Hey , haven't done much in Blender for a while so I got back at it and did this little animation of a basketball free throw. I thought it would be a good exercise and I had to learn the "Child of " constraint which was fun.(not) Here is the animation

And if you want to try this animation yourself I have here the blend file with everything except my character. You just have to add your favorite character and animate it.

This is the reason I am learning Blender because it's animation tools are better than Carrara's.

wolf359

Blender,s animation tools are very good I'm discovering. ?

Yes, I do have the axis icon in the top right of the viewport , it does help.

Hey LuxXeon, I understand the Graph Editor interface for the most part. My issue is ... lets say I want to "swing" my characters arms a little more using the graph editor nodes/curves . My first guess is to use the "X" rotation curve but it really is the "Y" curve I need to change instead. I seen to have to guess too much , I think it just takes practice. I do like in the Graph editor using "shift + h" (when cursor is in list window of graph editor) to hide all other curves except the one you have selected.

Hey Guys, just posting another animation of a walk cycle, this time I tried for a smoother walk. I used the Graph Editor to tweak the walk cycle NLA clip , have to get used to which axis of rotation, location is which. It seems like I have to guess too much to find the right axis in the Graph Editor. Making progress though.
I am ready to start some sort of animation project if anyone is interested in joining. If anyone has a storyline or idea let me know. I am also going to post this at Blender Artists forum . Here is the walk cycle animation

Hey LuxXeon, I looked at the Animation Layers add-on you mentioned, looks like what I expected an NLA system to do. Blender's NLA system seems clunky or counterintuitive, I hope blender gets this functionality soon.
I did some more animating to my little animation and I think it is getting better because I can really feel the heaviness of the ball he carries which is a good sign. Here is the animation.

Hey , I am getting used to how to animate in Blender's NLA Editor/ Action Editor/ Dope Sheet. IN this little animation I used a walk cycle NLA clip several times as well as created new NLA clips along the way. I found a few interesting things in Blender that helped out in controlling how things went.

1. If you have the Time Scrubber in the NLA Editor on the last frame of the NLA Clip then when you go to the Action Editor the Pose is the same as the last frame of the NLA clip in the NLA editor. This is a great starting point for your creating the next NLA clip.
2. Also the Pose library is very useful. If you copy the each main Poses of your Walk Cycle without the Root Location to the Pose Library you can then create a new walk cycle anywhere in the scene by just picking the Pose from the Library. This solves a couple problems I was having. Here is a simple animation.

Little Animation

Hey LuxXeon, Yes, I have been struggling with blender in that it doesn't seem to allow Keyframing and NLA strips at the same time. I seemed to make progress in "editing " the NLA clips and re keyframing the existing clips to make new NLA strips. So, what you say very well could be true that it is a problem with the NLA strips. somewhere.
I think you have to disable all NLA strips then you can Keyframe a new animation , save out the new animation to a new NLA strip, turn on all the NLA strips in the NLA editor then add your new NLA clip.

Luxxeon, Thanks for looking at it . Regarding the ground plane , I wasn't worried about the artifacts/flickering at this point as I was just working on the animation. I took a look at the Rigify Add-on and figured out how to use it for my characters so I should be able to eliminate the "Rig" as the cause unless there is a bug in the Rigify rig.

If you wanted to look at it here is the blend file . Just go to the end of the animation and try to rotate the feet using the IK Targets. The Blend File

I can post the blend file , maybe I will do this later. I did try the same animation using the Mike_Rig I downloaded from the internet, here is the video showing what I animated with my rig. I didn't encounter the problem with the wonky rotating of the feet controls, so I think it is my rig.

The animation of what I am trying to do that causes the issue.

Ahhh, okay . Thanks

Just a note on my above steps or an addition .

Step 4a. In creating the walk I copied all my bones for my pass pose, then I "pasted X flipped" to create the next pass pose quicker. After doing this my character position gets moved quite a ways from the position where I copied the pose, this is unusual. I have to move the character a long ways to the new position.

After doing this the IK Target bones start to go wonky.

Hey , I am using Blender 2.90.1 and I will try to explain a little more clearly the problem. I can't remember about using "keep offsets" but I am pretty sure I did. I usually animate from the Side View and also use the Front and Top views as helper views. The rigged character is perpendicular(90deg) to the Side,Front and Top views. Here is a step by step .

1. I animate the walk of the character straight forward. Everything works perfect, IK Targets for feet work great.
2. I used an NLA clip for the walk forward and also add Path Constraint.
3. New NLA clip, I then animate the figure turning 110deg to the left. I start animating the figure moving forward at 110deg from step #1 above.
4. I try to change the 3d view so I am looking at my character as close as possible to planar side view so I can rotate the bones properly.
5. After doing this I notice the IK bones acting a little strange .
6. After doing a few more steps the IK bones become very erratic. I will try again from scratch to find out more about this issue. I also have another character rig(Mike_Rig) I downloaded from the web that I can test with to see if this shows up with it. I just find it easier to animate with my rig which is why I used my rig.

Hey Thanks .. That is a huge file. You don't have it on Youtube, VImeo or Rumble?