Fundamentals

Overview

Core Concepts: Tracks and Strips

The foundation of Animation Editor Pro (and Blender's animation system) is the concept of Tracks and Strips:

• Tracks - Think of tracks as layers in your animation timeline. Animation Editor Pro organizes strips into these tracks.
• Strips (Editor Strips) - These are the fundamental building blocks containing animation data (keyframes, references to existing actions, modifiers). Each track can hold one or more strips.
• Stacking/Layering - Blender's animation system works on a stacking principle. Strips in higher tracks take precedence over strips in lower tracks when their timelines overlap. The Blend Type property (e.g., Combine, Replace) on a strip determines how it blends with strips on lower tracks.

Types of Strips in Animation Editor Pro

The addon utilizes different types of strips, often visually distinct:

• Editable Strips - (Green in Track Preview, White Name in Editor Strip List)
• These strips contain new, editable actions.
• You can directly pose bones and insert keyframes into these strips.
• Ideal for creating animations from scratch, tweaking specific bones in an existing animation, or adding displacement modifiers.
• You can add an empty editable strip and enable features like the Displacement Modifier to procedurally control the character's overall movement (linearly or cyclically) along an axis, keeping the base animation action free of baked location changes.
• Non-Editable Strips - (Red in Track Preview, Red Name in Editor Strip List)
• These strips reference existing Blender Actions.
• Added using the Add Editor Strip from Existing Action operator.
• You cannot insert new keyframes directly into these strips.
• You can still adjust their properties, such as timing (Start/End frames), repetitions (Animation Repeat), speed (Animation Speed), Influence, Blend Type, Extrapolation, and enable features like In Place (to stop the action's displacement) or Only Selected Bones (to limit the action's effect to specific bones).
• Local Transition Strips - (Blue in Track Preview)
• These are automatically generated (when using the Add Local Transition option while adding a strip) or manually added using the Add Local Transition operator.
• They create smooth blends between consecutive strips within the same track. See the Local Transitions feature description.
• Their duration determines how long the blend lasts.

Key Features

• Global Transitions

While Blender's native transitions are useful for creating a smooth blend between two adjacent strips, they are limited to a single track. This makes it difficult to transition complex, layered animations where a character's motion is split across multiple stacked tracks.

Animation Editor Pro's Global Transitions feature is designed to solve this problem. It treats your entire animation stack as a single, cohesive unit, allowing you to create powerful, unified blends with one command.

How it works: Instead of just blending two strips, the tool performs a comprehensive analysis of your animation between a given start and end frame.

• Intelligent Keyframe Calculation: It generates the necessary transition keyframes for all relevant bones, ensuring every part of your character blends smoothly and in sync.
• Total Layout Flexibility: It works seamlessly regardless of your strip setup. Whether you have a simple linear sequence on one track, a complex multi-track stack, or a mix of both, Global Transitions can handle it.
• Automatic Timeline Cleanup: The tool uses the Relocation Frame number you set to automatically ripple all subsequent strips. This means they will be shifted forward or backward as needed to perfectly accommodate the new timing. This completely eliminates the need for manual cleanup and prevents timeline conflicts.
• Local Transitions

The Local Transitions feature is designed to enhance and simplify the use of Blender's native transitions. These are the standard blends created between two sequential strips on the same track. The Animation Editor Pro addon makes adding or removing local transitions easy. Local transition duration can also be set with a single click. Local transitions are added via the Add Local Transition setting when adding a new strip (see Strip Management Operators), or using the dedicated Add Local Transition / Remove Local Transition operators (see Strip Operators section below).

• Time Gap - Determines the duration of the blend (e.g., FAST (0.33 seg), MEDIUM, SLOW, Keep Same Gap). Animation Editor Pro uses the Scene Frame Rate to convert the selected Time Gap into a frame offset, which determines the calculated Start Frame for the subsequent strip.
• Create Seamless Animation Cycles

A common challenge in animation is creating a perfect loop. Often, the final pose of an animation doesn't exactly match the starting pose, resulting in a noticeable 'jerk' or 'snap' when the animation repeats. Manually fixing this across a complex, multi-track, multi-strip animation setup is a difficult and time-consuming task.

Our Create Seamless Loops feature is engineered to solve this problem elegantly. It intelligently analyzes the animation's start and end poses across all of your unmuted strips. It then generates a brand new, self-contained transition strip that seamlessly blends the end of your animation back to the beginning.

You have complete creative control over this blend by simply specifying its desired duration. The result is a flawless, perfectly looping animation asset. This is ideal for fixing walk cycles that don't quite connect, creating smooth idle animations from a short performance, or turning any motion into a production-ready loop-all with a single, powerful command.

• Effortless Animation Mirroring

Creating a mirrored version of an animation in Blender --for instance, turning a "right-handed punch" into a "left-handed punch"-- is a notoriously complex and manual process. It requires duplicating keyframes, carefully selecting controls for one side of the body (e.g., _L bones), copying their animation, and then pasting it flipped onto the corresponding _R bones. This process must be repeated for every single strip in your animation stack, making it incredibly time-consuming and prone to human error.

The Solution: A True Multi-Track Mirror

Animation Editor Pro addon's Mirror Animation operator transforms this entire workflow into a single, intelligent command. It doesn't just flip a single strip; it takes a holistic view of your entire layered animation. The tool automatically scans all unmuted strips across every track within your specified frame range. It then performs the complex calculations needed to generate a complete, spatially mirrored version of the entire performance.

The result is a brand-new, self-contained animation strip. This new strip is non-destructively placed at the very end of your overall editor strip setup, ready to be used, edited, or blended into your scene. There is no need to manually re-map keyframes or worry about breaking your original animation.

This feature dramatically speeds up the animation process and opens up new creative possibilities.

• Create Symmetrical Actions: Animate a character waving with their right hand, and in one click, generate a perfect left-handed wave.
• Double Your Combat Animations: Effortlessly create left-sided and right-sided versions of attacks, blocks, and dodges for games or action sequences.
• Accelerate Walk/Run Cycles: Animate just one half of a walk cycle (e.g., the right leg stepping forward) and use the mirror tool to instantly generate the second half, cutting your workload significantly.
• Build Animation Libraries Faster: Quickly populate your asset library with mirrored variations of your core animations, providing more options for your scenes with minimal extra effort.
• Displacement Modifiers

Animating root motion --such as a character walking across a room or a vehicle driving down a road-- can be a tedious process. Traditionally, this requires careful keyframing of the root bone in the Graph Editor. Adjusting the speed or distance later involves tweaking F-Curve slopes, which is often unintuitive, time-consuming, and difficult to make consistent across multiple animation strips.

Our addon introduces Displacement Modifiers, a powerful procedural system for generating this kind of motion directly on an editor strip. Instead of wrestling with keyframes, you can now drive your animation with simple, intuitive parameters like Speed, Amplitude, and Offset. This non-destructive approach allows you to make complex motion adjustments in seconds, whether you're creating perfectly linear forward movement for a walk cycle or a subtle, oscillating idle animation. The power of the Graph Editor is now accessible through a simple, animator-friendly interface.

This feature, added via a strip's settings (specifically the Add Displacement Modifier property) or the Add Strip operators, allows you to procedurally move the entire armature (usually driven by the root bone).

• Type
  • Linear: Moves the bone in a straight line along the specified axis at a constant speed.
  • Cyclic: Creates oscillating motion along the specified axis (useful for bouncing, jumping, subtle breathing, idle sways, etc.).
• Displaced Bone - The bone whose location will be directly modified (usually the main root bone, e.g., "c_root_master.x"). The addon typically detects this automatically.
• Location Index - The local axis (X, Y, or Z) along which the displacement occurs.
• Speed - (Linear/Cyclic) Controls the rate of movement or oscillation frequency.
• Amplitude - (Cyclic) Controls the maximum distance of the cyclic movement from the origin.
• Offset - (Linear/Cyclic)
  • For Linear Displacement: An initial starting offset value along the displacement axis. Crucial for ensuring continuous movement when chaining displacement strips. Use the Calculate Linear Offset operator in the strip settings to automatically determine the correct value. (See Operator Reference).
  • For Cyclic Displacement: A constant factor to offset values by. Common Values are 0 or Amplitude/2.
• In Place Animation

Many animation assets, particularly walk or run cycles, are created with "root motion" --meaning the forward movement is baked directly into the animation data. While useful for simple scenes, this approach is inherently inflexible. You cannot easily make the character walk in a curve, change speed, or use the animation in game engines that require separate, procedural movement.

Animation Editor Pro's In Place (see Strip Settings) feature provides a simple yet powerful solution to this problem. With a single toggle, you can non-destructively mute the location data of a specific bone (typically the root) or even the entire rig for a given strip. This effectively "decouples" the character's performance from its world-space movement, converting a root-motion animation into a perfect, reusable in-place loop.

This unlocks a powerful, procedural workflow. Once an animation is made in-place, you can then use our Displacement Modifier (usually Linear type) to drive the character's movement with precise, editable control. While primarily used on the root bone, this versatile setting can also be used to cancel out any unwanted location drift on other bones, giving you another layer of control for polishing your animations.

• Copy (and Extract) Animation from Selected Bones

Complex animations are often created as a single performance, with all keyframes residing in one action. While this is great for initial blocking, this "monolithic" approach presents a major challenge in the animation editor: you cannot independently control different parts of the body. For instance, you can't reduce the influence of just the legs or speed up only the arm movements if they are all part of the same strip.

The Copy Animation from Selected Bones operator (See Strip Operators section below and the Splitting/Refining workflow) is a powerful tool designed specifically for this purpose. It allows you to "deconstruct" a single animation strip into multiple, independent layers based on bone selection. Simply select the bones you wish to isolate (e.g., all left-arm bones), and the operator will create a new strip containing only their animation. When using the crucial "extract" option, it simultaneously removes that animation from the source strip, leaving you with two clean, separate layers without any overlapping data.

This workflow is fundamental for advanced animation editing. By splitting your performance into logical parts --like arms, legs, torso, and head-- you gain granular control over your animation. You can now give the new 'arm' strip its own influence, time scale, or blending mode, completely independent of the rest of the body. This is perfect for fine-tuning performances, blending only parts of an animation, or creating complex layered effects.

• The Animator's Workflow Toolkit

A fluid animation workflow requires constant access to a wide range of tools, from viewport controls and keyframing commands to powerful posing operators. In Blender, these essential functions are often scattered across different editors, context menus, and hotkeys. Constantly switching between them breaks concentration and slows down the creative process.

To solve this, Animation Editor Pro consolidates a suite of the most frequently used animation utilities into a single, cohesive toolkit, right within the main panel. This command center is designed to keep you "in the zone," eliminating tedious menu-hunting and letting you focus on your performance.

The toolkit provides a range of powerful, context-aware operators to accelerate your work:

• Smart Keyframing: The Insert Keyframe button isn't just a shortcut; it's intelligent. Its icon changes color to give you critical feedback at a glance, showing whether the selected strip is editable, if you're on a valid frame, or if you're about to keyframe outside the strip's range --preventing common mistakes before they happen.
• Powerful Posing Tools: Speed up character posing exponentially. Instantly Symmetrize a pose from one side to the other, Isolate selected bones to work without visual clutter, and Reset transforms to their rest position with a single click.
• Instant Viewport Control: Get the perfect view of your work without leaving the panel. Instantly toggle viewport overlays and gizmos, or snap to any orthographic view (Front, Left, Top, etc.) through a convenient pop-up menu.

By centralizing these key functions, this toolkit dramatically reduces clicks and streamlines your entire animation process, from initial blocking to final polish (See Utility Operators section).