5 Must Have Addons for Character Animation in 2020 [Blender 2.8]

In today's episode, I'm going to show you five add-ons to improve your character animation workflow. This episode is sponsored by me. Use the code down below to get a 10% discount on any of these products. Welcome everyone. I'm Luciano, and this is the adventures of Lollipop Matt. We're going to talk about these five little add-ons. Some of these add-ons are paid for, and you're going to get discount codes. I received commission for these add-ons, but I wouldn't recommend them if I wouldn't use them myself. So without further ado, even though it's an old add-on and it's a free add-on, it's super useful when you are needing to grab a prop because it will help you when you select your character and the prop, you need to create a constraint, key the constraint, its position. So you need to turn it on and off. And so what the dynamic parent add-on will do, it will convert all of these steps into one button. So you grab your hands and put it in the prop, press the button and it will create the constraint. If you want to leave it somewhere, you press another button and it leaves it there. If you want to switch hands, for instance, you can have a prop in one hand. You put the other hand, you grab it, you select the constraint and it will key the first constraint. So its influence is zero and then create a new one for the other hand and so you can continue on. So this add-on is really, really handy. Also has baking, so you can bake into key frames if you don't want to leave any constraints in your scene. This add-on is free and you can find it in the blender artists forum link below. I adore this add-on and it's very cheap for what it does. Basically, it gives you all the functionality that you find in animation layers, like the ones that you use in Maya, but in blender. It's currently heavily in development. It's been improved a lot regarding back fixes and stuff like that. So when we get to version one, it's going to be even better. So far, I've tried it and it works really, really well. You can create layers, you can delete them. You can bake them. You can animate the influence on the layers. If you want, you can solo them. You can solo your original animation. You can mix it up. It's a really easy to use add-on and it's super powerful. I couldn't recommend it anymore. The ghost frames add-on will help you create little ghosts so you can check your spacing or compare your poses. So you're, you're making sure that you are creating your poses the way you want them. It's not an onion skinning add-on per se, but it's sort of in the middle. It's very similar to the BH ghost that you find for Maya. So what it does is basically it takes little snapshots, wherever you want it to do it, so you can check and compare those poses, or if you want, you can take a snapshot of your entire timeline, which takes obviously a lot longer, but generally it works really well and super fast. This one is $24.97. It's a really nice picker add-on. It's super simple, but it's really, really powerful. You can have several windows of pickers, like for face and for the body, you can click and add and shift and like deselect parts, you can create group buttons. So you can, for instance, have one for each joint of your finger, but then one big button for, for the entire finger, stuff like that. It looks a lot like in the style of the anime school picker, but I think it's way more powerful. And another thing is that it's meant to be separate from Blender, so you can plug it into Blender, Maya or something else if you develop an add-on. I think it's a good value for the money. I'm using it myself at the moment, and I am really liking it. Not only you can create selections and buttons like that, but you can also run Python scripts from it. So if you have like an IK snap, you can put it on a button. And so you can have a lot of hidden things in Blender and just keep like a big window with only your picker and your character. I think it's really, really handy. This add-on basically is a selection sets add-on with a lot of extra functionality. You can select and create groups and you can automatically create the opposite side groups. You can add to the selections very easily. You can, you can create motion trails for all your selection. If you want, you can, you can mute your curves directly from there. So it's very easy to handle a lot of common functions. This add-on is $15 on the Blender market or in Gumroad, but also there's a free GitHub page where you can get it for free. And I would encourage you to get it, try it. And if you like it, buy Julian some beers. If you activate Rigify, you'll see that under the Rigify tab, there is Quatt Euler rotation transformer tool. Basically it allows you to change rotation types without losing your animation. It comes with Rigify, but it's not exclusive to its rigs. It works with anything that has rotations. So it's really easy to use. You can just select something, pick the type of rotation that you want, X, Y, Z, X, or et cetera, and tell it to convert the entire action. Or if you have several actions, say you have a one character and you did 10 actions, and then you realize that rotation orders were wrong, you can tell it to change all the rotation orders in all the actions. Let me know in the comments below, which one of these add-ons you've already been using. If you're going to buy any of those paid add-ons, grab the coupon codes because you'll get a discount. So that's it for today. Remember to like, and subscribe and see me next time.