Editing Tools/Sonic Frontiers Animation Tools (section)

== Usage: ==
<sub>To-do: Make tutorial, but otherwise here's an overview.</sub>

A skeleton needs to be imported into the scene, and this skeleton must be selected in the viewport in order to import or export an animation. The add-on currently only reads bone indices from the animation file, so an animation can ''only'' be imported over the skeleton that it was originally made for. Batch functions can be found in the right ribbon of the viewport's sidebar, in the "Frontiers Animation" category under the "Animation" tab. 

As long as all the bones' scale inheritance mode in your skeleton is set to "Aligned", and any targets for scale-modifying constraints follow the same inheritance mode, the skeleton should generally export exactly as you see in the viewport. 

Per-animation settings (such as FPS and frame range) can be found in the "Action Editor" under the Dope Sheet editor. PXD specific settings may currently not show up for any animation that wasn't imported, or duplicated off of an imported animation. 

When exporting custom skeletons, ensure that all bone names only contain alphanumeric characters. With the exception of underscores "_", any special characters (such as "." commonly auto-added to many duplicated resources in Blender) in bone names may cause a crash in-game upon loading. 

In order to have a default game skeleton support mirroring in Blender, a skeleton must be imported using YX orientation (a toggleable option in all import/export dialogues). If the skeleton is imported with this setting, '''all subsequent import/export operations from this add-on must enable YX orientation as well.''' If it is not properly called out, results in-game will not turn out as expected.

During batch operations, Blender may freeze and become unresponsive. The external Blender console window can (and should) be open so you may view a readout of the import progress instead of assuming the program is crashing. It is not recommended to batch imports hundreds of animations at a time. Depending on your hardware, you may want to play with a group of about 50 at a time or maybe up to 200 if you have a higher end system.