some point. First, I may have just the video for you ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-vKgH5zXIYmM.html In this one, I show the main Rigify controls, explain FK/IK, etc. For setting Keyframes, maybe this one? ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-p3m57yAcsi0.html All the one-minute tutorials actually made me very anxious when I first started making my videos. It felt like no one would watch my 30min+ vids and I just couldn't make them any shorter without losing context etc. Fortunately, I found out that enough people appreciate this format :) Oh, and I am aware of how I sound. I am just not a good speaker with a thick accent on top. What you hear is me trying really, really hard :P I should do some voice training but there are more important things at the moment haha
@@CGDive You misunderstand me... you are an EXCELLENT speaker. I could only hope to be as clear and precise with language as you. It's perfect, in my opinion. Frankly, it's one of the reasons I have subscribed, and am lavishing you with praise. And your accent is very enjoyable-and not so thick that it detracts from clarity.
All the same, working with NLA is still very cumbersome and inconvenient. This is one of the pain points of the blender. Even in Godot, the work with different animations is somehow more welcoming. I think, or rather I hope, that everything nodes projects will fix these shortcomings. And thank you very much for the video! As always awesome ^__^
To be honest I haven't worked with another similar system so I can't make a comparison. This is a common problem with Blender tho. It has the tools, they are just not organized in a way that is enjoyable to use. When I first needed to use NLA for a project it was super painful as things just weren't working as I expected. But after figuring out how it works it's not that bad. And I tried to share solutions for the major pain points I experienced. How will everything nodes affect the nla?
@@CGDive I discovered how to correct NLA glitches in much of my bone orientations after attempting to blend two animations. I simply need the hip bone to accurately perform the correct motions of let's say a flip move from a Mixamo FBX. Then after performing what you showed here I get a partial blended animation maybe a combo of idle+run+flip+idle/walk cycle. Prior to getting help from your video here I couldn't figure out how to effectively blend my animations. It's mainly a flip animation that doesn't work well no matter how I initially attempt to blend it. So I just gave up on the blending aspect and instead used whatever good by product I could muster up from every possible combination of blended animation fails I generated using the NLA (Joining two different action strips). I then added another clean FBX to the scene of that flip animation itself which already had a idle motion built into it. I copy pasted all of its keyframes onto the new by product blended animation that included the original flip in it. The one that got the hip bone adjust I was seeking via the NLA (Used the Hold Forward technique you showed us here to reset the origin point to align a run cycle with that flip, but the flip had faulty leg and arm movements afterwards). So I copied everything except for the hip mind you from the clean flip animation. That way the copied keyframes won't send my blended by product back to the origin point. Presto! it worked no more errors/glitches in my blended animation. However, I had to bake the by product with errors and all before copying them keyframes to its bones. I'll soon be showing folks my fix for it so to showcase the entire issue and cool tweak I discovered. Could fix a great many people's animation fails using the NLA. Thanks again for all the help this tutorial was essential for me to discover the glitch and quick sloppy fix.
Thank you so much for explaining this! I'm making my first character animation sequence ever, and it's for a client, and this is a total game changer for me. Cheers!
What a perfect timing, I am doing animations with only dopesheet and graph editor. and I am still learning NLA animation combinations. Thank you so much.
@@CGDive I hope we can also use delta transform while using animation strips, it works good in case of dopesheet. I haven't tried animation strips before. So I am curious.
@@AlberTesla1024 To be honest I am scared of delta transforms and rarely use them so I can't say much about this. But I'll add it to my list of ideas and see if I can figure something out.
You saved my life. If it wasn't for your video, I would still be struggling with the export of animation and the problem of skeletal restraint. Thank you for everything.
Man, you are a legend! I spent a couple of days finding any info about the NLA tutorials that dive deeper than just basic things till find this one. Working with Mixamo animations makes it almost impossible to ignore NLA. It's saj that this pipeline makes pivot point static. But it's such a minor downfall for this workflow
Excellent in all regards. I literally just started with blender(for mechanical prototyping). If this is indeed some of the first info on NLA, then u are creating a springboard for others to leap off of. The day ur info becomes outdated is the day u will know that others have leaped from ur gifts.
You are an amazing instructor! This has been very very helpful. Thank you for your clear explanations, which will greatly assisted me in completing my next project. Keep it up :-)
Hello CG Dive, very nice video again it's very well explained thank you for all the TAF you shoot bro, it's awesome. Also, I hope you'll give us a tutorial on how to use Rigyfy animbox
Awesome tutorial, would love to see maybe a tutorial how you work on multiple characters in one scene. I tried to do little figting scene with same approach and it was nightmarish experience.
8:52 - For some reason when I push the actions down to the NLA, the idle action has the model sticking one arm straight out from her body while the other one works like it's supposed to. I tried a few times and it happened each time, even though I tried to do exactly the same steps as CGDive. I wasn't able to fix it. EDIT - This gets fixed later in the tutorial when you start messing with IK/FK keyframes. Don't worry about it, just follow the tutorial.
I still have like 2mins left but I cant hold back any longer I can not express how thankfull I am to make this -monster of tec- accessible to me its a super abstract system but understandable.... if you -cg.dive- explains it and you dive so deeb to just pick up any gem that can... yes indeed can change peoples live cause by this tec .... the production of animations for ... game.dev... or animation.portfolios... to get a job at all to get around.... or to get the dream job you wanted.... or just be able to quit the shitty job you have at present time... that drains your soul and kills your heart... becomes ACCESSIBLE acceccibility is crucial to skill skill is curcial to achieve new targets... targets in live and live itself you sir make good live accessible you make dreams accesible you make lifted lives accessible yeah I tend to go a bit over dramatic :D but thats what I want to say man
9:29 But you do not need to active blending in the buttom action strip at all. Additive NLA Actions and Auto IK Pose Option are completely game changers for me.. just when I think I've watched all your videos, I come across something new again ;o
very good explanation and workflow using the NLA editor... Do you have a video where you show how to transfer animations from mixamo or other rigs to rigify rig
This tutorial series has been very enlightening! Since you use rigify, I have a bit of a dilemma and wanted to see if you had any insight: Sometimes when I'm working with a rigify rig, I do some animation and I come to the realization that an additional animation control would make my life easier. The problem is, if I make a change to the metarig to add those controls and then re-generate the rig, all of the NLA data is lost. The individual actions are still fine, so I could hypothetically just re-assemble the strips, but if I've already made a lot of edits to strips for timing, repetition, scale, etc, redoing all that work would be a huge headache. Do you know of a way to preserve that NLA data when re-generating a rigify rig?
Hi Todor, Would you consider doing a tutorial on keyframing the IK/FK switch, but only on the bones (while setting up an action, for example)? I want to mix IK/FK while posing a limb of my character, but having trouble figuring out when and where I must place the keyframe(s) when switching. It would be awesome if you would do a tutorial, as I know it will be super well explained just like the rest of your courses! Thank you for your time! Edit: Sorry, more info, I'm using Rigify, and I want to animate the character using IK/FK switching, not just to pose. There's a lot of tutorials that explain how to make the switch, or use it for posing, but can't seem to find an explanation how to utilize the switching when animating. Thanks again!:)
hmm, hmm I have a bit on that in this video ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-UxdPtVAz6Do.html It's about combining actions in the NLA and some of them are FK, others in IK. Does it help? Basically, each mode has pros and cons and you switch when you encounter an action that requires a switch. But yeah, it's a good idea for a future video. I'll think about it.
@@CGDive Thank you for your reply Todor! Ok, so I'm interested in learning how to switch between the ik/fk when animating a limb, that is , how to keyframe that switch. As an example, I rigged a character using rigify. Now, at frame 1 I add a location keyframe, move the leg and at frame 10 I also add the keyframe indicating where this movement ends. This is while using IK. Now, from frame 10 I want to use FK, that controls lets say just the shin, until frame 20. And from frame 20, I want to go back to IK. So, the switching is hapening at frame 10, and at frame 20. I hope I managed to explain what I want to do. I'm bad at exlanations :) Basicaly, want to find out how to efectively use both techniques, how to keyframe them, etc. Everytime I do try and keyframe the switch, the rig behaves strangely, or just resets, or simply doesn't do anything.Thanks for your time!
@@markokovacevic3225 Hi. I think you know where the IK/FK switch is, right? Then all you need to do is hover over the switch property/slider and press "i" on your keyboard. Or you could right-click > Insert keyframe. So in your example: -on frame 9 keyframe IK/FK -on frame 10 you would snap the FK to IK so that they are in the same position -then set IK/FK to one so that you are in FK mode. -then add a keyframe for the IK-FK switch That's the whole process. Now you're in FK mode but the section between frames 1-10 is in IK mode. Makes sense? I hope so but I'll try to also make a short video about that soon. :)
@@CGDive Thank you so much! Yes, this is it !!:) I really appreciate your help! I think I was adding unnecessary keyframes somewhere on the timeline before. Your explanation solved the issues. Thanks again, and I look forward to your video on this topic as well! :)
One of the most detailed and Informative Series about Rigging on RU-vid. Thank you very much. I followed your Series completely and it helped me alot, especially the hierarchy topics for unreal engine. I have a little problem i can not seem to solve though. I have the normal bending issue around the knees and elbows which i solved through shapekeys that are driven by the bones of the rigify rig. My first Problem is that i have to manually change the driver to the control bones while animating and back to the game rig bones when baking. Problem nr.2 is that i cant get them exported to unreal when driven by the game rig when using nla. Is there a way to cover shape keys in the near future?
Hey sorry for the late reply. Interesting questions... 1. Can't you add the shape key drivers directly to the game rig? 2. Ah, that's interesting. I am not sure why that would happen.... I'll make a note to test these things but I can't promise to cover the topic very soon. I can say that using shape keys in a game engine may not be a good idea. The performance hit is significant AFAIK. You may be better off using additional bones in the knee/elbow area which are not too difficult to setup.
@@CGDive Ty for the reply. My solution for the Issue in Unreal was just Duplicate the Mesh in Blender and delete the Original Mesh and it worked, dunno why xD. It solved the driver Shapekey Issue too, when parented to the gamerig. Now i see all shapekeys changing accordingly.
cool tutorial as always, man! about the bullet time.. is there a way to slow down all the objects on the scene at once? or you got to do it each at a time?
Good question. There is something called "Time stretching" (under Output properties) which can speed up or slow down everything but it can't be keyframed... so you can't slow things down and then speed them back up. So I don't think it's possible at the moment but I'll think about it some more.
Yeah... In the strip options, there is a checkbox called Animated Influence. Enable it and that will allow you to control the influence. You can do complex stuff with it like using a curve to control the influence of the strip over time. But if you simply want it to have, say influence of 0.5 the whole time, then set the value to 0.5 and create one keyframe. That's it. Simple, but I guess having to add a keyframe is a bit unintuitive.
Very good tutorial! I have a problem with different type of animated character, where chosen animation in Mixamo is moving forward during walk, while ground marker staying at the same place. I manage to move every 42 frames that ground marker, but then there is problem with parenting camera to the character. Any help? Please.
Hi. I am not sure what your actual goal is, especially not sure what the "problem with parenting camera" is. But Mixamo has an option for walking animations to make them walk "in place". Maybe that will help.
I am having a hard time turning my armature to a different direction. I have 2 actions The first animation runs on the y axis. When the first animation ends, I want the 2nd animation to turn to the x axis. I followed your video here with keyframing the root bone, but I can't achieve the solution. I've been researching for days got any ideas or videos that I can look into?
Technically Blender bakes your animation as you export it. But that's often not enough. Creating is exportable rigs is the main subject in this playlist l: Blender to Game Engines (Unreal, Unity, Godot etc.): ru-vid.com/group/PLdcL5aF8ZcJvCyqWeCBYVGKbQgrQngen3 If you tell me what you're trying to do, I can probably isolate the most relevant videos.
@@CGDive thanks so much for replying ! If you could help me out I would appreciate it :) I've made animation layers like you have done in this video. When I export the animation out and import it into unreal it imports all the animation layers as separate anim files. Is it possible to bake the layers down into one inside blender before exporting ?
@@shaypayne Oh, I see. In Pose Mode, you could go to Pose > Animation > Bake Action (or look for Bake Action in the Search menu). Enable "Visual Keying". "Only Selected Bones" will only bake selected bones so Select the controls/bones you want to bake. Or you could disable which would bake every single bone... The other settings should be fine (unchecked). This will bake whatever you have in the NLA as a new action. The only problem is if you have IK/FK switching in the mixed actions. Baking these properties is not supported by the baker, at least last time I checked.
I only discover this video today. Very interesting, althought a bit complicated. With the addon rigify animbox, the arms are too close to the body (my character had a A shape, not a T shape, may be that's what causes the problem). I didn't manage to fix that. I dont' understand how tu use the IK hand controler, it seems not to work. You explain it in the vidéo but I dont'understand very well.
Sounds like you need more basic knowledge. Please, watch the Rigify playslist ru-vid.com/group/PLdcL5aF8ZcJv68SSdwxip33M7snakl6Dx and in this video I show how to fix the arms ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-jB9iBT6J47Y.html
What are your thoughts on Animation Layers? I'm confused with the relationship with the NLA and there's not a lot of comprehensive videos about it. I want to spend my time and energy wisely to make sure I'm going down the right paths. My results have been somewhat chaotic.
I have the addon but I haven't tested it yet, TBH. I think it uses the NLA under the hood but I am not 100% sure about that. But even if it does, it enables certain workflows that are either impossible or very difficult with vanilla NLA. Will try to review the addon in the near future.
@@CGDive since I wrote you im able to get things to work with what I think are the v1 features. There is a section for per bone key framing I haven't gotten to yet but that looks very helpful. It has some specifics and I wrote down steps to get it to work reliably for me in a basic way. I'm sure you'll be more fluent with it and be able to use those additional features that were introduced in v2.
Great tutorial! I have a dumb question,after I export fbx from blender,I can't transform it like moving or scaling it. The keyframe of the first and the last frame seems to be locked,the animate properties of the first and the last frame are activited. Other fbx downloaded from mixamo was fine,I can move or scale it in any software.
Some thing's I'm not sure about, why is it you go to frame 1 rather than 0 for creating keyframes etc? Also do you know what the shortcut is to select all bones? Not able to find it when trying to follow along for creating the two new actions
To select all bones: A To the other questions, try to add context. I don't have perfect memory even for my own videos so I have no idea what you're asking about. Frames 1 and 0? Sorry, doesn't ring any bells.
@@CGDive From 11:55 you state you'll create two new actions, then you move the NLA timeline slider down to frame 1 (Although it starts at 0). Likely doesn't amake a difference but was curious as to why that is. Thanks for the shortcut!
@@MistralFlacon Ah, ok! In my scene the start frame seems to be 1, actually. Often it is set to 0 by default and your assumption is correct - it's not a major issue. :)
Okay, so I have a big ActionStrip, I split it with Y, I edit the cutted piece with TAB, when I'm done I press TAB to exit edit mode and BOOM! The cutted action strip returns to its full version before the split! How to deal with it?
Ideally you should have IK controls. Then you can add a new NLA layer. From there you can tweak the IK controls where the sliding occurs. The Layer blending modes that are useful are either Replace or Add. Each has pros and cons. I'll make a video about that in the future.
@@CGDive The problem of feet sliding in a separate walking or running animation is relatively easy to solve. The difficulty is that when I add a fade in and out effect between the "walking animation" and the "running animation", the feet sliding becomes difficult to solve
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?
@@CGDive hi, thank your for your quick response. I found out that it was a simple solution 😬 Thanks anyway for your time. Just a quick question tho. Do you know anything about python and openCV? I ran into a problem which I can't find on the internet and RU-vid
Last time i saw this I missed some parts like animated strip time and dope sheet's extrapolation mode. I had to go through this again to understand completely.
Yeah, it's not something you can watch once and it's done. You have to use it in practice, that's how you'll learn the most useful stuff for yourself. Keep up the good work!
Thanks for this video! The NLA editor is one of the less intuitive spaces in Blender so I always appreciate learning about it. At 3:34, you make a point to move to the starting frame before unlinking the action. Does that make a difference somehow in the NLA editor, or could you have unlinked before changing the frame with the same result?
Hey Matt! I do that just because on frame 1 I have the default position of my objects. If I unlink the action at a frame further in time, some objects/bones will stay in a random position/rotation. Sure, you can press alt+G/R/S or use Pose > clear transforms to get the default position but I think it's faster to go to a frame where things are already set up. Of course, the character may not be in the default pose on frame 1. In such cases it doesn't matter where you unlink the action and you'll have to reset the pose manually if you need to. That's all, I hope it makes sense.
Hey - I'm following along and at 20:45 I've run into some problems when editing an action. Any ideas what is going on here? ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-6qWmnW5aVQI.html I've tried Tab and Shift-Tab but neither solves this issue.
Oh, that's interesting. I think it's a "known problem" but I can't remember what it was and if there is a solution. If you can send me the file in this state, I could take a look.
When i use "combine" for the blending type it makes the bone i am trying to animate go in the completely wrong place. I have a walk cycle and am trying to modify it with a different action. i want my character to take a drag form a cigarette so i need to animate the hand bone in the new action. It almost works, but it combines the walk cycle animation and cigarette drag animation in a weird way and the hand spins like mad when transitioning from 1 action to the other. I am using a mixamo rig, is this the issue?
The mixamo rig shouldn't cause any problems. A common problem is when you have added some keyframes in replace mode and then you switch to combine ... which is kind of what I did in the video but only for blending in/out the end of the strips. Generally you should set the blend type before you add any keyframs.
@@BlueBerryFTW The main action can be created in advance but anything above it which modifies it should have a blend type set before you start adding keyframes.
Thank you very much for this tutorial. It helped a lot. I have a question, after preparing all the actions, if the movement that I want is doing the actions while following a curve path, how can I do it? Thank you.
@@CGDive actually the mixamo walk animation is of 32 frames and and moves forward 2 meters in Y-axis direction .. Now when I try to make it move for 20 meters using linear(F-curve) extrapolation for Y location keyframes and cycle(F-curve) extrapolation for rest all keyframes, The character slow down its speed as it moves ahead and becomes very very slow after some distance.. How can I make it move with same speed throughout the cycle???
@@anishalamansari9887 If the character moves forward that makes things much more difficult. I think mixamo has options to export the action in place. See if you can do that and it should make things easier.
You look like one Russian RU-vid blogger living in Japan and making videos about Japan, lol. Sergey Kuvaev JP his channel. Maybe anybody already was telling you
How do you "scale" an animation? :) Do you mean to make it longer? If so how do you make it longer without slowing it down? What would happen instead of slowing down?
@@CGDive Only it will be long and end in any number I want in the timeline. I mean here that I want to know how to make it long, and when I make it long, the animation will be longer, and it will continue to the limit I want.
When animating with a hair particle system, how do I attach the hair to the rig or model so that the hair does not stay stationary when positioning it? The hair moves with the position of the entire model, but if the models head is positioned the look left, the hair does not move with it.
I am not absolutely sure but that probably has to do with the Modifiers. You want the Particle hair modifier to be below the Armature modifier. Hope this helps!
@@CGDive Thank you so much! I moved the armature modifier from the bottom of the list (where it was default because I added the hair before rigging) to the top and the hair moves with the model.
@@davisb69 I am not sure what you need to happen so I can't give a clear answer. But just give both a try. Whatever works better, go with it :) Sometimes the position of the modifiers doesn't matter.
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