How to fix animation actions that are separated and duplicated onto every bone in the heirarchy

Question

I have a character with a set of actions on it (Idle, Walk, Run, etc.). It was given to me with permission to use it in a project I am working on. But, rather than the Armature having a single set of actions and animation data at the root or the Armature, there is instead an animation block of data with a full set of actions (Walk, Run etc.) duplicated for every single bone in the hierarchy, which makes these file impossible to work with.

For example, in order to see the walk action, you need to select every single bone separately and manually set the action to 'Walk', which is extremely time-consuming.

Is there any way to fix this and clean it up so that all the animation data is at the root with just a single set of actions, one for each anim in the file?

Answer 1

This looks like it was baked "out of" somewhere, rather than the actual (correctly rigged) file. The only thing I can think of, for you to work, would be to arm (create) a basic rig, and apply constraints to those bones to the bones on your given rig. The second thing you need to do is to "bake" in Blender, each action from each of those bones. That means, you'll delete everything but "walk" from the outliner (save an "original bones with mixed actions" files first), then save the "walk" file. Clean and delete everything that is not "walk", save "walk" file". Do the same for the remaining actions. Open the "walk" (action only) file and do a BAKE to YOUR basic rig. Delete your given "walk" actions and the previous (broken) rig. Now you have a completely re-build Walk (baked) action in your new basic Rig. Go to your ACTION EDITOR WINDOW and NAME the action accordingly (this is important, so you can pick it up, later). Do the same for all other files. When you complete all that, you can go to your "walk" (baked) action, and FILE>Append>yourOtherBakedSeparatedActionFile.blend>ACTIONS>Append. You will now see it on your ACTION EDITOR (name that you given your action from the previously fixed files in their action editor window). You can now push this action into the NLA, to be exported (file>export>fbx> Press N > export NLA clips and Actions) when you're done editing them.

After all of this, you can now start EDITING whatever you needed to edit. Here's an in-depth video about what gets exported and what not (from other applications into Blender), this is a recommended watch since you inherited a non-editable file, thus you need to reconstruct it, bake it, organize the actions so you can do your work.