How do I get from Animation Groups to Animation Ranges

[chrisrcampart]

Hey All!

First time user and first time poster on your community forums! I think it goes without saying, but any of you willing to help with my dilemma I already praise you and I am grateful for your time! That said, I am also very new to web dev for 3D animation so apologies for any wrong terminology as I have primarily worked on other platforms but hopefully some of what I say will make sense.

So I’m working on bringing in straight forward stuff like bringing in Mixamo animation clips into Blender and then into Babylon sandbox. I’ve gotten as far with documentation and searching the wide web on multiple methods on how to do this properly and I’ve gotten far enough to where I have successfully imported a .glb from Blender to babylon sandbox with 4 animation groups (e.g. walk, jump, idle, tpose). Now for what I’m working on, animation groups are not end game for me, what I’m trying to accomplish is have the exported .glb supply me with animation ranges, not animation groups. I somewhat understand the difference for Babylon, but I’m not sure how to get this accomplished after trying to many different workflows getting my mixamo animation clips from Blender to Babylon. I’ve exported my Blender scene with all 4 anim clips as a .babylon, a gltf and a .glb and unfortunately no animation ranges. Below is an image showing what I need too accomplish:

(Apparently being brand new I cannot post more than 1 image, will try posting after this post)

This is what I have showing up in Babylon Sandbox right now after exporting my stuff from Blender:

Here is a screenshot of my current scene setup in blender that has allowed me to get this far. I used action strips and exported the scene as a .glb to get my groups and referred to this youtube link I’ve seen lying about on the forums:

(Apparently being brand new I cannot post more than 1 image, will try posting after this post)

I now know this is not what my team and I are aiming for. Again, I’m very new so be as brutal or as helpful as you feel need be, trust me any info on how to get my animation groups to be animation ranges would be most appreciated. Thank you everyone

[chrisrcampart]

This is an image that shows the end resule of what I should have once importing my .glb, .babylon or .gltf. I need animation ranges not animation groups:

[chrisrcampart]

Here is a screenshot of my blender scene setup that I was able to get a .glb export into 1 file with 4 anim clips in BabyLon. Also a link that I used to get where I am, but it would seem It does’t produce animation ranges:

Combining Mixamo animations in Blender 2.8 for BabylonJS

Thank you everyone!

[gbz]

Hi @chrisrcampart, please do check out this guide and question post:

• Mixamo - Babylon.js Documentation (multiple animations)
• Problem Loading Meshes with Textures (includes a video of exporting 1 animation)

I’m guessing that in order to use animation ranges, the animation keyframes in Blender should be placed one after the other in the same time track, rather than each animation having its own separate time track.

[chrisrcampart]

You are a lifesaver! I use NLA in blender so it’s a different process than what the babylon docs provide. Combining the tracks into one worked and now shows animation ranges in the sandbox. However, I have a new issue, where my arms/hand joints/animation is very wonky. Here is a screenshot.

[JCPalmer]

AnimationRanges are used for the .babylon exporter to export each Blender Action as a named range in BJS.

GLTF exporter does not directly know what AnimationRanges are as they as BJS specific. Seems as NLA on the Blender side & the importer gets to the same place though.

[chrisrcampart]

Thank you for clarifying, I was just found an article suggesting the same thing, really appreciate you breaking that down and simplifying the difference. Also @gbz I figured out the reason for the broken joints, Blender likes there to be a blank nla track above/before the nla track that has all the animation clips, upon doing this everything worked out great. Thanks for all the help and info guys, straight life saving!