Animation

    • transform animation of all types of objects

    • transform animation of pose bones

    • light animation

    • camera animation

    In most games, one object would have several animations to switch between. This add-on has support for exporting multiple actions all at once into a single AnimationPlayer and makes it easy to switch actions.

    This workflow makes use of blender nla_tracks. Here is a brief guide on how to use this feature:

    1. Stash active action

    ../../../_images/nla_pushdown.jpg

    Or it can be done stashing the action in Dope Sheet

    ../../../_images/stash_action.jpg

    2. Check mute status of NLA tracks

    An NLA track can be or unmute, the exporter will export all the NLA track as a separate action, while blends all the unmute NLA tracks into every action (including the action action) being exported.

    3. Export the scene

    Make sure the option has been turned on.

    Then all the stashed actions, as well as the active action, are exported to an AnimationPlayer.

    ../../../_images/in_godot.jpg

    Sometimes complicated animation is built with object constraint; a usual example is inverse kinematics. The add-on would automatically check if an object has some constraint; if it does, all the constraints are baked into actions and then exported along with the object.

    Godot and Blender have different structure to store animation data. In Godot animation data is stored in an AnimationPlayer node, instead of in each animated node. In order to fix this inconsistence and still make the animation play versatile, this add-on has three animation exporting modes.

    Mode ‘Animation as Actions’

    Treat all the animations as object actions, so in the exported scene, every object would have its own AnimationPlayer and hold its actions.

    Mode ‘Scene Animation’

    If you want your animation to generate the same result as playing at Blender’s timeline, this is what you want. In this mode, all the animations in the scene are placed in just one AnimationPlayer in the scene root.

    This mode has very similar behavior of mode ‘Animation as Action’, but it can generate fewer AnimationPlayers; objects in parent-children relationship would share their AnimationPlayer. It is useful when you have several rigs, and each Skeleton and Mesh has actions; then one rig would have just one AnimationPlayer.