Introduction

The NLA editor, short for NonLinear Animation, can manipulate and repurpose Actions, without the tedium of handling keyframes. It is often used to make broad, significant changes to a scene’s animation, with relative ease. It can also repurpose, chain together a sequence of motions, and “layered” actions, which make it easier to organize, and version-control your animation.

Header

View Menu

Sidebar N

Show or hide the Sidebar Region.

Adjust Last Operation

Displays a pop-up panel to alter properties of the last completed operation. See Adjust Last Operation.

Channels

Show or hide the Channels Region.

Frame Selected NumpadPeriod

Reset viewable area to show selected strips.

Frame All Home

Reset viewable area to show all strips.

Go to Current Frame Numpad0

Centers the area to the Playhead.

Realtime Updates

When transforming NLA-strips, the changes to the animation are propagated to other views.

Show Control F-Curves

Overlays a graph of the NLA-strip’s influence on top of the strip.

Show Markers

Shows the markers region. When disabled, the Markers Menu is also hidden and markers operators are not available in this editor.

Show Local Markers

Shows action-local markers on the strip, this is useful when synchronizing time across strips.

Local markers shown on a strip.

Show Seconds Ctrl-T

Show timing in seconds not frames.

Sync Visible Range

It synchronizes the horizontal panning and scale of the current editor with the other editors (Graph, Dope Sheet, NLA, and Sequencer) when this option is set. That way you always have these editors showing the same section of frames.

Set Preview Range P

Interactively define frame range used for playback. Allows you to define a temporary preview range to use for animation playback (this is the same thing as the Playback Range option of the Timeline editor header).

Clear Preview Range Alt-P

Clears the preview range.

Set Preview Range to Selected Ctrl-Alt-P

Sets the preview range to playback the selected NLA strips.

Area

Area controls, see the user interface documentation for more information.

See also

• See Timeline’s View Menu.

Select Menu

All A

Select all NLA-strips.

None Alt-A

Deselect all NLA-strips.

Invert Ctrl-I

Invert the current selection of NLA-strips.

Box Select B

Select NLA-strips by drawing a box. All NLA-strips that intersects the box will be added to the current selection.

Border Axis Range Alt-B

Select NLA-strips by drawing a box. All NLA-strips that intersects the frames of the drawn box will be added to the current selection.

Before Current Frame [

Select all NLA-strips before the current frame.

After Current Frame ]

Select all NLA-strips after the current frame.

Markers Menu

Markers are used to denote frames with key points or significant events within an animation. Like with most animation editors, markers are shown at the bottom of the editor.

Markers in animation editor.

For descriptions of the different marker tools, see Editing Markers.

Track Menu

Contains tools for working with NLA tracks. For descriptions of the different editing tools, see Editing Tracks.

Strip Menu

Contains tools for working with NLA strips. For descriptions of the different editing tools, see Editing Strips.

Add

Add Action Strip Shift-A

Add an NLA-strip referencing an Action to the active track.

Add Transition Shift-T

Add an NLA-strip to create a transition between a selection of two adjacent NLA-strips.

Add Sound Strip Shift-K

Add an NLA-strip controlling when the speaker object plays its sound clip.

Selected Objects

Let the selected objects appear in the NLA Editor. This is done by adding an empty animation data object to the selected object.

Transform Controls

Snap

Activates automatic snapping when you moving keys.

• Snap To

  Type of element to snap to.

  • Frame:

    Snap to frame.

    Second:

    Snap to seconds.

    Nearest Marker:

    Snap to nearest Marker.

  Absolute Time Snap

  Absolute time alignment when transforming keyframes