Getting started

Animatica Marionette is a Blender add-on for posing characters and fixing their animation by hand. Drag a hand, a foot, the hips or the head, and a pose model inside the add-on moves the rest of the body. Then edit the motion across frames: reshape a path, smooth out jitter, keep a planted foot from sliding.

It runs offline, on your CPU, inside Blender. It needs no account in Blender and no GPU, and what you make with it is yours. Poses and edits land as ordinary keys on your rig, and nothing is added to the rig.

#What you need

#Get Marionette

1. Buy it on animatica.ai/marionette. It is paid once and comes with every 1.x update. If you're on Pro paid yearly or have a Teams seat, it is already included.
2. Open Downloads in your Animatica account and download the zip for your platform. There is one for macOS on Apple silicon, one for macOS on Intel, one for Windows and one for Linux.

Your licence lives in your Animatica account, so you can download Marionette again on any computer.

#Install it

1. In Blender, open Edit → Preferences → Get Extensions.
2. Open the menu at the top right (the ⌄ button) and choose Install from Disk….
3. Pick the zip you downloaded. Blender installs Marionette and turns it on.

There is nothing else to set up. The pose model and everything it runs on come inside the zip.

#Your first pose

1. Pick a character. Select your rig in the viewport. To try Marionette without your own rig, start from a scene with no armature: the floating bar at the bottom of the viewport shows one button, Add Character, which adds the Animatic character. It comes with the add-on, and Add → Animatic Character adds it too.
2. Click Autopose, the first button on the floating bar. Blender switches to Pose Mode with the Autopose tool, and handles appear on the hips, the hands, the feet, and a Look-at in front of the head.
3. Drag a hand. The body follows as a body does: the feet stay planted, the hips shift, the spine and the other arm come along.
4. Key the pose. Press I, or click Key Pose on the bar. To key every pose as you make it, switch on Auto Keying, the record button on the bar.
5. Go to another frame and pose again. Previous Key and Next Key on the bar jump between the character's keys.

Click Autopose again to go back to Blender's Select tool. The pose and the keys stay.

In practice: posing is one loop. Switch the tool on, pose with the handles, key the pose, go to the next moment. The floating bar holds that loop, in that order.

#Where everything is

Marionette has no sidebar tab. Everything is in the viewport:

• The floating bar, at the bottom of the viewport: posing, keys, the editing tools, what is drawn, and Settings. See The bar and settings.
• The Handle Picker, at the top left: your character in a T-pose with its handles, to pick them and set them up. See Posing.

The cross at the right end of the bar folds it down to a small tab, and a click on the tab opens it again. To hide it altogether, untick Marionette Bar at the top of the viewport's View menu.

#Updates

Once a day, with Blender's Allow Online Access on (Preferences → System), Marionette asks animatica.ai whether a newer version is out. Only Marionette's and Blender's version numbers are sent. When there is one, it shows at the top of Marionette's Settings with Get It, which opens Downloads in your Animatica account.

To update, install the new zip with Install from Disk as before. It replaces the old version and your settings carry over.

Preferences → Add-ons → Animatica Marionette has the switch (Check Once a Day, on by default), what the last check said, and Check Now.

#With Animatica Choreographer

Marionette works on its own, on any keyed animation. If you also use Animatica Choreographer, the two combine: Marionette's tools join Choreographer's bar and edit the takes it generates. See With Choreographer.