Managing Large Blender Animations

I was recently asked what I’d make as a Blender tutorial from a company that already has a ton of great, in depth courses. At the time I was stymied. A lot of what I’d teach was already covered by their lessons.

I know now what I’d teach. A tutorial specifically about proper scene management in Blender. It’s one thing to create an animation or two, but even a relatively short animation can involve scene management. Not knowing how to properly manage scenes can quickly make even a short project feel unwieldy.

For instance: there’s a stair climbing animation. You want to try two or three approaches. Do you do those as 2 or 3 different files? If not, what’s the best way to keep track of them in one file?

After creating the two approaches other scenes get added to the animation. Whoops, now you want to add a third approach to that stair climbing animation. Do you have to move all the animations further down the timeline to fit in that third approach? If you do have to move everything, what’s the best way of doing this so you don’t miss keyframes from a layer of your armature that you didn’t have selected?

These are questions I ran into with a less than 5 minute animation. There were only a few scenes, some had multiple cuts, but without that organization making the cuts was more painful than it could’ve been.

Proper organization would’ve saved me some pain in this project. Proper scene organization is something I’d like to cover in a tutorial, though it’s something I still need to research.

I believe studio.blender.org has some of this in managing their animations. I should go check that out. Even if they don’t, they have the animation files themselves and I could learn a lot from them.

Edit: CGCookie does have a little on this. In their course Animation in Blender Workflow & Body Mechanics is the Animation Workflow Tips. I’d like to take that and really expand on it.