In this very short video, I’ll show you what the Realtime Endframe add-on for Blender is and how to use it, especially in combination with the automatic keyframe recording mode.
Video Transcript
Hello everyone! In this very short video, I’ll show you what the Realtime Endframe add-on for Blender is and how to use it, especially in combination with the automatic keyframe recording mode. These are two separate topics, so this is actually a triple tutorial, because we’ll go over the add-on and Auto Keying individually, and then we’ll see how to use them together!
Let’s start with the add-on, which is available at the link in the description and was created and tested with Blender version 4.3. In short, when you click the Start Realtime Recording button, the animation in the Timeline will start playing; however, this time playback won’t stop at the value set in the End Frame field. It will keep going until you press the Escape key.
The add-on continuously pushes the End Frame of the animation forward, leaving a small margin between the current frame and the updated End Frame. When you press the Escape key or click the add-on’s button again, playback will stop, and the End Frame will be set to the last frame that was played.
You can also go back to another point on the Timeline and start the add-on again from there. It will extend the animation’s duration, pushing the End Frame forward only when it’s needed.
The add-on is installed like any other add-on. After downloading it to disk, just open the Add-ons tab in the Preferences window, and choose to install the downloaded file from disk. Once activated, the add-on will be available in a tab in the 3D Viewport, and from there you can use it just as I showed you earlier.
As I mentioned at the beginning of the tutorial, this add-on works great with Auto Keying mode, especially when recording the movement of the virtual camera using the Walk mode. If you select the virtual camera and switch to Walk mode, you can freely move the view around the 3D scene like in a video game, moving and rotating the camera in real time. Pressing the Escape key exits this mode, and the view returns to the starting point.
Auto Keying is a special mode that you activate in the Timeline, and it automatically creates new keyframes for objects, masks, or bones when they’re modified in the scene.
If you enable Auto Keying in the Timeline and use Walk mode on the virtual camera while the animation is playing, Blender will automatically record keyframes for the virtual camera. When you press Escape to exit Walk mode, you’ll now have an animation of the virtual camera in your scene, just as you animated it interactively using your mouse and keyboard. The problem is that, normally, the End Frame needs to be set ahead of time, so the duration of the recording might end up being too short, as I’m showing on screen.
The Realtime Endframe add-on solves this issue because, as you can see, the End Frame is updated dynamically, so you can take as much time as you need to record the movement of your virtual camera in the scene.
Alright, that’s it for this short tutorial! Unlike most of my other video tutorials, a PDF version of this one is not currently available for download. However, you’ll find a link in the description to a page with PDF versions of many of my other tutorials. In any case, this is a great time to subscribe to the channel and enable notifications! See you soon!