XPS, Blender, poses and animation

Check my previous tutorial to learn how to install addon on Blender  XPS to Blender 2.7x(Blender internal the easy way)Things we are gonna need are Blender 2.7x  http://www.blender.org/ XPS tools addon for Blender ( Blender 2.7x XPS Tools 1.1  made by yours truly ) A Model for XPS/XNALara (Binary or ASCII) For Mac Users Safari automatically unzips downloaded files and deletes the original ZIP file.  Try disabling this function (I don't know how, I never used a Mac) or download using another browser like Firefox. Preparation UPDATE: Here is avideo showing the install process. Thanks a lot! Install Xps addon to blender First thing we have to do is to installing the addon. Go to the provided link and download the latest version of the addon. DO NOT UNZ...

Ok, so this is how the new tools of the addon works.

Bone Renaming
Some functionalities of blender requiere the names of the bone to follow certain conventions (Blender Manual: wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc…)


The XPS to Blender button will affect all the selected armatures, it will rename all the bones that contain the word left or right and replace them with the placeholder *side* (this is to be able to reconstruct the original name latter) and add to the end of the name the suffix .L and .R respectively.

The Blender to XPS button affects all the selected armatures, renames all the bones, replace the *side* with the corresponding words left or right according to the suffix .L or .R, and remove the suffix. This should effectively restore the original name of the bone.

Importing/Exporting a sequence of poses.

Importing a sequence of poses as Keyframes.

For this you are gonna need a Model and a sequence of poses for that model. You can make the poses any way you want, the only requisite is that the ending of the name of the poses must be a numeric sequence.
For example runcycle-0001.pose, runcycle-0002.pose, etc. or walk001.pose, walk001.pose, etc.

First import your model.


Now Select the armature so that is the active object.
Goto to the XPS Toolshelf and in the XPS Anim panel click the button Poses to Keyframes.
This will open a file selection dialog. Select 1 pose of the sequence. It doesnt matter witch one you choose, the addon will import all the poses in the sequence.



The addon imported all the poses as keyframes (the yellow lines in the timeline).
You can left click on the timeline and scrub to see the animation. Since we only imported keyframes, the animation is very choppy.



Now we will put some frames in between the keyframes to make a better animation.
Set roughly the length of the animation by changing the start and end frame of the playback/render range.
With this we will be able to preview the animation and make it loop when we press ALT+A for playback. Press it again to stop.

Change the editor area from Timeline to Dope Sheet.
Hit the Home Key to bet fit all the keyfames in the screen.


Those squares/diamonds are the keyframes. Each bone has its own keyframes.


To select a keyframe right click on it. To move a keyframe Press G or right click and hold. Left click to place the keyframe.
If you try to move the keyframes selecting them to the right of the bone names you will move the individual keyframe for a bone, we want to move them together. To do this select the key frame from the top part.






Once you space the keyframes, blender will create the in between frames automatically.
Press CTRL+ALT+P to set the preview range automatically from the first keyframe to the last and then press ALT+A to playback the preview.

Export a sequence of frames as poses.

The button Frames to Poses will export every single frame in the playback/render range to a sequence of poses.
Select the armature with the poses you want to export.
In the Timeline change the start and end frames.
Click the Frames to Poses button and input a name for the sequence.
The addon will add 3 digits to the name. This numbering correspond the the number of the frame.



Now you can load the poses sequence back into XPS and watch your animation



Enjoy and don't forget to share!