Ze Reel Hunt

Ze Reel Hunt Tools ZeCockpit

Free · GPL-3.0Blender add-onBlender 5.2+

ZeCockpit

Blender already has dozens of animation tools — the Graph Editor sliders, selection sets, motion paths, ghost curves. Almost none of them have a button. ZeCockpit puts them in one sidebar panel and calls each native tool directly, so you keep its tooltip, its undo entry and its shortcut.

On top of that, the Ze suite adds six modules: sticky deformers, time offset, animation sculpt layers, a picker, an Alembic lookdev link and a Rigify fitter.

Made for the way animators actually work — one panel, a floating bar on Shift K, and nothing hidden behind a menu you forget between two shots.

Install it

Two ways, same result

  1. Drag the ZIP into Blender

    Drop the downloaded file straight onto a Blender window and confirm. That is the whole install.

  2. Or install it from the Preferences

    If dragging is not an option, use the Extensions preferences and pick the ZIP from disk.

    Preferences › Get Extensions › ⌄ › Install from Disk

  3. Open the panel

    In the 3D viewport, press N to open the sidebar and pick the ZeCockpit tab. Shift K brings up the floating bar wherever your cursor is.

Get the updates

Optional, but worth the minute

Installing from the ZIP gives you this version and nothing after it. Add the repository once and Blender finds every new version on its own, in its own Extensions list.

  1. Add the remote repository

    Preferences › Get Extensions › Repositories › + › Add Remote Repository

  2. Paste this URL

    https://zereelhunt.com/blender/index.json

  3. Tick “Allow Online Access”

    Blender keeps the network off until you allow it. Without this box ticked, the repository stays empty and no update is ever found.

Already installed from the ZIP?Adding the repository afterwards is fine — Blender picks up the add-on it already has and offers the next version when it appears.

What the cockpit does

Three steps, top to bottom

Blender ready, rig ready, shot in blocking or spline. They describe the state of your file, and you run them once.

Twelve settings, one button

A comfortable animation setup means changing twelve settings across five different places. Apply Animation Setup does all of them, and shows every one it touched.

Families of tools, not a menu

Tools are grouped by what they act on — the selection, the pose, the whole shot, the Graph Editor keys. The panel follows the editor you are in.

A floating bar on Shift K

Star any tool to pin it to the bar, and it opens under your cursor. A tool your Blender does not have disappears rather than sitting there greyed out.

The Ze suite

Six modules, included

ZeSticky

Pose family · Shift K

Point at a spot on the skin and get a handle that pushes the surface around it, on top of whatever the rig is doing. A cheek that puffs, a brow that pinches, a contact. Radius and strength are animatable.

ZeTimeOffset

Pose & Sliders · Shift K

Keys stay where they are in time; the motion slides underneath them. Each key takes the value the curve had a few frames earlier or later — for a tail, a lock of hair, an arm that follows.

ZeAnimSculpt

Sculpt family · 3D viewport

Deformation layers over animated geometry — an Alembic cache from Maya, a Blender rig, anything. They stack like image layers, each one reading the result of the one below, with animatable opacity and masks.

ZePicker

Selection family · Shift K

A floating window of buttons drawn over a picture of the character: one click selects the controllers. Tabs for body and face, a background image per tab, zoom and trackpad gestures, and buttons you create where you click.

ZeLookdev

Own panel · 3D viewport

Animate in Maya, export an Alembic, keep the shaders on your Blender lookdev. ZeLookdev makes the lookdev read the cache — no shader is reapplied. A new animation version is just a new file path.

ZeRigFit

Own panel · for Rigify

Place about twenty markers by clicking on the mesh itself and ZeRigFit builds a fitted Rigify metarig (159 bones), then skins it. The ray resolves depth at the click, so no switching to a side view.

Licence and credits

GPL-3.0-or-later

ZeCockpit and the Ze suite are free software under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later. You can use them on any production, commercial or not, and you get the source with the add-on.

ZePicker is a GPL fork of FreePicker 4.9.1 by dirun. The fork adds room to work — zoom, tabs, a background image per tab, trackpad gestures and click-to-create buttons.

ZeTimeOffset takes up the Time Offset tool from AnimAide by Ares Deveaux, which no longer runs under Blender 5.2.

ZeSticky is inspired by Josh Sobel's Sticky Mod for Maya, and ZeAnimSculpt by the spirit of the Mush3D tools — both written from scratch here.