Making and Importing Animations

So you want to make animations for NSMBW? No problem. This guide is meant to teach you how to get your animations in-game.

Custom animations can be used for so many things in the modding scene, when making custom enemies, custom players, anything that is animated in-game can have their animation edited! There are a few exceptions, for instance, not much is known about animating BG's but I do hope to cover that and do some research before I say anything.

'''DISCLAIMER: THIS TUTORIAL IS BEST SUITED FOR BLENDER USERS AND ALSO ASSUMES YOU HAVE BASIC KNOWLEDGE OF HOW TO USE BLENDER. IN ADDITION TO THIS IT IS ALSO ASSUMED YOU KNOW HOW TO ANIMATE IN BLENDER, I WILL NOT BE TEACHING YOU ANIMATION BASICS. THIS IS MERELY FOR LEARNING THE WORKFLOW OF MAKING NSMBW ANIMATIONS WITH BLENDER'''

Tools and requirements
So the stuff you're gonna need is the following:
 * BrawlCrate
 * Blender Brawl Scripts by GuiltyGhost
 * Reading Skills
 * Dump of NSMBW with the files

Blender Brawl Script?
The Blender Brawl Script zip is a .zip containing 3 addons for Blender 3.0+, I recommend installing all of them as they can make your life a lot easier. Also, it has the  and the BrawlCrate   importer (not to be confused with the default dae importer and exporter), which is both essential in this tutorial. The other scripts include useful things for IK' s and also uh a Brawl Retarget thing-a-majig. Yeah ok THAT may be more useful if you're modding Brawl. Anywho, install the scripts by unzipping and in Blender, go to Edit -> Preferences -> Add-ons -> Install then go to where you unzipped the archive at, and select each  that you see in the folders. Boom, then enable each of the addons as you install, and you should now be able to go to File -> Import -> BrawlCrate Animation and BrawlCrate Dae among other things, but that's most important. Boom, you're done. If you don't see that make sure you install it right, again there's tutorials on that sorta thing, I'm not here to teach you Blender Basics.

Getting your idea
This is the time you think of what you want to animate. Do you want to animate walking? Idle? Is it going to be a player animation? Enemy? Boss? Custom stuff? Whatever you want, it's 90% likely that you're gonna be following the same steps as I am, but yeah this is the part you want to think of what your goal is.

In this case, I want to animate Ludwig von Koopa's Idle animation to something goofy. I know we're doing a pretty advanced character, what you expected a Goomba? The point is the process is the same, you can apply this tutorial for whatever you do.

Getting the files
Everything you're gonna need can be found in your  folder of the NSMBW dump. For example, let's go to Ludwig's .arc, also labeled as If you see an   folder in the , you're in luck, as you can export that and edit it in Blender!

Now let's see the animations play out to see which animation we need! Most of the time Nintendo does a pretty good job in their naming conventions of their animations, however if you need extra clarity you can always check.

Go to the  of the model in the , right-click -> preview, zoom in and out however you need, then open the left and bottom arrow bar, and then in the top left you should see all the CHR animations and in the bottom a timeline. In the top left, simply click the animation name you want to test, for example if you choose the wait animation, then press Play in the bottom, your model should now do their little animation!

Uh...
If you don't that means they don't use animations OR they have animations in another .arc, only instance I'm aware of that this is the case is with the Player animations (Mario, Luigi, Toad). I'll go more in depth on editing their animations later, but the tutorial still applies, they just require extra setup.