[WIP]VSE QuickTitling

Coding Released Scripts and Themes
1

QuickTitling is an addon to allow for easily creating full title graphics (sometimes referred to as CGs or motion graphics) from Blender’s VSE.

Tutorial video showing how to create titles from version 0.6.0:

Demo video from version 0.5.0:

This addon enables presets and easy real-time editing from the VSE. Setting your sequencer preview to OpenGL preview Material mode is HIGHLY recommended.
The effort was to keep things fairly simple, but allow for good looking and complicated titles.

The workflow is as follows:
Select a preset (‘Default’ for blank)
Make a title scene strip
Add objects of 4 basic types: Box, Circle, Image, Text
Configure those objects in a variety of ways including position, rotation, scale, extrusion and beveling.
Set up materials for those objects including color, specularity, transparency, and texture and alpha texture.
Add a variety of simple animations to each object using presets, then change the settings to suit your taste.
Modify shadows to your taste
If desired, easily export to an image for quicker render times (obviously, no animation is included tho).

So this was originally part of my VSE Quick Functions script, but I realized it really didn’t have anything to do with the rest of the script, so I decided to split it off into it’s own thing.

This addon aims to be as easy to use as possible, if you have any suggestions on how to streamline the interface, please let me know!
This is still in beta and needs testing, there might be bugs, so be warned. Please report any bugs here, on github, or send me a message.

Get the latest version at GitHub:

2 Likes
2

I will definitely be checking this out.

3

Very interesting. Thanks

4

Looks like Blender 2.78 changes one of the variables and breaks my script… small bugfix added.
for Blender 2.78 or later: use 0.5.1
for Blender 2.77 or earlier: use 0.5

5

wow! looks great! I’ll give it a try!

6

Does this addon have a github page?

7

Not yet, no, its next on my todo list to update tho, and ill put the new version on there.

8

Just released version 0.6, and its a huge update!

Make sure you uninstall the old version, it uses a different file formatting now.

First of all, it is now on github, so download the latest release, or master from there:

Big new things are: an improved workflow, built-in presets menu with previews, cyclic animations, sequencer preview overlays showing selected object and wordwrap area, and editing objects directly in the sequencer preview window (select, grab, scale, rotate, more)!

I also created a tutorial video showing how to install and use the addon, see the first post in this thread to watch it, it should give a good overview of some of the great new features too.

I did my best to test it, but with so many changes there may be bugs.

Full Changelog:

  • Changed interface and workflow, should make a lot more sense now
  • Built-in titles are now shown in preset menu, with preview images
  • Newly added objects are named
  • Circles are now actually circles
  • Now keeps track of if a title is edited and displays this
  • Added video settings (loop, frame offset, length), only shown if the loaded texture is a video
  • Added outline options for all but image type, uses a beveled copy of the object to create an outline
  • Added animation oscillations and animation presets for these
  • Added duplicate object button
  • Word wrapping behaves better now, changing the text scale does not change the wrapping size
  • Exported presets are cleaner now - default variables are not saved and xml files have line returns and indenting
  • Updated old presets and added new ones
  • Added overlays in preview windows to show selected title objects
  • Added grab, rotate and scale shortcuts (G, R, S in preview area) for selected object. You can also constrain on an axis, and type in values
  • Added click to selected title elements! Unfortunately, for some reason, I can’t make this right click… doesn’t work, so had to do left…
  • Added page up/page down shortcuts to change the current object layer
  • Added Shift-T shortcut in sequencer to pop up the title preset menu and add a new title quickly

Future plans:

At some point, im going to start porting this to blender 2.8, and using eevee instead of blender internal, should allow for much nicer looking titles and much quicker rendering. Ill probably wait until it is at least in beta tho, right now the python api is still in flux apparently.

3 Likes