SMEAR — Stylized Animation Add-on

Making 3D animation feel genuinely 2D used to mean manually modeling weird, distorted meshes for every single smear frame.

Now, a free Blender add-on handles it automatically.

SMEAR—developed as part of a SIGGRAPH 2024 research paper—lets you bake procedural elongated in-betweens, ghosting multiples, and speed lines directly along your object’s trajectory.

You get full Geometry Node controls over length, noise patterns, and speed thresholds, without destroying your original rig or animation.

If you animate in 3D, do you prefer procedural stylization tools like this, or do you still prefer sculpting smear frames by hand?

SMEAR is a free Blender add-on for stylised animation. It lets you create smear frames, motion lines and multiple in-betweens, the kind of effects that give hand-crafted, next-level motion to your work.

SMEAR FREE Add-on for Blender3D! lets you create smear frames, motion lines, and multi in-betweens for next-level stylized animation.

You can grab SMEAR for free directly from the official Blender Extensions platform (compatible with Blender 4.2 LTS and newer). If you use the “Multiple In-Betweens” feature, just make sure to hook up an attribute named alpha in your material shader!