Blender has a very nice way to save Pose presets, it's called the Pose Library. This feature allows you to select any number of bones, pose them how you like, then you can save those poses to a library and use them again on that rig at any time in the future. I suppose it's similar to how Poser or Daz Studio work? Anyway, I was about to make this post to Blender Artists or the Blender Reddit group, but I thought I'd ask here first in case there is someone in this wonderful Blender group who knows the answer...

Is there a way to create animations on a rig/armature, then save that to a library similar to the Poser library feature? Let's say we have a character that we wish to redistribute to other users, but we'd like to include some basic animations with the rig, like a walk cycle or run cycle, without altering the original Rest Pose on that armature out of the box.

The first thing that came to mind was to duplicate only the armature, then apply a motion or animation to that duplicate and save it to a new collection. This way, users of this character can copy and paste the animation from that "dummy rig" to the character's armature if they wish. Is that typically how it's done, or is there another way about this that I'm overlooking?

Just a little update for those who may be wondering about how to do this. I found a "workaround" to the inquiry I made above. Just to recap, I'm looking for an easy and clean way to package motions or animations with a rigged character I made so that these animations can be applied to the armature of the character by users if and when they want to use them. Similar to saving Poses in the Pose Library.

I haven't found an integrated way to do this yet, but this workaround seems to work very well. As I mentioned, my thought was just to duplicate only the armature of the original character, create some animation on that duplicate rig, then save it to a separate collection. Doing this for a number of different animations or motions, each on its own duplicate rig and saved to a collection is essentially the same as creating a Pose library, except for animated poses. It's very simple, as it turns out, to copy any animation or motion from the duplicated rig back to the original rig, as illustrated in the screen capture below...

This seems to work very easily. However, if anyone has a better way, please share it with me! So far, I like this method but I just don't know if I'm missing something even more convenient.

Hi Lux,

I am not sure if this will help your situation however, I use the Blender action editor to import/re-use motion data from other rigs of the exact same armature.

This method enables me to import an FBX character from Iclone CC3 pipeline and set up my materials.

But after that, I can create multiple new body and facial animation in Iclone with any base default CC3 Character and export those mutliple motions to an FBX file to Blender and ALL of those motions become available in the action editor and can be applied to my main textured actor via a dropdown list in the Blender action editor,

This method works only with rigs with Identical bone hierarcies and must have the same set of facial blend shapes for facial animation transfer.

I have tested figures as old as Millenium 3 ,exported from Daz studio as FBX, and it works perfectly as long as I import other animated figures from the Millenium 3 generation

You can even delete the figures who brought in the new motion and the data remains stored in the action editor of your saved .blend file

Here is a video tutorial I made that is specifically for CC3 to Blender but details how to use the action editor to switch between stored motions. https://youtu.be/igv--GMiUq4

@wolf359 Yes, that is exactly the functionality I was looking for! So once we give the action a fake user, Blender will save the unlinked action for use at any time on a compatible armature. That's perfect, thank you!

Full disclosure, I also was using the somewhat cumbersome CTRL-L method until I learned of this method from a user over on the Blender Artists forums. ?

I made the video tutorial for my fellow Iclone/CC3 users however I am pleased to see it helps you and any other Blender users

Cheers