How to organize multiple NLA track compositions?

Question

I'm working on a character for a game and I want to organize his individual animations (still, walking, attacking) with NLAs.

First, I wanted to use one NLA track per animation and render them out individually. But now I would like to use the advantages of NLA and also overlay several actions/tracks (e.g. walking and breathing together).

Now I'm looking for a possibility of a higher organizational abstraction. With NLA I can combine several actions, but I would now like to "bundle" these NLA-Track-Setups into the actual animations so that I can easily render them out.

My first idea was to chain them all together, e.g. "resting" goes from frame 0 to 100; "hart_attack" goes from frame 101 to 150"; and so on. But this always creates a lot of work if the animation lengths will change.

Maybe someone has a better idea or knows how to group/organize NLAs?

Answer 1

I’m having the same issue. I have about 40 animations with many needing to be compatible and work together. Using the action editor, all is good because it’s easy to switch from one action to another. Using the NLA editor it’s a nightmare because there doesn’t seem to be a way to group tracks. You can turn a strip into a meta strip, but that doesn’t help.

You’re essentially left with using naming conventions for the tracks to ‘group’ them and then manually toggling on and off individual tracks to work on the groups.