Animax Addon

I bet that most of you know the commotion addon for offset animation. The Animax addon does also offset animations but gives a lot more possibilities. For example, there are presets so that you don’t have to animate your objects. And if you are not fond of the 19-ish presets, don’t worry. There are so many parameters per preset that you cannot count the possibilities. On top of that, it has also presets that are not really presets. How is that? Let me explain a bit more.

The Structure of the Animax Addon

First things first. It is handy to understand the structure of the addon. For starters: You can make animations or split/slice/fracture an object. If you choose to hack the object in pieces, let’s say, you can animate the pieces after that.

Animations

Now the animations. So you have 19-ish presets of which a few are not really presets (like custom, follow curve, etc). As I said, the presets have so many parameters, that the parameters matter more (sometimes) than the presets. It depends. What I mean by that is, don’t focus too much on the presets. I recommend using a few frequently. Most likely you want to use: Explosion, Shoot, and Smooth. And next to that the special ones: Copy Animation, Follow Curve, and Custom. If you choose Copy Animation, that is roughly said what commotion does. The main benefit here is that the addon works (Sometimes commotion is broken, and then we need to find a working download).

One thing to realize, and it’s very interesting, is that the Animax Addon works with Delta Transform. That means we still can animate our object(s) as usual. Like an animation in animation. And if you have the commotion addon working, you can combine it, because the commotion addon doesn’t know anything about Delta Transform. You can get crazy things done.

Slicing/Fracturing

Now the slicing/fracturing part where you can break your object in pieces. There are a few options. We have Shell Splitting, Mesh slicing, and Cell Fracture. Shell Splitting is like tearing the faces apart and optionally solidify. You can also subdivide the faces first. Next Mesh Slicing, as you might guess is for Slicing your mesh. This part is maybe confusing at first, therefore I give you some hints. Don’t worry about the input mesh: it’s just the mesh that you selected (let’s start with that), but you have to pick it (it’s not selected by default. Then choose any preset for mesh cutting and click on the up-arrow to load the preset. Then press Execute. Don’t worry yet about the Mesh output: you can leave that empty for now.

The last option to break your object in pieces is Cell Fracture which is built in Blender, but accessible right here in the UI.

Examples of what you can do with the Animax Addon

How I use the addon

First, one important thing is to make a collection first of the objects you want to animate. Next, put the origin to object.

I will stick with a few preset and get familiar with those. For me, it will be: Explosion, Copy Animation, Follow Curve, and Custom. And any of the slicing/fracturing features. I think I can do any offset animation with that. And if you want to go crazy: you can combine it with other animation addons or manual animation. And one interesting thing: I made the VSE Transitions with the Animax addon. So then you render some cubes or planes with emission shader (grayscale) and you use that animation in the VSE as a mask to mix two videos.

Or what about a video as texture on a bunch of cubes and animate the cubes. The amount of possibilities is mind-boggling, and therefore I limit myself to just a few options.

Where to get the Animax Addon?

I am not going to tell you because I want to keep this a secret for myself. Just kidding. You can get the Animax Addon on Blender Market. Excellent documentation, and check the YouTube Channel here: