TakeBuilder is currently in BETA cycle.

Price will increase after BETA.

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What is TakeBuilder?

TakeBuilder is a Blender addon designed to simplify building long animation takes from your collection of pre-made clips. Perfect for pre-viz and cinematics, TakeBuilder ensures precise event timing and positioning. Speed up your workflow with features like auto seamless looping for source clips and path following, letting you iterate rapidly and nail your shot every time.

The Situation

I'm creating a previz/mockup video for my action game, where the character runs around and fights a building-size monster. The animation involves repetitive actions such as running, rolling, and attacking, which I'd like to reuse to avoid tedious keyframing.

Initially, I considered using Blender's Nonlinear Animation (NLA) tool, but I soon realized it only offers control over time, not space. Since cinematics require precise placement and timing, I need to play specific actions along curves or at exact points. This led me to search for a more suitable solution.

Solving The Problem

Highlights 

 🎬 Assembling Actions 

  Combine multiple animation segments into a single take. It functions like a upgraded NLA editor (without strips unfortunately :( ).

⌛ Auto Loop

  Make your animation clips seamlessly looped.

  TakeBuilder automatically calculates the difference in position and orientation between the start and end frames, ensuring a smooth transition, no snapping.

➰ Trajectory Manipulation

  Warp the trajectory of you animation clip along a path curve, or play the clip from any position with any orientation.

🔧 Tweak and Rebuild

  Refine your take by tweaking parameters and rebuilding it. The source actions remain unchanged during the build process, ensuring flexibility and non-destructive editing

Requirements

• Blender 4.4 or higher
  • Support for lower version might be added if needed.
• SciPy (install via addon preferences panel)

State of Development

TakeBuilder is currently in its early stages, bugs🪲 are expected. Despite being under development, it is a functional product with all advertised features working as intended.

If you run into any issues, please don't hesitate to 📫contact us or Join our  ❤ Discord ❤

Planned Updates for BETA

The following features are planned for recent updates:

• Extend By Distance: Add options to calculate the loop count of actions based on movement distance or target position.
• Pose Matching: Introduce an auto time offset selection feature for seamless transitions between segments. This feature matches the pose of the previous action to determine the optimal starting point for blending.
• Slope Alignment: Automatically align character bones (such as feet or spine) to the slope of the path curve.
• Enhanced Visualization: Introduce gizmos to help visualize timings and positions, making it easier to fine-tune your take.
• More Robust Hierarchy Handling: Handle those evil Child-Of constraints with more robustness.
• Performance Optimization: Add cache to avoid re-calculating the same data.