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.
21-05-2007 at 9:24 am
Hi Bassam — have you tried using the NLA, and setting the armature of the group as the NLA target? I used that extensively in BlenderPeople. I may be misunderstanding what you’re trying to do, but you CAN use different animations on the armature portion of a linked group through NLA.
21-05-2007 at 9:51 am
yes you can do that, and add strips to the groups in the NLA. What I’m doing here is having two instances of the same groups being posed and animated with proxies in the same scene; using the nla on a group directly doesn’t allow you to pose it, only to apply premade animations