AnimAide is a free add-on for Blender that has some helpful tools for animation.
----- I'm in touch with Blender developers to bring this tools to core Blender ------
Development no longer active
I started this project as a learning experience. I'm an animator wanting to learn how to code, and while fun it takes a lot of time.
Blender is transitioning to a more robust animation module, which is great but most likely will break AnimAide. Life is getting in the way of me continuing to develop the addon at this time, so I ask if anybody would be willing to fork it and continue the journey for the Blender community. I'm sure a real coder would make AnimAide even better.
There is a list of forks but most of them are of old code and don't know if they are maintained.
If anybody wants to do it (and gives me the info) I will link it here so people know where to go.
Thanks.
Ares
In contrast to modeling, when animating there are not that many options to manipulate keys on an f-curve like you can with the vertices on a geometry. That is where AnimAide comes in.
There are some Blender options to manipulate keys, but AnimAide open the door to new possibilities. Not only has a wider range of tools but when working with a group of f-curves each one will have their local space.
This kind of tools is standard in the game and film industry.
Animaide has three main panels:
These panel gives you helpful tools to simultaneously manipulate keys across multiple f-curves from either animated objects or animated bones in an armature.
With this tool you can modify any animated object, and the change will propagate to the animation range. It can be filter by a mask. You can find the panel in all the animation editors, but the mask option just in the GraphEditor.
This toolbox mostly aims to speedup some tasks you already can do by adding extra options to some Blender Tools.
In General:
CurveTools:
AnimOffset:
KeyManager:
This panel can be moved to the animation views headers to make it more accessible.
Has three main sections:
Move-insert:
Type:
Uses the colored Blender key types (Keyframe, Breakdown, Jitter, Extreme), and lets you "assign", "select", "unselect" and "delete" them by type. It also incorporates a Blender option that lets you select the key type that auto-key will use.
Interpolation:
Lets you quickly assign interpolation types to key handles, just like Blender does, but with the added benefit of been able to assign it to every key in the selected object with the click of a button.
When dealing with "Bezier" curves, it lets you select the left or right handles of every selected key to easily interact with a group of handles at once.