Making the NLA tools work for you

So glad I watched this, if only for the explanation of 'push down'. I was thinking the clips ended up on the same pile as the default cube.

NLA is great when you have to deal with a single armature but when you start using multiple ones (people interaction for instance) mixed with some shapekeys, it become quite a nightmare to use :(

i have an animation in a t pose and at frame 30 it starts to move, so how do i only select a certain amount of keyframe animation to be repeated but still include the t pose ?

I have been so frustrated with NLA, but spent last couple of days watching a ton of tutorials, I think I am starting to get the hang of it. Will see, I am glad to hear you speak and sound's like you are going to help improve it. I been to Weta Studios (not in the studios but their gift shop). The Hobbit was seven days from being completed. We watched the film they show. A couple of days later my daughter said she wanted to go to work for Weta. When we got back to the U.S. we had a message from AI (art institute). We enrolled our daughter. She won a couple of prestigious awards. She was in the graphic art, though their was a teacher who practically begged her to come animation department as a story boarder. She is a fantastic artist but head strong like me. lol... Even though she didn't go to work for Weta she immediately was able to fill much needed spot in our church and has been working there every since. I believe God used Weta to speak to our daughter because He knew that there was going to be a need. It is a job. I think it would of been awesome if she did get to work for Weta or Dream Works or whatever.

Thanks to this, I finally understand how to use it. However, the animation layers plugin is just much better to speed up the workflow process. The joke about geometry nodes was unexpected but very appreciated ! :D

Nothing gives a user more hope than to see the engineers actually USE the tools and understand what needs to be done. I initially tried using the NLA purely for animation and layering but went back to straight animating on the timeline for the reasons outlined in this talk. Namely that once a characters animation is a clip, it drastically slows down the iteration workflow. Also the ability to align two clips around any control on the rig would make it infinitely more useful.

Good humor, i like these talks with jokes

I recall spending half a year trying to learn NLA in cinema 4d,
I liked the idea of combining mixamo animation which was providing free motion capture animation, and creating custom motion capture facial animation I would record with my iPhone, , and editing these animations in the timeline to make it even more unique. But damn the timeline was so full with animation keyframes it seemed impossible.
But it the idea seemed so intuiative. Combining all animations and editing them further, seamlessly. And blender really out here making that a feasible approach. Thanks Bois

Awesome, thanks!

Thank you @CGDive

Good talk, I am very happy Brad Clark is part of the effort to evolve the Blender animation tools.

Hi, I'm using NLA and baking quite often, what I really would like is a bake function in which if a channell is transferred untouched (and controlled by two keyframes only, in example) it gets baked with the same two keyframes only, not with a key on every frame. This would help me a lot in terms of editing speed, because in my workflow i use baking during the animation process, not only at the end of the session. Thank you for your attention.

Really excellent talk/workshop. Brad is such a great teacher. Pointing out what can be improved about the NLA while making people excited to dive into it. ❤❤❤

Whoah, I was using NLA for exporting and for managing exports, but that trick with separate Scene for Export is gold. Thanks!

Thanks for pointing out the full stack feature, it was driving me mad not having (knowing) it

Ok so it was not just me, I did some basic things in the NLA editor, it took me quite some time to find out how it works and I still did not understand 100% the idea behind it. A very confusing editor, I'm sure its very powerful if you really understand it, I'm just an amateur creating a simple animation every now and then. At the moment I'm scared to use it 😆, since its easy to mess things up that already worked. Numerous times I was pretty lost, using this editor. But I understand without this editor complex animations are not feasible.

Great talk ! Thank you very much for that !
💖

You should have a look at the motion mixer tool from Lightwave 3D, it could give you some more ideas. The concept of actors for example is really useful and could be a great addition to NLA.

I know this NLA talk will get very far in the industry. Thank you Sir @Clark for an amazing conference. Point on.

OMG 🙀 the guy from rigging dojo great.!!