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Bit of a straight forward question. I can competently animate multiple different armatures at the same time, but my issue is the tedium of having to select each armature from the Outliner and choose the action individually. Having both armatures selected in pose mode only assigns the action to the active element.

Realistically, this issue only arises if I decide to go back and adjust an animation I had previously worked on. I know that creating a new action with both armatures selected assigns the new action to both.

Is there a way to get around this? Am I forced to join the armatures, or do I just deal with it?

Edit: I'll try to elaborate on what my issue is. Say I make an action(action_1), animate both armatures, decide I'm done, then move on to another action(action_2), animate the armatures again. I then decide I need to go back to action_1 to adjust something. Choosing action_1, despite both armatures being selected, only changes the action for the active selection, not both simultaneously. So then I have to go to the outliner, choose the armature that is still on action_2, go back to the action editor and choose action_1. Otherwise one armature will play action_1 and the other will play action_2 and obviously the actions won't be synced up. I would really prefer to keep the armatures separate because I'm doing this for game development and I'd rather not have a dozen sets of arms for each unique weapon/item, on top of potentially dozens of animations for each different item. I'm aware that tedious work will be involved, I'm just trying to remove as much as possible. My current work around is the NLA editor window being very small in the corner so that the different armature tabs are right next to that windows action drop down menu so I don't have to drag my cursor all over my screen. However, I'll still take better solutions if anyone has them. Thanks.

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I'm on my phone right now so I can't verify, but I have two guesses:

The common shortcut to propagate what you do to the selected object is to hold down the Alt key.

I might be wrong, but it works if you select multiple armature objects and hold the key down while selecting an action in the action editor's action drop-down menu.

Otherwise, in object mode with armatures selected, if you press CtrlL to open the link data menu, perhaps you have an entry there to link actions?

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  • $\begingroup$ Appreciate the attempt but neither of those is quite what I'm looking for. Holding alt while selecting an action while everything is selected doesn't appear to do anything. In object mode in the link data menu there's an option to link animation data, which I don't think is what I'm looking for either. They have appropriate animation data, they all have the same actions, so really my issue isn't so much not understanding functions or stuff not working correctly, but more of a workflow problem. Stuff doesn't behave the way I expect. $\endgroup$
    – Derek Fix
    Commented Apr 21 at 6:34

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