Animation Editor Pro

NOTE: THIS ADDON IS FOR BLENDER VERSIONS FROM 4.1 AND LATER

Welcome to Animation Editor Pro, a powerful Blender addon designed to streamline your character animation workflow. This addon provides an intuitive interface for creating, editing, and managing armature/rig animations using Blender's Animation system.

Animation Editor Pro offers:

• Clean and simple interface to create, edit, combine, and refine animation strips in a non-destructive way.
• Stacking (layering) and sequencing animation strips linearly for composing complex animations with visual track preview.
• Procedural displacement for character movement managed through the UI.
• Handle local transitions between animation clips smoothly.
• Convert root motion animations into in-place animations with a single-click non-destructively.
• Create powerful global transitions that affect multiple strips across several tracks at once, overcoming Blender's limitation of only transitioning between two adjacent strips on a single track.
• Easily loop complex animations. With a single click, you can apply a non-destructive cycle across multiple strips and stacked tracks simultaneously.
• Instantly mirror your entire animation or a selected portion, non-destructively and with a single click.
• Modify animation strips by choosing which bones will have effect (using Only Selected Bones), also, with a single-click, and non-destructively.
• Refine animations by splitting bone groups into new animation strips (using Copy Animation).
• Single-click enabling or disabling animation strips (using Mute Strip).
• Bake the final composition into a single action.
• A set of useful utility tools such as bone isolation and restoring for easy keyframing on complex rigs, quick orthographic view selection, and more.

For a detailed look at each of these powerful tools, explore the Key Features section.

Whether you're creating simple character animations or complex multi-action sequences, Animation Editor Pro helps you work faster and more efficiently.

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 (see video above).
  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.
• 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).

• 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.

• 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).

Want to see more?

Check out the full playlist on YouTube for more tutorials and deep dives.

View Playlist on YouTube

Ready to Dive Deeper?

Our comprehensive documentation covers every feature in detail, with clear explanations and examples.

Read the Full Documentation