This is a thread for Keymesh add-on on extensions platform.
Keymesh allows objects to have more than one object data and makes the object data assignment animatable. This means users can assign different data to object on every frame and create stop-motion-like animations by sculpting, modeling, painting, or even grooming frame-by-frame.
Keymesh is production-ready tool and can be even used for simple (non-animated) mesh versioning during modeling.
Keymesh 2.3 comes with multiple features that help with stop-motion animations:
Frame Picker UI & Thumbnails
Baking regular animations into stop-motion Keymesh object
Support for linking and library overrides.
Support for render farms & 3D printing for actual stop-motion productions
and many more!
You can get Keymesh from Blenders preferences (Get Extensions tab) or from the official extensions platform.
Keymesh is free and open source project. If you want to support the development Buy Me a Coffe
If you would like to help me out developing this thing contact me. There are some things I could use a helping hand on. Tomorrow I will upload this on GitHub too.
I might add support for empties and armatures too, if I find a way around current obstacles. And Grease Pencil too after 3.0 is integrated. It’s not necessary but it is possible, so why not.
Remove operator in Frame Picker is bugged and I’m trying to find a way to resolve it. In some cases it returns error and cancels operation before it’s finished, but works perfectly if current frame is after last keyframe.
BRILLIANT!
I was so sad that they seemingly abandoned this. (Always wondered why)
Anyway, just bought the support version on Gumroad. It would be so good if you stayed on this
So far it seems to work just fine in 3.6 and 4.0 alpha except the error you mentioned but I haven’t tested it out thouroghly. But I really like the design.
For anyone wanting to try this: I had to unpack the folder into my addon directory. Choosing zip from the prefs doesn’t seem to work just yet.
Also in the long run I’d like to have the ability to choose in which tab it should appear. My N panel is really starting to get crowded
That is very helpful feedback thank you.
Blender does that sometimes when .zip files are copied instead of installed, I haven’t identified the reason yet, but couple of unpack-repack usually works. I’ll fix that.
I actually have a version in which you can choose the tab from preferences but forgot to include it. I’ll have new file with both tomorrow.
you should wait with grease pencil … native instanced keyframes integrated into gp are soon coming as one of the new main features of gp 3.0 and would make this redundant and just waste your ressources.
That is not what this add-on does for GP. It doesn’t deal with frames and paintings at all. It is basically a object versioning feature that lets you animate which version of object you’re looking at on which frame.
Keymeshing GP object will basically backup entire object and let you move on to the next frame with new data-block, but everything before that frame is backed up. For GP that is not useful, because it already is basically stop-mo, but it can be useful as object versioning device, and it’s simply writing ‘GPENCIL’ in the allowed objects and it will work on Grease Pencil too.
No. What they’re introducing is frame versioning. Not object versioning. That is completely different. Object can hold much more information than just frames. Strokes, Onion Skinning data, layer data, all of those are saved on data level
I haven’t tested with old particle hair. I’m not sure if they’re stored on object or data level. I haven’t changed much about how meshes work, so if it worked with original it should, but I doubt it.
Over 100 downloads now. Thank you all for your support. This year I plan to work on some more features and stop-motion add-ons. I will demonstrate some of them at Blender Conference.
Financial support helps me allocate more time on working on these projects so consider donating if you can afford, it will be greatly appreciated
I have added initial support for Shape Keys, will polish and upload 2.1.2 either today or tomorrow. But it comes with a warning:
Since Shape Keys are separata data-blocks in Blender and not part of the Mesh, they need to be duplicated too. And Shape Keys can also hold shape key action data blocks, which is different from actions. It’s a mess, and controlling everything is a big headache for users. From what I’ve tested so far everything will work, but managing everything falls onto you as user.
One problem that can’t be fixed is that when using shape keys (especially baked, or sampled) and Keymesh together and scrubbing through timeline, there are some twitches and delays. Nothing shows up in final animation, but since Blender needs to update mesh in multiple ways, this happens.
Also, this is not in the scope of the add-on, but as you know if you remesh you lose all your shape keys and attributes. But with Shape Keys you also can’t modify mesh in any way besides moving vertices. If you extrude, inset, loop cut, etc. expect some trouble. But if you model procedurally with Geometry Nodes or other modifiers everything is kept.
Shape Key support will be in the preferences and turned off by default, you can turn it on if you want.
While I am leaving the option I implemented in previous comment in the add-on, turns out it’s not a good idea. Problem is Keymesh needs to update object on every frame, and so do Shape Keys, and when both are doing that updates are slow, and results in frames on which either Keymesh, or keyframes aren’t fully loaded. And it shows in final render too.
Instead, more destructive, but straightforward way is new operator that I implemented:
Shape Keys to Keymesh
As name suggests, it bakes all shape key animation on Keymesh. Shape Keys are removed, and you can’t change them anymore (although backed up on separate object), and entire shape key animation is turned into Keymesh animation. That means you can sculpt on top of shape keys frame-by-frame.
I recommend this workflow for anyone who wants to combine the two, and I am one of those who does it.
Convert to Separate Objects
I also implemented this new feature that converts Keymesh animation into separate objects. That is very good tool for anyone who wants to 3D-Print animated objects for stop-motion animation.
If you want to have better control of baking shape key animations you can use my other add-on Bake Shape Keys. I use both for my workflow. Bake Shape Keys will recieve update too very soon.
This one will let you quickly bake on twos, or threes and will turn animation into constant interpolation. Or you can do it manually with other tools.
