• 3D
  • Character Animation workflow

Hey,

I'm struggling when importing a character with animation clips. In Blender I have 2 actions (fake user), idle and run. When I'm importing it in Godot, I'm being asked to create a new inherited scene. After doing this I see all the sub nodes greyed out. In the AnimationPlayer I only see the idle animation and when opened in the inspector for checking looping, my animation is not looping. Moreover when I modify and re-export the character nothing is updating in godot even after cliking reimport.

Can you guide me through a correct workflow ?

Thank you in advance.

What file format are you using? Are you using collada or GLTF, or something else?

I have found for making imported animations loop, one of the only ways is to remove instancing through "make local" and then set the animation to loop. There might be a flag or something that you can select in Blender to tell Godot to make the animation loop, but I am unaware of it. Making the nodes local will remove instancing though, so reimporting the scene will not have an effect. Another thing to try is making the children nodes editable, which is an option when you right click, but I personally have had hit and miss luck with changing the AnimationPlayer when the children nodes are editable.

All of that said, it is quite possible that I am missing something in my workflow. I've been using Collada with Blender 2.7 using the Better Collada plugin, but things may be different with newer versions of Blender and/or different file formats. I would suggest putting something like "Godot <File Format Here> import workflow" in the search engine of your choice and see if that pulls up some results tailored for the file format you are using.

Thanks for your answer. I'm using .GLB as recommended as the COLLADA exporter is not supported anymore for 2.8. For now what I've done is to modify the import settings so the animations are imported as separate files. Moreover, I have to close and reopen Godot to see my changes on the inherited node. I hope the workflow will be fined tuned in Godot 4.

I haven't used .GLB myself, but it sounds like Godot is not detecting the change. I'm not sure what the fix would be, I'd need to mess around with .GLB files and the workflow around them. (Which I'll have to do eventually once I make the change to using Blender 2.8)

@panicq said: I hope the workflow will be fined tuned in Godot 4.

Agreed!