Animation Asset type
Thought it would be very useful to have an animation asset type.
I know the challenge likely comes down to "rig matching", but perhaps that's a "pluggable" feature within this animation asset type functionality.
In other words, asset saved as some "generalized rig", and when you drag it onto a model, a dialog comes up with option to select the rig type. The rig types that (dynamically) show will be whichever ones you have "mapping files" for in some folder (folder perhaps a user preference). With a suggestion to create a mapping file for Rigify to start, and vendors of other rigging tools can create mapping files for their toolset. The mapping files oc are a bone mapping between the generalized humanoid rig and the rig type specific rig (rigify, auto-rig pro, etc). Something like that ...
And the mesh being targeted by the asset "drop" must already be rigged using the rig type chosen during the instancing of the asset, oc.
In the asset browser itself, you will be able to view the animaton (whether it be real-time, or a rendered sequence)
Even if this only supports "humanoid" features to start, that brings a lot of functionality, and a "market" for blender artists to sell their hand-crafted animations in a manner that makes it easy for the user to cycle through a bunch of animations right there in their own project, and apply it to a character.
2 Comments
While the intention is good, good luck defining a "generalized rig". So many people tried to make a standard rig that can hold anim for everything: it never worked and only added more and more "standards".
At the end of the day it's a meaningless hassle, and you always end up retargeting animations to different rigs, so the smart thing to do is instead spend time and resource on retargeting tools instead of adding more illusional standard rigs to the list.
Rigify and other rigs can already do this to some extent; the animation is stored to namespaces, so if you append an walk animation from a beefy ogre to a tiny elf, it all "works." You can then often globally modify the curves for things like feet and pelvis translation and everything automatically works. Since IK is kinda the same for all rigs out there, you can even get away with some other rig by using find/replace on bone names.
Asset browser is a different issue; this sounds like it relates most to things like the newer addition of Collections as assets (so you can store a whole character) and Poses. I think animations or actions as an asset would just be an extension of poses.