NLA editor presets
I was able to find quite a weak spot of Blender when it comes to producing animation for game engines. With action editor you are able to create per-object animation which is fine for most of the time. However, some game engines employ a little bit more complicated concept behind, for example, character animations than just animating a rig. For example, in my case, one animation sequence can support animations for different custom properties of any object on the scene, changes in particle color and many other things.
With the current NLA editor I can combine different actions from different objects into a one big animation which works perfectly fine. However, right now I am basically limited to one big "action"/preset/project in NLA. So, in my opinion, that would make sense to add something similar to "actions" for the NLA editor. So that you can add multiple scene animations and switch between them using a drop-down, similar to what Action Editor implements for actions. That will be a big improvement for overall animation workflow in Blender simply because NLA editor is very convenient to use for this purpose.
4 Comments
This really could use a mock-up to help show what you're getting at.
@Jason van Gumster: He was mostly refering to the ability that in the NLA editors of game engine, you work on a per level basis with shot sequences. Meaning.. you can merge multiple scenes in the NLA editor. This can be done in the VSE of Blender already, just it's a little disjointed.
Merge the VSE scene editing with the NLA would fix this. In the VSE you can edit and work on different scenes in the same output/timeline.
Cut Tracks, Shots and from what I know is how Unreal Engine works, and this would be how the VSE works in Blender. First you need to build your scene animations (a shot) and then with that you can use your sequences as shots (scenes). You wouldn't do this in the NLA currently, but the VSE.
A quick toggle to edit that particular scene from the VSE would be nice.
@ondraise15: I meant more like allowing a collection of per-scene NLA clips. Same scene can be reused in multiple animation clips which is currently not possible. Now you need to create a separate scene for each clip because NLA editor essentially allows you to store one clip of blended strips right now, not more. The idea was adding a new ID type in Blender, similar to what actions are for objects.