Reusing actions
Actions are an interesting type of data block. They store all the animation channels for an object; we’ve been making them since the start of this book, yet we’ve scarcely needed to think about them. Actions are created automatically, and there’s usually just one action per object for the whole animation. When we first keyed the location of Cube in Chapter 1, an action was automatically created called CubeAction. Thenceforth, every keyframe for every property belonging to Cube was stored in the aptly named CubeAction action, and that was that. Blender never prompted us about this. Why would we need it to?
The same goes for all the other animations we worked on, including animations of the character Rain. Every time we animated Rain in a new project, we created an action for her, thinking only of the keyframes in that action and never the action itself as a container of animation data. Sometimes, however, there are actions-qua-actions we do want...
