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Description
This quick tutorial is for Blender animators who need to create several animations for the same character and keep all of them in one file.
This is convenient when creating animations for games; may also be used when creating CG movies with Blender.

The method is available in the dope-sheet, in action editor mode (see image), the main buttons used to create and manage actions are grouped together on the right side. I think the pic summarizes how it works but I'll give more details here.

- first, the action selector
- second, the action name. Clicking this allows you to give a meaningful name; it is important when you have many actions, of course!
- The button with an 'F', make sure to press it. AFTER you press it you will see a number on the right and if you press that number, you can make the action 'single user'. The number tells us how many armatures are currently using this action (for example, maybe we are animating 100 rabbits eating carrots, so 100 rabbits currently use the same animation, but if we want the rabbit near the camera to use a slightly different animation, we press that number then we can edit the special animation separately.
- The button to create a new action. The name of the action will change and the new action is based on the current action.
- The button to unlink the current action, then NO action is assigned to the armature BUT if we set a keyframe after pressing this [X] button, a new action is automatically created based on the current pose.

Also, notice that on the right you can see a vaguely similar interface in Armature properties. Here this window displays 'Default' and 'Idle (basic)'. Well these are saved POSES that belong to a POSE library.
Here the currently selected library is K poses.
But here's the trick, a pose library and an action (like, Kagami.walk_sketch) are the same thing. So if we press that button left to K poses, we find the same list of actions/pose libraries.
Now if we pick a pose in 'K poses' we can use the button under +, - (a kinda magnifier button) to copy that pose to the current armature.
BUT when pressing that magnifier button we only copy to currently selected bones, which is great, unless you don't know about it (because then, it looks like the button does nothing).

Hope this helps.

Description
This quick tutorial is for Blender animators who need to create several animations for the same character and keep all of them in one file.
This is convenient when creating animations for games; may also be used when creating CG movies with Blender.

The method is available in the dope-sheet, in action editor mode (see image), the main buttons used to create and manage actions are grouped together on the right side. I think the pic summarizes how it works but I'll give more details here.

- first, the action selector
- second, the action name. Clicking this allows you to give a meaningful name; it is important when you have many actions, of course!
- The button with an 'F', make sure to press it. AFTER you press it you will see a number on the right and if you press that number, you can make the action 'single user'. The number tells us how many armatures are currently using this action (for example, maybe we are animating 100 rabbits eating carrots, so 100 rabbits currently use the same animation, but if we want the rabbit near the camera to use a slightly different animation, we press that number then we can edit the special animation separately.
- The button to create a new action. The name of the action will change and the new action is based on the current action.
- The button to unlink the current action, then NO action is assigned to the armature BUT if we set a keyframe after pressing this [X] button, a new action is automatically created based on the current pose.

Also, notice that on the right you can see a vaguely similar interface in Armature properties. Here this window displays 'Default' and 'Idle (basic)'. Well these are saved POSES that belong to a POSE library.
Here the currently selected library is K poses.
But here's the trick, a pose library and an action (like, Kagami.walk_sketch) are the same thing. So if we press that button left to K poses, we find the same list of actions/pose libraries.
Now if we pick a pose in 'K poses' we can use the button under +, - (a kinda magnifier button) to copy that pose to the current armature.
BUT when pressing that magnifier button we only copy to currently selected bones, which is great, unless you don't know about it (because then, it looks like the button does nothing).

Hope this helps.