Year: 2020

Using Non-Linear Animation (NLA Features) in Blender 2.8

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Many animation apps have an exciting feature that lets us re-use a group of keyframes in a more convenient way to build larger and more complex animations. They’re commonly referred to as non-linear editing. A popular example includes setting up an action as keyframes once, and then looping it using an NLA bock of sorts (like a walk cycle). Better yet, animations can be combined and transitioned without interruptions or ugly pops. We can even overlay several actions, such as a walk cycle, an eye blink and a waving hand gesture.

Blender has these features, and while difficult to grasp at first, they’re surprisingly simple to use once you grasp the concept:

  • setup an animation using regular keyframes, or import it from a service like Mixamo
  • turn this group into an Action Strip (that’s what Blender calls an NLA block)
  • add this Action Strip onto an NLA track, repeat it or combine it with other strips
  • add transitions in between blocks to seamless motion
  • add tracks to combine animations

Here’s how it works for me. This might not be 100% accurate, but it’s good enough to build seriously cool animations with ease. I’m using Blender 2.82 for this example, and I’m expanding on principles I’ve briefly touched on in my previous article about looping walk animations.

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Switching between Cameras in Animations with Blender 2.8

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If you have multiple cameras in your scene, chances are that you may want to cut to another one during the course of an animation. I’ve often wondered how to do that, but only finding outdated material on the internet, I decided to poke around myself. Half an hour later I had it sussed out …

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How to render with the current Viewport Shading in Blender

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Although I like Eevee, sometimes I’d like something even faster for animatic previews. Eevee still requires lights to be setup, whereas with the regular “material preview” setting in the viewport, we can see things just fine before we bring in our lights. It would be nice if there is a way to use the same …

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Rendering with Transparency in Blender

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I’ve encountered a small puzzle recently in regards to rendering the alpha channel of PNG images with transparency. I didn’t quite understand the complex setups I’ve read about, nor could I reproduce the results. Thanks to some hive-mind thinking, we could figure it out on my Discord Server.

Here’s how to do it, both for Eevee and Cycles.

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Animating Synty Characters in Unreal Engine

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I’ve been intrigued by how easy it is to render a scene from Synty Studios in Unreal Engine. It’s as easy as opening the project and selecting the demo map. This allows us to explore the scene with the default Unreal Mannequin. I wanted to find out how to use a Synty character in its …

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How to loop Walk Animations with Blender’s NLA Editor

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In my previous article I’ve explained how to import Synty characters into Blender, and how to apply animations from Mixamo. Now that we have an animation in there, we may want to play it more than once. In a walk cycle, we’d have to play the walk loop multiple times to create the illusion of walking. I’ll cover how to do that in this article before I forget again.

PS: These are just notes, not exactly a tutorial. I’ve only just discovered the basics of the NLA Editor, so if I’m mis-describing anything and you know better, or something isn’t working, please leave a comment so I can correct this article.

Here’s what we’ll do:

  • if necessary, remove the forward motion from the current animation
  • turn the keyframe animation into an Action Strip (that’s an NLA Block)
  • add the Action Strip to an NLA Track (that’s a special timeline)
  • modify the Action Strip to repeat
  • apply forward motion with two keyframes

The concept of the NLA Editor is similar to aniBlocks in DAZ Studio, or the NLA blocks in Carrara. We start with regular keyframes, turn them into a block (or Action Strip as Blender calls them), and then we mix and match them on a special timeline called the NLA Editor. If you’re curious, NLA stands for Non Linear Animation. Action strips can be mixed and matched to blend in, so there’s no popping when one animation ends and one begins.

The NLA Editor can be used in conjunction with regular keyframes. For walk cycles, it is common to exclude the forward motion from the Action Strip and instead replace it with a linear motion. If the forward motion is included in the Action Strip, the character would reset to the beginning rather than continuously move forward. Hence I’ll use a combination of the two.

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Using Synty Characters with Mixamo and Blender

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I’ve just worked out how to import Synty characters into Blender via Mixamo. It’s a somewhat complex process with a few pitfalls, and while it’s all fresh in my mind, I thought I’d best write it down somewhere. The workflow is similar for both the SimplePeople and the Polygon City characters, and I would imagine other Synty characters will probably work with these instructions just as well.

Note that I’m only using Blender and Mixamo, no other plugins or game engines. I’ll also explain how to add textures while we’re in the process, because that’s not exactly intuitive. Here’s the step-by-step outline:

  • import Synty character into Blender (as FBX)
  • correct pose and apply texture
  • export as FBX (see settings below)
  • import into Mixamo
  • apply desired animation and export (as FBX)
  • import into Blender and see the animation

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Octane for DAZ Studio – render tests

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In a recent stream I got accustomed with some of the options of the Octane Plugin for DAZ Studio. It’s easy to get brain overload with so many sliders! After some fiddling though, I discovered how to render the final image. However, there appear to be four different types of options on how to achieve that. These are:

  • Direct Lighting
  • Path Tracing
  • PMC
  • Info Channel

Rather than read the manual, which I’m sure would explain what the difference between each option, I did a few test renders of the scene we built. Let’s see if we can visually detect any differences.

The renders below were done at 2000×1500 with the built-in denoiser, which kicks in at the end of the image. Until that point, minor grain is visible. These were saved as 16 bit PNG files (click to enlarge).

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Adding an old GPU increased my render speed by 24%

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I’ve made an interesting discovery the other day about one of my render nodes: with identical GPUs, one appears to render faster than the other. I didn’t get it at first. But with a possible explanation in my head, I got the thinking and applied the same principle to my other node, and was able to increase its render speed by 24%!

How exciting is that?

It’s all about retro hardware, and how to make the most out of what you already have. Let me tell you what I discovered, and how I made use of an old AMD/ATI GPU in my setup that I never thought would work.

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Can a 1080p Timeline export 4K UHD in Premiere Pro?

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I was asking myself this very same question. The obvious answer is YES of course, it really depends on the export settings. I had assumed of course that Premiere is clever enough to take the original resolution from whatever media is available, and do its rendering from that. Big mistake. Because it doesn’t do that!

While it is possible to pick a 4K or 4K UHD export preset, or even create your own, Premiere will up-scale your footage from 1080 to the desired resolution.

I’ve done some tests on this recently and can confirm that’s how Premiere works under the hood. If you want to get crisp 4K output from your edit, the timeline needs to be set to 4K or 4K UHD (depending on what aspect resolution you’re editing in).

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