Repeating the Animation
Jim is now walking in place, taking only one step. Before you make Jim move through space, you have to repeat the animation so he takes more steps. There are several ways to do this. For example, you can just duplicate all the poses in the Dope Sheet to have another step after the first one, but in this case you’re going to do it from the NLA Editor so that you’ll have an introduction to this Blender feature.
First, open an NLA Editor. It will look like something similar to what you can see in Figure 12.5. The name of your current action appears (below the rig’s name, which is the object that performs the action), and next to it you’ll see an icon with a snowflake; you’ll also see the action’s keyframes displayed to the right of its name.
There are two ways to proceed from here. First, you can press the X button in the action’s name inside the Action Editor (make sure to press the F near it first), so Jim stops performing that action and the NLA Editor can do its job. Then, you can go to the NLA Editor, press Shift + A, and from the list select the Walk_Cycle action you’ve been creating, and it will be added as a strip.
The second option, which is much easier and faster, is to click the snowflake icon in the Walk_Cycle action in the NLA Editor. This will turn the action into a strip and automatically perform the actions explained in the first option. Now you can move that strip to change the time in which the whole animation happens. You can even scale with S to make it faster or slower, and duplicate it to have more steps (see Figure 12.6).
Of course, you can duplicate the Walk_Cycle strip to include more steps in your animation, but you’re going to learn a more elegant way to do it. Press N in the NLA Editor to open the Properties Region. There are two things you can adjust here. First, in the Action Clip panel, you can “cut” frames at the start or end of the animation. Set the end to 39 instead of 40 so pose 1 doesn’t repeat in two frames. This will make the transition more natural when you repeat it. Then, in the same panel, you can change the scale of the strip and the number of repetitions it will have. Set the repetitions to something like 5 or 6, so you have enough steps in the animation. Then you can play with the scale of the strip to make the animation faster or slower until you’re satisfied with it.
As you can see, using the NLA Editor is a very easy way of controlling actions instead of dealing with a lot of keyframes in order to achieve the same result. This is just an introduction, but you can do all sorts of cool things in this editor, such as overlapping different actions or creating transitions between two actions.