Animation Combiner for Blender

This is a plugin for Blender (3.0+), which simplifies creating animation by combining simple ones through custom UI.

Current capabilities

• Can import/export animation from MESSIF .data files (if you would like to add more formats, please create an issue)
• Combines multiple animation into one
• Works with both normalized and non-normalized animations
• Ability to apply animations only to a specific body parts
• Can interpolate between different animations

Limitations

• Only one format supported so far
• All animation needs to have same framerate
  • Not 100% true, you can slow down individual animation, however working with different framerates is cumbersome
• All animation should face the same way
  • Working with animations facing different way is not forbidden and works, but results in weird composites

Planned features

• More formats!
• More skeleton types and ability to interpolate between them
• Ability to work with multiple frame rates and export to a specific one

Installation

• Download the latest archive from releases
• Install plugin to Blender
  • Edit -> Preferences -> Install..
  • Search for "Animation Combiner"
  • Enable plugin

Basic idea

• In this plugin the individual animations are called Actions
• Actions are grouped together in Groups and are applied at the same time
• Groups are applied in sequentially in the specific order.
• Each Action has a number of settings like slowdown, transition which are used to configure how precisely the Action is blended with other Actions.
• You can select to which body parts the Action applies, however only one Action can be applied to every single body part in the Group
• You can select Use movement settings, which will apply the movement the animation had, but can also be only selected once per Group.
• You can select which Skeleton is constructed as base, with Use skeleton, but only one can be selected globally (=per Armature).

Usage

• Look into the right side of the viewport and switch to Animation tab
  • All UI elements are under one panel called AnimationCombiner
• Create new armature through Create Armature button or choose existing one from dropdown
• Create new group
• Import actions into that group
  • Currently only file imports are supported
• Mark the action with Use skeleton
• Apply actions through Apply button
• Export