f r e e f a c

One of blender’s great new features in 2.43 is the ability to animate linked-group-instances via proxy objects . This effectively solves the problem of animating library data in large projects (I wish we had this during project orange.)
Being a new feature there is a lot of planned work on it- one of the current limitations is that for a given group (character) only one animation can work- If you have two instances, you can’t give them different anims, for instance, to animate mancandy dancing with himself. I found a cheap workaround/hack that’ll work for this version- at least if you have a posix filesystem (not sure about windows). Basically, make a symlink to your library file, and in the scene file, link the group twice- once to the symlink, and once to the original file. Now you can make two group instances and give them each proxies. Blender treats each symlink as a totally different library, so you can animate them independantly. I can imagine this getting cumbersome if you want too many instances of the same character, but for a few it’s fine.
While I don’t think this hack will eat your babies, it might, so backup your work before you try.

I’ve been working a bit with curves lately, and stumbled across an easy way to get over curve twist singularity (as you cross the curve’s Z axis)

• You get the problem when you’re editing a 3D curve, and it needs to loop /curve in the “up” direction of the curve. As you cross that imaginary vertical line, The curve twists. Just go on as normal, and when you’re done editing, select all the points in the curve and add a hook.
• Once you’ve added the hook, pop back out into object mode. Then select and rotate the curve object only (leave the hook alone), and rotate the curve , so you get a more favourable plane. The advantage is that the you don’t need to bother rotating twice (once in object, the other in edit mode).

You can apply the hook modifier and delete the empty to reduce clutter, or leave it and have the option of rotating again later if you move the curve points around and get another twist.