The action strip

Consider some basic things we might want to do to Rain’s walking animation:

• Offset the walk cycle in time
• Speed up or slow down Rain’s pace
• Start/stop the walk cycle (or, put another way, repeat the cycle a finite number of times)

For all these tasks, we already know one solution: edit the keyframes! In other words, select the keyframes, then move them, scale them, or duplicate them as needed. That’s often a perfectly good solution, but not always. Editing keyframes means editing the action, which is problematic if you linked that action or if you don’t want to duplicate or overwrite it.

That’s where the Nonlinear Animation editor comes in.

Introduction to the Nonlinear Animation editor

While you may have thought your animations were controlled solely by the keyframes that appear in the Dope Sheet, the Timeline, and the Graph Editor, another area in Blender was pulling the strings this whole time:

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