How to make an instance of a model for animation?

Question

When you are animating, you lose control of the directions on which the bones are being manipulated, such as rotation, location and scale. For example if you are animating a mouth. If the head is stationary on its primary place its easier to animate the mouth. But then when its rotated, it is a little more difficult, because the mouth is not aligned with the axis. I'm not a fan of the transformation orientations, because sometimes its not accurate and it is even more for the vertexes and edges. Is there a way to create an instance of the model with the bones which can be animated more easily? Or maybe something to make the process easier?

Update - In case I confused anybody - Just like when you create an instance of an object and then use that instance in the render that you can rotate, scale.... and the original one is stationary on the axis which you can manipulate in edit mode so that the instance updates as if it is aligned with the axis.

I want to do that exactly with the object and the bones.

Answer 1

You may want to look into blender's concept of NLAs. Actions are data blocks just like meshes and materials. You can create a new scene with an instance of the armature and mesh. You can then animate the pose to move the mouth.

You can use the Action Editor mode of the Dope Sheet to figure out the name of the action (and rename it if you like).

Then in your scene you can find your instance of the armature and use the NLA editor to add a track. Then add a strip to that track and use the mouth animation you created in the other scene.