How to mirror an animation

Question

I have an animation of my character holding a lamp with the right hand. I want to mirror this animation to get my character holding a lamp with the left hand. For each frame I can copy pose and paste it x-flipped. However, I've got many frames and it will take a long time to perform such operation for each frame. Is there any way to do it faster?

Answer 1

Mirroring a pose (animation):

1. Open the Dope Sheet:
2. Select your keyframes (e. g. via Border select or circle select etc.) or just press A to select them all.
3. Press Ctrl + C to copy them.
4. Navigate to the place where you want to paste them and press Ctrl + Shift + V. This will paste the selected keyframes but it will flip the pose (in order to flip the pose correctly you'll need to name the bones like this: PartOfTheBody_L and PartOfTheBody_R (Left and Right)

Playing an animation in reverse:

1. Open the Dope Sheet:
2. Press A to select all keyframes.
3. Press Shift + D to duplicate them and drag them to the place where you want.
4. Navigate to the last duplicated keyframe.
5. Press Shift + M to open up the Mirror Keys menu and klick on 'By Times over Current frame'.

Answer 2

So after some googling and reading API I came up with a little script to automate the process:

import bpy

scn = bpy.context.scene

bpy.ops.object.mode_set(mode='POSE')
bpy.ops.pose.select_all(action='SELECT')

initial_keyframe = scn.frame_current

scn.frame_set(0)

while True:
    bpy.ops.anim.keyframe_insert()

    if 'FINISHED' not in bpy.ops.screen.keyframe_jump(next=True):
        break
    else:
        # A hook to update bone positions after jump.
        # See http://blender.stackexchange.com/a/8534/14703
        scn.frame_set(scn.frame_current)

scn.frame_set(0)

while True:
    bpy.ops.pose.copy()
    bpy.ops.pose.paste(flipped=True)
    bpy.ops.anim.keyframe_insert()

    if 'FINISHED' not in bpy.ops.screen.keyframe_jump(next=True):
        break
    else:
        scn.frame_set(scn.frame_current)

scn.frame_set(initial_keyframe)

Running this will x-flip all frames in the animation. Unfortunately copying and pasting pose creates unwanted keyframes so you may want to clean up the result manually.

Answer 3

Easy, select the armature in the outliner and then over the viewport Right-Click Mirror > X Global or Y or Z depending on your specific case, then hit Space Bar .