What's a good Blender character animation workflow?

[Boothand]

When editing and creating new animations, I start with importing animations and so on. Would it be worthwhile (or possible) to learn how to create an IK rig to use and animate, and simply export after that? Would new animations get imported onto that rig set-up or would it find a conflict/import the old one?

 

The reason I'm asking is because while I'm not uncomfortable with rotating limb by limb, it doesn't have the hierarchy necessary for that - so when I rotate the elbow, the hand doesn't follow, and fingers etc. If it did, I wouldn't need the above. But even if I somehow figured out how to fix that, would I need to do that every time I imported a new animation?

[mrwonko]

That's what the skeleton change dropdown menu in the importer is for - it changes the JKA bone hierarchy a little to fix those issues.

 

A nice IK setup probably helps with animating; just import the skeleton and change it as necessary, I don't see why that would lead to any issues.

[Boothand]

Ok, will give it a try soon then!

[DT.]

Yeah, you'll want an IK setup or a ghost rig (which is what I use in 3ds Max) but not sure if you can do that in Blender. Otherwise, you may as well be using Dragon.