blender-manual/manual/editors/nla/introduction.rst

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Introduction

The NLA editor, short for NonLinear Animation, can manipulate and repurpose Actions, without the tedium of handling keyframes. It is often used to make broad, significant changes to a scene’s animation, with relative ease. It can also repurpose, chain together a sequence of motions, and “layered” actions, which make it easier to organize, and version-control your animation.

Header

View Menu

Adjust Last Operation

Displays a pop-up panel to alter properties of the last completed operation. See bpy.ops.screen.redo_last.

Realtime Updates

When transforming NLA-strips, the changes to the animation are propagated to other views.

Show Control F-Curves

Overlays a graph of the NLA-strip’s influence on top of the strip.

Show Markers

Shows the markers region. When disabled, the Markers Menu is also hidden and markers operators are not available in this editor.

Show Local Markers

Shows action-local markers on the strip, this is useful when synchronizing time across strips.

Local markers shown on a strip.

Set Preview Range P

Selecting a preview range by dragging in the NLA Editor.

Clear Preview Range Alt-P

Unset the preview range

Auto Select Preview Range Ctrl-Alt-P

Automatically select the preview range based on the range of keyframes.

See also

See Timeline’s Timeline view menu.

Select Menu

All A

Select all NLA-strips.

None Alt-A

Deselect all NLA-strips.

Invert Ctrl-I

Invert the current selection of NLA-strips.

Box Select B

Select NLA-strips by drawing a box. All NLA-strips that intersects the box will be added to the current selection.

Border Axis Range Alt-B

Select NLA-strips by drawing a box. All NLA-strips that intersects the frames of the drawn box will be added to the current selection.

Before Current Frame [

Select all NLA-strips before the current frame.

After Current Frame ]

Select all NLA-strips after the current frame.

Markers Menu

Markers are used to denote frames with key points or significant events within an animation. Like with most animation editors, markers are shown at the bottom of the editor.

Markers in animation editor.

For descriptions of the different marker tools, see Editing Markers.

Edit Menu

Contains tools for working with NLA strips. For descriptions of the different editing tools, see Editing Strips.

Add

Add Action Strip Shift-A

Add an NLA-strip referencing an Action to the active track.

Add Transition Shift-T

Add an NLA-strip to create a transition between a selection of two adjacent NLA-strips.

Add Sound Strip Shift-K

Add an NLA-strip controlling when the speaker object plays its sound clip.

Add Meta-Strip Ctrl-G

Group selected NLA-strips into a meta strip. A meta strip will group the selected NLA-strips of the same NLA-track.

Remove Meta-Strip Ctrl-Alt-G

Ungroup selected Meta strips.

Add Tracks

Add a new NLA-Track on top of the selected object.

Add Track Above Selected

Add a new NLA-Track just above the selected NLA-track.

Include Selected Objects

Let the selected objects appear in the NLA Editor. This is done by adding an empty animation data object to the selected object.