Blender addons for stop motion

Daftlander · December 1, 2019

I am working on animating in blender, and then using 3d printing to do replacement animation, a la Studio Laika, but on a much smaller budget.

Does anyone know of a blender addon that would allow me to take each frame of an animation and turn it into an STL? I've found a couple on github but none seem to actually work.

Failing that how should i go about learning to write blender addons? Any books, lessons you would reccomend?

Thanks.

straight_stewie · December 2, 2019

Each frame of an animation can be thought of as a completely unique model.

If you can't find a better solution, you could export each individual frame in whatever format your 3D printing tools can accept. You can do this manually by selecting the frame you want to export as a model, and then manually exporting that frame. Then you could do this for each frame. For any meaningful animation this would be an absolutely insane amount of work.

However, you can do that with Blenders built in python scripting console, you won't even have to write an add on, unless you want to for future use. The Anim operators will help you to move frames, and the Export Scene operators will help you to export scenes as .obj files. You can also select individual objects and export those, if you don't need to export the whole scene every frame (for example, your "world" and your animated model are in the same scene).

This is the launching point for those who wish to learn how to automate workflow tasks with Blender: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/advanced/scripting/introduction.html

Daftlander · December 5, 2019

Thanks. As you say it takes forever to pull frames one by one. I will have to work on an addon

straight_stewie · December 6, 2019

2 hours ago, Daftlander said:

Thanks. As you say it takes forever to pull frames one by one. I will have to work on an addon

That's one option. You could also just write a python script and run it in blenders console.

Usually you would only make an add-on if the "thing" needs a lot of user input, needs to look professional (i.e. if you distribute it with your name on it), or needs to blend seamlessly into a console-free workflow.