Keymesh Too

Complete rewrite of iconic Keymesh add-on by Pablo Dobarro, that lets you create stop-motion animations inside Blender. This is a free add-on only purchase if you want to support development.

Keymesh is one of the most popular and iconic Blender add-ons by Pablo Dobarro, one of the creators of modern Sculpt Mode. It lets you create stop-motion animations inside Blender by letting you animate mesh objects frame-by-frame. You can sculpt animation, or model it, frame-by-frame. You can animate UV Maps, attributes, color attributes (vertex paint), and almost everything in a very traditional way.

This is a complete rewrite and expansion of the add-on to modernize it and give it features missing from the original version. Keymesh too supports all types of objects (except empties and armatures)! That means you can animate hair curves flowing frame-by-frame! You can create stop-motion swappable mouths by simply modeling Curves! Animate text changing on every frame with a single click, and more. A huge list of new features include:

• Frame Picker
  Keymesh Too has a new Frame Picker UI, that registers all versions of objects you've made with Keymesh, lets you see all of them and insert new keyframes easily, without having to duplicate keyframes in Dope Sheet. You can organize your frames by naming them and removing what you no longer need. Updated UI also displays a number of times each version of the object is used in the animation.
  
  Keymesh Too can also work as an Object Versioning add-on, so it is useful for modelers and sculptors too. Internally it works by saving multiple versions of the object data (e.g. Mesh, Curve), meaning you can save, for example, different layers of your sculpting, and different variants of the model you can't decide between. And you can put them on the timeline, scrub, and see all versions of your object!

• Curves!
  Keymesh Too includes support for all types of Curves, Metaballs, Lattices, etc. Almost every object type in Blender! (except empties, armatures, and grease pencils for now). You can animate stop-motion hair movement, twitching in fur, or simply text that changes over time. Regular Bezier and NURBs Curves can also be animated to create stop-motion replacement mouths (like in the picture above), and with the new Frame Picker, it becomes incredibly easy to animate lip sync.

• Shape Keys to Keymesh
  A new operator in the 2.1 update lets you convert animated shape keys into Keymesh animation. Shape keys are removed and instead sculpts are baked into Keymesh frames. That means you can animate frame-by-frame by sculpting on top of shape key animations. Combining traditional 3D animation workflow and Graph Editor with Keymesh might give you amazing results and an easier workflow!

3D model by MatMADNESS on Sketchfab

• Convert to Separate Objects
  'Convert to Separate Objects' operator will turn Keymesh animation into separate objects. A new object will be created for each animated frame and lined up in your scene. This tool is for people who want to use Keymesh for real-life stop-motion productions by 3D printing animated parts for each frame.

Other Updates in Keymesh Too:

• Shortcuts:
  Page Up and Page Down move the current frame to previous and next Keymesh keyframe.
  Ctrl-Page Up and Ctrl-Page Down insert new Keymesh keyframes forward or backward.
• New, simpler UI with more tooltips and Remove Keymesh Block operator
• Option in preferences to backup original object data before adding Keymesh data
• Option in preferences to allow or disallow creating Keymesh keyframes in Edit Mode (Because of how Blender evaluates Edit Mode, updates are not visible and can cause problems)
• Shape Key support (Note: Because Shape Keys are separate data-block in Blender, copying them can create some issues, for example, delays when scrubbing in Timeline, and if you remesh your object, shape keys will be deleted. It is recommended you convert Shape Keys to Keymesh instead)
• Numerous bug fixes for the original Keymesh and code clean-up