Animation

Animation supported:

• transform animation of all types of objects

• transform animation of pose bones

• shape key animation

• light animation

• camera animation

Multiple Actions For Single Object

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

New created action is always an active action bound to object. There are several ways to place an active action into NLA track, one is of course doing it in NLA Editor

Or it can be done stashing the action in Dope Sheet

2. Check mute status of NLA tracks

An NLA track can be mute or unmute, the exporter will export all the mute 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 Export Stashed Actions option has been turned on.

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

Constraints

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.

Animation Mode

Redot and Blender have different structure to store animation data. In Redot 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.

Mode 'Animation as Action with Squash'

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.