AniMate Pro is a comprehensive set of tools for animation bringing some of the most wanted features from Maya and AnimBot to Blender. The tool has been in close development with professional animators from Disney, Pixar, DreamWorks and other animation studios for over a year. The tool is growing in features every week but we reached the point where we need wider testing and we decided to release it in early access.

You can expect a lot of involvement in the development, request new features and report bugs. This is an early access for a reason so expect some things to give errors, but you can expect as well a committed developer to fix them swiftly.

Join us in this journey and take advantage of early access pricing for one of the most comprehensive tool for animation for Blender.

Small sample of what the users of all skill levels and backgrounds say about AniMate Pro:

Timeline Scrubbing

The "spacebar" (configurable) key can do the default blender action but now holding it makes you enter into a modal that scrubs the timeline, like if you went and selected the playhead but without moving the mouse from your viewport and where you are working right now. While holding space you can display the GUI help, and there are a lot of configurable keys there that can help you understand what you can do with it.

It can be used as a toggle or by holding the key bound to scrubbing (default to SPACE). It is possible to choose to require the LMB or make it a toggle in order to scrub.

Anim Lattice

Manipulate selected keyframe sin the graph editor with a bounding box.

• Proportional scaling based on selection
• Retime keys or tweak values in bulk.

Anim Time Warper

Adjust the timing of your keys on the fly with Pins, Bars and Easings

• Add Pins in selected frames.
• Bars and Easings will be created between Pins.
• Drag Pins to adjust the time between two segments.
• Drag Bars around to preserve the length of the segment.
• Drag Easings to increase the key density towards the Pins.
• Push all Pins or Bars in the direction of movement by holding Shift while dragging.
• Pull all the Pins or Bars behind the direction of movement by holding Ctrl while dragging.
• During TimeWarp: R (Realtime), F (Full Frames), A (SHIFT Add Pin on cursor, ALT on current frame), X (SHIFT Delete Pin under cursor, ALT Delete all)

Anim Sculpt

Sculpt directly over keyframes with proportional editing in the Graph editor. This tool is an essential part of the toolkit or any animator for working with motion capture data.

• Tweak - move keys around.
• Shift: Smooth - smooth relative positions between neighbouring keyframes.
• Ctrl+Shift: Average - smooth to 0 or to average of selected keyframes.

Editors' top bars (Graph & Dope)

Four button themes with support for light Blender themes

Complete control of the top bars directly in the editors: customizable elements, order of sections and buttons.

Independently control what displays on the Graph or the Dope sheet editors

Anim Offset

Offset transforms for a complete animation or for parts of it using proportional blending to achieve seamless results.

From the discontinued addon AnimAide the Anim Offset feature has been implemented into all its glory and is super helpful for offsetting parts of the animation proportionally without having to add layers or rekey the keyframes.

Anim Nudge

• Nudge selected keyframes by a certain set (configurable on the fly) amount of frames.
• Snap previous or following keyframes to the play head if nothing selected.
• Move the frames at the playhead by the set amount.

Anim Poser

Propagate a pose over a certain range of keyframes or copy values to all keyframes matching the furthest left or right keyframe from the selected.

Two new operators with two different options:

• Paste Pose to Range:
  • It will paste the copied pose in the selected range (preview, selected keyframes, all)

• Propagate values (left or right)
  • it will paste the value of the left or right most keyframe from the selected keyframes to all the curves with selected keyframes.

Anim Slicer

A tool to add “cuts” (insert keyframes preserving the animation curves) in a range of frames for the current action given a given criteria for the selected transform channels or available.

Slicing is an advance baking technique to control the output while preserving the curves. Ideal for adding extra keyframes or generating stepped animations in a single click.

“Slice” the animation:

• Range:
  • Limit to selected preview range.
  • Use the whole action regardless of the preview range.
  • Use only the keyframes in between the keyframes selected.
• Criteria:
  • Slice on Full frames and Clean Subframes.
  • Add keyframes to markers only.
  • Add keyframes to every X frames only.
  • Add keyframes to every X frames AND markers.
  • Clear all other frames WITHIN the selected range that are not Markers or Step frames (or both, depending on what you choose).
• You can key:
  • Available, Loc, Rot, Scale, Custom Props

Anim Looper

One button to make all curves (or selected) cyclical and copy first frame to last (or vice-versa).

Create seamless loops fro the current action or selected F-Curves. Perfect for Walk cycles or looping animations.

• Cyclical: Make the animation cyclical with F-Modifiers
• Selection: All the animation or selected F-Curves.
• Match Loop: Copy start to end frame, vice-versa, or leave as is.
• Start/End frames (Handles and Interpolation).
• Middle frames (Handles and Interpolation).

Anim Shifter

Shift the current animation by a certain amount of frames (positive or negative)

• Shift all scene or only selected objects.
• Shift all curves or only selected.
• Add a hold frame at both ends of the shift to keep the animation still on the shift frames.

Cleanup Tools

Clear all keyframes from locked transforms in one click.

Optionally remove keyframes that do not contribute to animation (repeated values over different frames in a “flat” curve)

Euler local Filter (similar to discontinuity filter but only on selected keys)

Recommended Euler rotation to remove or minimize gimbal lock

Anim Re-timer

Retime animations from any frame rate to any other with ease and removing the subframes of the resulting animation getting a perfect result.

Realtime Motion Paths

While active the motion paths in the viewport will update based on changes in the graph editor or the active object or bone.

Anim Stepper

A tool to programatically add and update as needed the step animation of individual objects or the whole scene, non destructive animation in 2s, 3s, 4s...

• Per object / armature / bone workflows.
• Update all animation to a certain step.

Camera Stepper

Non destructively bake any animation from any object in a different frame step to your cameras (object in 2s, 3s… and the camera in 1s).

The animation needs to be already set up in frame steps for Camera Stepper to work.

Non-destructive workflow:

• Add object to list.
• Bake action to camera from the list.
• Swap between the baked and original (you can go back to the original with a simple toggle change it, change your source animation and re-bake with a simple click).

AutoKeying

Add visual cues to know when you have (or not) autokeying enabled:

• Square and passpartout in the 3d viewport (or the timeline editors).
• Configurable text to display in the viewport.
• Change the colors of:
  • The playhead
  • Headers
  • Outline of active pose bone or object.

Selection tools

In the graph editor there are some extra buttons, allowing you to lock vertical or horizontal movement of keys when dragging so you ensure only to move values or frames, but not both simultaneously.

• By default, can be disabled, the G R S buttons will be replaced with a overarching operator allowing you to isolate Loc, Rot or Scale tracks when no keys are selected
• You can make the playhead move to wherever you click on the graph editor when you select a keyframe
• Pressing G, S, or R when no keyframe is selected, will select the corresponding curves on the right panel from the currently selected object / bone.
• Pressing 1 (loc), 2(rot), 3(scale), 4(others, like custom properties) will select or unselect these fcurves for the selected object / bone and while holding shift, will toggle their visibility
• Display or hide handles for keyframes, or only selected, or none.

View Tools

Quickly access essential navigation tools:

• Isolate curve for selected (W), and cancel isolation.
• Zoom all keys (Z) if nothing selected, Zoom selected keys if selection.
• Zoom all and frame action (setting scene range to first and last keyframe, or custom frame range if active, of current animation)

Anim Keyposer (experimental)

An animation layers system that allows you to add key poses and retime an animation.

Preferences

Extensive preferences and configuration options. Preferences > AniMatePro: Timeline Tools > Configuration