> can't you just parent all 3 objects to > an empty and animate that?
He is not talking about all 3 objects moving identically, or even identically with an offset. Rather, he is talking about the 3 objects having (potentially) fully independent motion from each other, but all stored in the same action. In other words, he's asking for actions to be able to contain more than one object's animation at a time, in the same way that actions can contain more than one bone's animation at a time. For this to be possible the animation channels in actions would have to be "fully qualified". e.g. instead of just "x location" you would have "x location of cube" and "x location of sphere". That way you could have separate animation for the cube's and sphere's x location, but still stored in the same action without conflicting or over-writing each other. I should amend my previous response to Tobias and point out that action channels can already have "fully qualified" names, because they just use relative RNA paths to specify what property they reference. The RNA path is always evaluated relative to what the action is assigned to. So in theory you can assign an action to the scene, and have the RNA paths include the object. You can use the python api to construct such a situation if you like, but IIRC the depgraph cannot handle that right now, so it doesn't work reliably and can often do weird funky things. Therefore there are no tools to allow the user to construct something like that easily, and Blender's animation workflow depends heavily on armatures for any situation where there are multiple "objects" (bones) with related animation. This unfortunately does not provide good solutions for all cases, but it provides at least workable (even if sometimes annoying) solutions for perhaps 80%+ of cases. Note, however, that the animation system is not the only thing with this weird addiction to armatures. The library linking proxy system is that way as well. I can't speak for the developers, but I'm hoping (fingers crossed) that we can slowly migrate away from these historical limitations. In the mean time, you can usually work around it or brute-force some solutions, even if it isn't ideal or user-friendly. Tobias: out of curiosity, do you have a specific use-case in mind that you want this for? --Nathan On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 10:11 PM, Knapp <magick.c...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 4:39 AM, Nathan Vegdahl <ces...@cessen.com> wrote: >>> In this scene you have three objects. Every object >>> has it's own action and it works well. But for some animations it could >>> be very useful to store that animation of all three objects in one >>> action > > It is very possible I don't get what you are saying but can't you just > parent all 3 objects to an empty and animate that? > > > -- > Douglas E Knapp > > Creative Commons Film Group, Helping people make open source movies > with open source software! > http://douglas.bespin.org/CommonsFilmGroup/phpBB3/index.php > > Massage in Gelsenkirchen-Buer: > http://douglas.bespin.org/tcm/ztab1.htm > Please link to me and trade links with me! > > Open Source Sci-Fi mmoRPG Game project. > http://sf-journey-creations.wikispot.org/Front_Page > http://code.google.com/p/perspectiveproject/ > _______________________________________________ > Bf-committers mailing list > Bf-committers@blender.org > http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers > _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list Bf-committers@blender.org http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers