Solium - personal research and development

kuligs2

MikeCL Why would you assume i was offended?

This clears up for me the diferences between NLA and actions.

About the 2 separate animations for 2 objects, i have expereinced this before, but now blender have something that is called "Slots"? Havent played with them but this sort of took care of that problem.

Any comment is welcome and dont need to feel like youre walking on eggshells, trying to not offend people for having opinion. I hope this place is not like reddit/discord where opinionated voices gets muted.

MikeCL

kuligs2 Why would you assume i was offended?

My bad, " its not like i was born with this knowledge", seemed I might have been given a tone I didn't mean to.

Anyways. Yeah. Blender is making changes in how animation is dealt with. The "slots" is a relatively new feature.

Tomcat It seems more that they are changing, or making improvements, in how animations are assigned to different objects and some UI improvements, rather than changing/replacing the NLA system. I could be wrong (need to read up more on it), like with the new slots system, and how all animation-related panels will have playback controls.

But I can't see any changes to how NLA deals with animations.

Tomcat

MikeCL The NLA tracks are basically animation layers.

Is this not what is changing in the new version of Blender 5?

https://developer.blender.org/docs/release_notes/5.0/animation_rigging/

Tomcat

MikeCL But I can't see any changes to how NLA deals with animations.

It was mentioned that there would be compatibility issues, and as I understand it, apparently in animation as well (mainly).

MikeCL

Tomcat I see. I must confess I don't know that much about the upcoming NLA changes. Thanks for sharing. Need to do some reading on it. But for Blender v5.x, I assume there might be some time until the release?

Tomcat

MikeCL But for Blender v5.x, I assume there might be some time until the release?

Yeah, for sure.
It seems that it is not yet customary to force people to switch to the new version. It is quite possible to stay with the old one.

I guess it's just good to keep it in mind, just in case.

DaveTheCoder

Tomcat It is quite possible to stay with the old one.

Until recently, I was using Blender 2.8.3 LTS because Blender 3 and 4 were freezing after a few minutes. I suspect it had something to do with my integrated GPU. The freezing issue no longer occurs with Blender 4.5.4 LTS.

MikeCL But for Blender v5.x, I assume there might be some time until the release?

Blender 5.0 is scheduled for release tomorrow:
https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/milestone/20

Update: Blender 5.0 has been released.

But I'll stick with 4.5.4 for now. It has all the features I need. For that matter, so did 2.8.3. (On the other hand, after watching a video of the new features in 5.0, I may give it a try. And snap automatically upgraded my Blender install to 5.0, so it made the decision for me.)

kuligs2

So i found another annoying bug that keeps throwing me off..

Exporting blend to gltf wont export every Action animation for some reason. Maybe someone know why?

When i have animation active in blender, then that animation will be exported. But when its not selected it will not. Some other animations will be exported if not selected but not all..

Blendfile:

Godot:

As you can see for example Jump_32_start, RunJump_32_L are missing in godot.

I dont know what those numbers mean next to shield But its the same rig

I tried to enable these but it didnt help

Not sure whats going on...

xyz

kuligs2 You can't rely on action exporting due to how actions are architected in Blender, even with new slotted actions. Use NLA tracks instead.

kuligs2

kuligs2 Sheeeit.. Thanks blender, this was intuitive.. jeesless christ..

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/addons/import_export/scene_gltf2.html#actions-default

All i had to do is "Push down" the action.. Man.. some of them alread were "stashed" some did not.. I never used this button before now, so idk how it gets stashed automatically.. also its not visible in the action editor if the action is stashed pushed or whatever.. you just have to feel it out..

There is no indication here that action is stashed/pushed

You have to open this and press the stash button

And if its stashed then you will get notified that its stashed.

And then its gonna be visible in the NLA editor

And finally in godot.

I feel like that cult where you have to have the "secret handshake" to proceed.. Man.. spent 2h chasing this bug.

kuligs2

Alright alright alright

Here is another gripe and bug i dont know how to solve fastly, maybe some of yaal know my pain?

Blender rigify rig has these control bones that controls mesh. (green blue and maroon)

Well for some animations i like to use IK and for other FK.

Blender gives a way to influence the behavior.

But what my problem is that if i animate one animation with FK and another with IK then it get broken.

If the FK influence value left high on lets say sword swing animation then it gets exported into other animations.

How can i use the FK/IK helper bones to pose and animate and then animation will only use the deform bone positions or something that are controlled by the helper IK/FK bones and only deform bone data gets saved to Action/NLA track?

Hmm..

MikeCL

kuligs2 Are you exporting the control rig to the game? Or are you baking down the animation to a deformation / game-friendly skeleton/armature?

You usually don't want to export the control rig with all the IK and technical setup directly to a game engine, as many of these features are designed for the software you work in (Blender in this case), and a lot of it might not be transferable to a game engine. A control rig is there for the animator to control a skeleton, while the skeleton itself is the raw data that drives the animation in-game. What you normally want to export to the engine is a clean skeleton with animation data, not the animation controls.

This is what "Game Rig Tools" can help you with, unless you want to create an entire pipeline/workflow to handle this yourself. Something studios spend a lot of money and time on when it comes to in-house production/dev tooling.

Tomcat

kuligs2 But what my problem is that if i animate one animation with FK and another with IK then it get broken.

It “breaks” when transferred to Godot. Blender and Godot work differently with IK. If you want IK control in Godot, you need to implement it in Godot, not in Blender.

Actually, that's what @MikeCL said.

Although I successfully transferred IK to Godot from Blender, it was a very simple case. More complex situations require careful further study.

kuligs2

MikeCL In godot i have only deform bones, as per the export settings that were shown above somewhere in this thread.

I dont want to export control rig, and its not there in the export but the animations keep following control rig instead of the deform.. Now i dont do any bakes, not sure how or where...

I just push Actions to NLA and export..

kuligs2

Tomcat Its not what i was asking but thanks.

MikeCL

kuligs2 Is it possible for you to just make a quick screen recording of how you export the it?

kuligs2

Gowydot your statement made sense and nonsense.

I animated the arm swing with FK the green control bones. Maroon are IK control bones.

Then i already had other animations like run (godot screenshots) which used IK helper bones to animate the arm. And upon export when left the FK influence on, the sword swing animation is correct but other like run animations are now incorrect - arm stretched out.

I guess i need to bake animation. But i also want the "Action" to stay as i do it with IK/FK helpers so that i can iterate and fix things up later on.

Baking as i assume will override and insert keys at certain intervals over the animation.

MikeCL not sure what you want to see, but there is nothing so see in the video you asking for. I warned you!
there are two black frame cuts to censor the data, other than that nothing to see.

Btw video was edited in blender 😃

Gowydot

@kuligs2
Are you using FK for the sword and exporting actual sword's animation? There is no need for that. You could just use BoneAttachment for the sword and let it swing with player's wrist movement.

Gowydot

kuligs2

I animated the arm swing with FK the green control bones.

Ok I just saw a stick there so I thought you wanted to export sword animation too.
What is the reason for using FK for that? and Could IK do the same? FK IK is switching influence of the bones and probably confuses Godot LOL I don't know. I would just stick to one or the other.

MikeCL

kuligs2 not sure what you want to see

That was good. Well, you are still exporting the control rig instead of a clean skeleton without any fancy IK setup etc.

kuligs2 but i think i need to bake animation.

Yes. The way I usually work is that I have my "work" file where I have the advanced control rig setup and do all the animations, actions, etc. Then I save that to a separate "export" file where I do all the baking down and preparation for game export. This includes baking down the animation to a separate clean skeleton without any controls, push down all the actions to NLA strips. Just strip it down to its cleanest form to be used for exporting.

kuligs2 i wonder if there is a way to non destructively have baked animations and the "Action" animations with limited ammount of keyframes and let Blender interpolate between them

In Blender you work with curves that can create a smooth transition between frames, so when you animate you don't need to have a keyframe on every frame. If you have dense mocap data, you can clean that up in Blender with some of the tools to reduce the amount of keyframes and convert it to curves. Don't know if this is what you were after? Not sure if it's possible to have that non-destructive, though. The closest way of having this non-destructively is using the NLA editor and layer adjustments on top of each other.

kuligs2

Gowydot IK FK has some use cases im too lazy to describe but for instance a swing action is easier and intuitive setup using FK while other things are easier to setup using IK.

I havent had time but i think i need to bake animation.. i wonder if there is a way to non destructively have baked animations and the "Action" animations with limited ammount of keyframes and let blender interpolate between them..

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