About SMEAR

SMEAR is a Blender add‑on that generates stylized smear frames for 3D animation. It provides three main effects: elongated in‑betweens that stretch objects along their motion paths, motion lines drawn from randomly selected vertices, and multiple in‑betweens for richer motion exaggeration. The workflow starts in the Smear Frame Generation panel where the Bake Smears button preprocesses selected objects. Options such as Ignore Skeleton, Prune Skeleton, a Temporal Smoothing Window (default N=2), and a Camera POV mode adapt the process for articulated or simple objects. After preprocessing, a Geometry Node modifier is attached to the object; its parameters can be edited from the modifier tab or the SMEAR panels to fine‑tune the visual style. Developed under the MoStyle ANR Project, the add‑on is released under the GNU GPL v3.0 or later and is compatible with Blender 4.2 LTS and newer releases.

Features

• Elongated In-Between effect that stretches the object along its trajectory, with past/future length, speed weighting, noise pattern, and manual weight controls
• Motion Lines effect that draws lines along the trajectory of randomly selected vertices, with controls for length, offset, seed, probability, speed threshold, and radius
• Multiple In-Between effect for stylizing motion
• Bake Smears pre-process that applies a Geometry Node modifier to the selected object for style control
• Ignore Skeleton and Prune Skeleton options for articulated characters
• Temporal Smoothing Window to reduce temporally noisy effects, defaulting to N=2
• Camera POV mode to compute smear frames in camera space for simple objects without a skeleton

Best for

Blender artists who want to add stylized motion effects such as elongated in‑betweens, multiple in‑betweens, or motion lines to their 3D animations.