Instant-Life | Instant Animation Addon

Instant-Life | Procedural Idle Animation for Blender

Bring any character to life in one click. Instant-Life generates full-body breathing and idle motion on any rig procedurally, no keyframing, no manual F-Curve work.

• Seven built-in presets: Subtle, Default, Out of Breath, Panic, Breathing, Shivering, and Drunk, each with tuned amplitude, speed, and chest behaviour
• Smart auto-detection: automatically maps bones for Rigify, CloudRig, and custom rigs by name; manual override available for any convention
• Per-bone fine-tuning: adjust amplitude and speed independently for every body part with simple sliders
• Non-destructive: runs entirely through F-Curve modifiers; your original pose and keyframes are never touched, and everything removes in one click
• Character presets: save and export full bone configurations per character and reuse them across projects
• Custom user presets: build your own motion styles with per-body-part overrides on top of any built-in preset
• Face animation: dedicated eye blink, eye dart, and head-follow modules with keyframe-based generation and overshoot control
• Secondary motion: optional subtle random hand and head movement for added organic feel
• NLA bake: convert all motion to a clean NLA strip for Unity, Unreal, or any game engine pipeline
• Blender 4.4, 5.0, and 5.1 compatible

Designed for animators, technical artists, and tool-savvy generalists who want professional idle animation without the manual overhead.

How to Use Instant-Life

Setup

1. Install the addon and enable it in Blender Preferences
2. Select your character's armature and switch to Pose Mode
3. Open the Instant-Life panel in the 3D Viewport sidebar (N-panel, "Instant-Life" tab)

Assigning Bones

1. Under the Character section, use the bone pickers to assign each body part (chest, hips, head, arms, etc.) to the matching bone in your rig
2. If using Rigify or CloudRig, click Auto-Detect to fill the bone slots automatically
3. Run Validate to confirm all assigned bones exist in the armature

Generating Motion

1. Select a preset from the dropdown (Default is a good starting point)
2. Adjust the global Amplitude and Speed sliders to taste
3. Click Generate to apply the idle motion
4. Scrub the timeline to preview the result

Fine-Tuning

1. Use per-bone amplitude and speed sliders to balance individual body parts
2. Toggle Random Hands and Random Head for added secondary motion
3. Click Generate again after any change to update the motion

Face Animation

1. Open the Face Animation panel
2. Record open and closed poses for eye blinks, assign dart targets for eye movement, and set a head-follow bone
3. Click the respective Generate buttons to produce each system

Saving and Reusing

1. Save your bone configuration as a Character Preset to reuse on the same rig in future projects
2. Create a User Preset to store a custom motion style you want to reapply quickly

Export

1. Use the NLA Bake panel to convert all modifier-driven motion into a clean NLA strip ready for Unity, Unreal, or any game engine pipeline
2. Click Remove at any time to strip all Instant-Life motion non-destructively