Blender "Animation Layers" made Easy (no addons, just NLA)
Why Blender Stack Exchange recommends it
Blender Stack Exchange users link it as the go-to introduction when someone needs to combine, store, or edit multiple animations with the NLA editor.
Recommended by 2 people across 2 different months, 2022 to 2024.
What it is
A 40-minute Blender tutorial by CGDive that walks through the Nonlinear Animation (NLA) editor as a way to get animation-layer style workflows without addons. It covers tracks and strips, blending modes, extrapolation, tweak mode, looping, influence, and push down versus stash.
What people said
Recommends John Eason · 2023-03 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “how to record a couple of animations in blender?”
You need to learn about Blender's NLA editor. A good introduction from CGDive is here [this video] but there are many other videos online.
Recommends Copperplate · 2024-05 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Swapping Created Pose and Rest Pose?”
You're welcome! The gray "Push Down Action" button (located in the Nonlinear Animation Editor) basically just stores the current animation into its own strip that can then be slid around the track, edited, muted, or crossfaded with other action strips. I recommend CG Dive's tutorials on YouTube to learn more about the process: [this video]
Cites PowerNow · 2022-09 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “How to group keyframes for materials?”
As far as I found out, only transformation keyframes are shown in Action Editor. Probably because you can select different actions in the Action Editor and combine them in the NLA and this is perhaps not wanted with materials. And like Martynas Žiemys said, select the strip animation and click Tab to make the keyframes visible in the dope sheet. [this video]