I have two actions. I want to combine them together into one action by simple addition. Then I want to save out the result as an action.

In action mode I can successfully combine two actions, but I can't see a way of saving out the result.

Any ideas? Thanks.

Oh I was hoping that would not be the answer.

What I am trying to do is take an existing action, like a walk cycle, and add a second animation to it, which might for example have a single keyframe with the head tilted to one side. I want to mix these into a single animation, but I want to retain the original keyframes.

Baking has two problems:

1. It is very slow. With a simple walk cycle and my single keyframe action to bake, it takes several minutes.

2. A whole load of extra keyframes are added.

Both of these problems make baking not the right tool for this task.

is there some other way to achieve this?

Oh FYI after baking DO NOT try to undo the operation with UNDO. Doing so will not work and if you keep UNDOING in the hope that it will undo, it will crash the program.

You can blend the action files in the Choreography, and then render the result. Is that what you mean?
You don't have to bake anything, or at least I don't understand why you need to save out a sparate action file of the combined actions--since you could just save the choreography as is to reuse it later. Am I understanding?

Oh its because I want to save the result as a reusable action...

If you need to combine two actions into one action but without the computer calculating the combined keyframes, then you'll need to do it manually, via copy and paste.

Since your second action has only one keyframe, this should just take a few seconds.

The important thing to be familiar with when copying and pasting are the skeletal filters:
http://www.hash.com/htmlHelp/v11.1/CustomH...ame_Toolbar.htm

Knowing how these work will allow you to either copy & paste the keyframes of every bone in a body simultaneously, or just from one limb hierarchy. Or just one bone.

Of course the single keyframe is only an example.

The problem with copying and pasting is that I will lose the original keyframe information.

Again, another example: I have a walk cycle, with movement in the back. I want to make the back lean forward throughout the entire action. What I want to do is rotate the back by a set amount for all the keyframes.

Of course I could do this manually, but that is time consuming.

Anyone familiar with Character Studio will know about its animation layer facility. This is the kind of thing I am looking to replicate somehow here.

The thing is that in action mode I have successfully combined anims. Yes action mode. You can drag a second anim over into the action model, and the are combined just in the wat I want. The snag is that there is no way to export the result.

Anyway thanks for the link I'll check it out

Save the action?

Or, just right-click the action and select Save As.

Good catch on the drag & drop actions! I didn't know about that either.

If you can't replicate the same combination in a chor, then there must be a problem. I've thought this for quite a while...if you can get this one resolved, you'll have earned your stripes in my eyes.

Unfortunately saving the action only saves the core action not the blended result. So you can play with these animation "layers" in this way, but not save the result out. Unless I am missing something.

if it were possible to do this it would be a very powerful feature.

You're right, that doesn't work. A:M only adds the dragged action as a shortcut. It doesn't import the keyframes.

Still, it sounds like you're asking for a way for an action to store two sets of keyframes for the same bone (in your example, the back bone)--which it can't. If you want the two curves to be merged into one, baking's the only way, mathematically, that that can happen.

If you're just concerned about the end results, however, there's no reason you can't maintain your actions as two separate actions, and then stack them in the Choreography whenever you plan to animate with them.

There is a third option--kind of a user-controlled baking. If you combine two blended actions in the Chor, and then copy keyframes from there, you'll be copying the blended values to the clipboard. You don't need to position the scrubber on a defined keyframe, either. Anywhere you place the scrubber, you can "capture" a set of values resulting from the blended actions. So by copying keyframes from the Chor and pasting them into an action, you are doing a kind of manual bake of the keyframes. This way you can copy & paste as many or as few keyframes as you like to get the desired results in your new action.

Having said all that, I think most of the animators in this forum, if they needed to combine actions in this manner, would simply stack/blend actions in the Choreography at animation time.

I think a tech talk video on blending actions in the chor would be a very good idea. (hint hint)

Oh right... well this helps a lot. I forgot about the curves view.

Cheers!

Can't you blend the 2 actions in the chor and then export that as it's own action?

Wow, Bob, that really does solve it perfectly...Thanks for the input!