by Travis OBrien·Motion Graphics
Images © Travis OBrien. Used for product review; image policy.
Breakdowner earns its place in the superhive library for taking a deliberately restrained approach to onion skinning, limiting guides to the neighbouring key-frames so the viewport stays readable. It's built to complement, not replace, broader onion skinning tools.
Breakdowner is an onion skinning addon for Blender, designed with animators in mind. It shows breakdown guides for the key poses you've set, so you can concentrate on the pose in front of you instead of holding earlier and later frames in your head. Guides are never generated on interpolated frames between your key-frames, which keeps the viewport clean and clutter free.
Its approach is localized: when you perform a breakdown, Breakdowner shows only the most previous and most future frame, rather than scattering many snapshots of your character throughout the timeline. For generating guides it follows the rules of Blender's built-in Pose Breakdown operator, down to its C++ source. Rather than replacing other onion skinning addons, it is built to work alongside them.
You trigger a quick breakdown with Ctrl-E and open a pie menu of display options with Alt-E, with configurable settings to suit your setup. Setup involves creating a collection of local or linked objects and selecting it within your armature's data tab.
Breakdowner is best for animators who want a clean, localized onion skinning approach that limits breakdown guides to the previous and next frame around their key poses in Blender.
Breakdowner is completely free to download and use.
Breakdowner includes fixes for displaying breakdown guides in Blender 2.82 and 2.90, specifically for linked collections using Proxy and Override, so it runs in those versions. The current version, 1.23, also corrects world matrix calculations for library linked objects that previously caused objects to appear at the world origin. For the full range of supported Blender releases and the latest compatibility details, check the developer's page before installing.
Breakdowner is set up by first creating a collection of objects, which can be local or linked, and then selecting that collection within your armature's data tab. The developer suggests creating a collection inside your overall character collection and linking only the objects you want into it, so the new collection stays neatly wrapped within the character collection and can be used by Breakdowner. From there you invoke guides with the Ctrl-E shortcut or the Alt-E pie menu.
Breakdowner no longer supports Grease Pencil objects as of version 1.23; support that was added in an earlier release has since been removed. It does provide multi object support for Mesh, Curve, Font and Meta objects. If Grease Pencil compatibility matters for your workflow, check the developer's page for the current state before installing, since this behaviour has changed across versions.
Breakdowner works in a more localized way than many onion skinning tools. When you perform a breakdown it shows only the most previous and most future frame, rather than generating many snapshots of your character throughout the timeline or on interpolated frames. It never places guides on interpolated frames between your key-frames. It isn't meant to replace other onion skinning addons, but to work alongside them, since broader onion skinning is useful for visualizing overall motion.
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