Mesh Onion Skins

Coding Released Scripts and Themes
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#1

MESH ONION SKINS540
MESH ONION SKINS540960×540 158 KB

Mesh Onion Skins is a Blender add-on that helps to create and analyze object or character animation. Onion skinning, in computer graphics, is a technique used in creating animations to see several frames at once. This way, the animator can make decisions on how to create or change a frame based on the previous frame in the sequence.

How does it work? Mesh Onion Skins add-on has ‘GPU’ and ‘Mesh’ draw modes, that you can choose from.

  • ’GPU’ mode is designed to be fast in term of viewport performance and less in time creation, but it is not present as a mesh data, therefore less possibilities in their data manipulation.

  • ’Mesh’ mode, basically, makes duplicate objects of the corresponded frame and applies to them several properties at the specified frame range. All duplicated objects (onion skins) are stored in the newly created collection and can be found in the Outliner. Stored collected data can be rendered with EEVEE or Cycles, or can be served for other purposes.

bball_gif

os_mannequin
os_mannequin704×396 4.08 MB

Supported Blender version: 2.83+

Download: https://gumroad.com/l/OqkKG

INSTALLATION

  • Open Blender and select Edit->Preferences

  • Click Add-ons category and then ‘Install…’ button

  • Select the downloaded archive file

  • Check the ‘Mesh Onion Skins’ option in the add-on dialog

OVERVIEW

FramesKeyframes_lin
FramesKeyframes_lin835×528 75.9 KB

OptionsColors_lin
OptionsColors_lin836×588 81.7 KB

SelectionVisibility_lin
SelectionVisibility_lin834×588 75.2 KB

8 Likes
#2

I try it. Good work gost.

1 Like
#3

Just tried it! Very nice work, thanks for the addon. :blush:

1 Like
#4

This addon is giving me a headache.
It constantly gives me an errors and can’t see onion skin at all…

image
image1235×667 170 KB

1 Like
#5

Thanks for a feedback. There is a simple solution in your case. You can go to line 1179 and change it like that:

    except (IndexError, AttributeError) as e:

and keep the indentation as it is in a file. I wonder what kind of material slot do you have for your HYLDRYN_BODY object. I hope it helps. I’ll gonna update it very soon.

…

Now updated to 1.0.1 version.

#6

Mesh Onion Skins 1.0.5

  • Added New ‘GPU’ Draw mode that much faster than previous one. Credit goes to iBrushC, due to his work development turned in the right direction. Thanks to his findings based on this https://docs.blender.org/api/current/gpu.html documentation. You can find more of iBrushC work at his github page https://github.com/iBrushC/animextras. Old ‘Mesh’ mode preserved, mostly, to render onion skins in EEVEE or Cycles, for instance, or for other purposes.

  • In the draw frame method ‘In Range’ added new option ‘Action Range’, that includes all frames of the current animation range in the onion skin creation process.

  • In the draw frame method 'Keyframes’ added new option ‘All Keyframes’, that includes all keysframes of the current animation in the onion skin creation process.

  • Added new ‘Keyframes’ option in the View Range section, that helps you to preview onion skins in a range of frames that contains selected number of keyframes.

  • Various small fixes.

2 Likes
#7

Mesh Onion Skins 1.0.6

  • Fix depsgraph update issue
  • Fix weren’t drawing skins of objects in overridden libraries if View Range being turned off (‘GPU’ mode only)

Please, don’t hesitate to report bugs if you find any. Stay safe and happy animating :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like