Animations in Blender

Bring an animation from the game into Blender as an action on your armature. Great for checking clothing for clipping in motion, or for weight painting in a pose. LivePose isn't needed for any of this.

There are three ways to get an animation into Blender:

Way	What you get	Where
Record live pose	Exactly what the game shows, frame by frame: the animation plus bone physics and LivePose.	Animations tab, Record live pose
Send an animation	The animation file itself, at its own frame rate. Physics bones stay at rest.	Animations tab, pencil on a listed animation
Send a mod's animation file	Any .pap file in any mod, without playing it in game.	Mod Browser, Animations chip

Before you start

1. In Blender, have an armature in your scene that uses the FFXIV skeleton your meshes are weighted to. The easiest is the armature that comes with a model sent from the plugin: it has the game's rest pose.
2. In the plugin's toolbar, click the sliders button. Under Animation export, Blender armature is the name of the armature object that receives animations. If there's no object with that name, Blender uses the selected armature, or the only one in the scene.
3. Set Blender's scene frame rate to 60 fps if you want to keep every recorded frame.

Record your character in motion

1. Open the Animations tab and click Record live pose (the tab on the right).
2. Choose the Character, the Length of the recording, and a Countdown. The countdown gives you time to start walking, so the recording captures steady motion.
3. Press Record, then move your character.
4. When it's done (or when you press Stop), the recording is sent to Blender. Send last recording again sends it again, for example after you've fixed the armature name.

Good to know:

• Recordings are sampled at 60 frames per second.
• Customize+ is paused on the character while it records, so MagicFit can add your Customize+ template in Blender without applying it twice. Only the character's own Customize+ profile can be paused, not one applied by Brio or Mare; if the body is still scaled, the result tells you.
• In GPose, You is your posed copy and Current target is the GPose target, for example an actor Brio plays an animation on.

Send an animation your character plays

1. Play the animation in game, so it shows up in the Animations list.
2. Press the pencil on its row (or right-click, Send animation to Blender).

The animation is sampled on the skeleton it was made for. Physics bones keep their rest pose; use Record live pose to include physics.

Send an animation file from a mod

1. Open the Mod Browser, pick a mod, and click the Animations chip.
2. Press the pencil on a .pap file (or right-click, Send animation to Blender).
3. A dialog lets you pick the Clip (a file often holds a loop and its start) and the Skeleton it was made for, found from your skeleton mods and the file's race.
4. Press Send to Blender.

Nothing has to play in game for this.

What happens in Blender

• The animation becomes a new action on the armature, starting at the scene's start frame. The scene's end frame moves to the animation's last frame.
• Bones are matched by name. Bones your armature doesn't have are listed in the result.
• Armatures imported with other bone orientations (glTF, FBX) work too.
• Bone scale is only keyed with Key bone scale on (in the toolbar's options). With it off, scaling you applied in Blender stays as it is.
• Use the add-on's Pose panel to switch between actions or back to the rest pose.