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¶

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 Local Markers: Shows action-local markers on the strip, this is useful when synchronizing time across strips.
Set Preview Range: Selecting a preview range by dragging in the NLA Editor.
Clear Preview Range: Unset the preview range
Auto Select Preview Range: Automatically select the preview range based on the range of keyframes.

Select Menu¶

All: Select all NLA-strips.
None: Deselect all NLA-strips.
Invert: Invert the current selection of NLA-strips.
Box Select: Select NLA-strips by drawing a box. All NLA-strips that intersects the box will be added to the current selection.
Border Axis Range: 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.

Edit Menu¶

Transform

Move: Move the selected NLA-strips in time or to different NLA-track.
Extend: Extend the selected NLA-strips.
Scale: Scale the selected NLA-strips.

Snap

Current Frame: Move the start of selected NLA-strips to the current frame.
Nearest Frame: Move the start of the selected NLA-strips to the nearest frame.
Nearest Second: Move the start of the selected NLA-strips to the nearest second.
Nearest Marker: Move the start of the selected NLA-strips to the nearest marker.

Duplicate

Make a copy of the selected NLA-strips.

Linked Duplicate

Make a shallow copy of the selected NLA-strips.

Split Strips

NLA-Split the selected strips into two NLA-strips. The split happens at the current frame.

Delete Strips

Delete selected NLA-Strips.

Toggle Muting

Mute or unmute the selected NLA-strips. Muted NLA-strips will not influence the animation.

Apply Scale

Apply the scale of the selected NLA-strips to their referenced Actions.

Clear Scale

Reset the scaling of the selected NLA-strips.

Sync Action Length

Synchronize the length of the action to the length used in the NLA-strip.

Make Single User

This tool ensures that none of the selected strips use an action which is also used by any other strips.

Swap Strips

Swap the order of the selected NLA-strips in their NLA-track.

Move Strips Up

Move selected NLA-strips a track up if there is room.

Move Strips Down

Move selected NLA-strips a track down if there is room.

Track Ordering

To Top: Move selected track to the top of the tracks.
Up: Move selected track one track up.
Down: Move selected track one track down.
To Bottom: Move selected tracks to the bottom of the tracks.

Remove Empty Animation Data

Remove Animation Data from selected objects when they don’t contain any animation.

Start Editing Stashed Action

It will enter and exit Tweak Mode as usual, but will also make sure that the action can be edited in isolation (by flagging the NLA track that the action strip comes from as being “solo”). This is useful for editing stashed actions, without the rest of the NLA Stack interfering.

Start Tweaking Strips Actions

The contents of Action strips can be edited, but you must be in Tweak Mode to do so. The keyframes of the action can then be edited in the Dope Sheet.

Add¶

Add Action strip: Add an NLA-strip referencing an Action to the active track.
Add Transition: Add an NLA-strip to create a transition between a selection of two adjacent NLA-strips.
Add Sound Strip: Add an NLA-strip controlling when the Speaker object plays its sound clip.
Add Meta-Strip: Group selected NLA-strips into a meta strip. A meta strip will group the selected NLA-strips of the same NLA-track.
Remove Meta-Strip: Ungroup selected Meta strips.
Add Tracks: Add a new NLA-Track on top of the selected object.
Add Track Above Selected: Add a new NLA-Track just above the selected NLA-track.
Include 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.