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Blender Addon

Per-panel reference for the Proscenio sidebar. Open it in Blender at 3D Viewport > Sidebar (N) > Proscenio.

For the end-to-end workflow, start with the Blender walkthrough; this section documents each panel and subpanel on its own.

What it does

The addon is where the pipeline's heavy lifting happens:

  • Mesh authoring (automesh) - trace a sprite's alpha into a deformable mesh, one-click or through an interactive multi-stage modal; weight-preserving regeneration reprojects paint when you re-densify.
  • Skeleton authoring (Quick Armature) - draw bones in the viewport by dragging head to tail.
  • Weight bind and paint - five bind modes (Bone Heat, Proximity, Envelope, Single Nearest, Empty), a 2D-tuned Edit Weights modal, copy-weights-between-sprites, and a weight sidecar that records provenance.
  • Slots - sprite-swap groups animated by slot index.
  • Atlas - pack, unpack, and apply a shared texture atlas.
  • Source-art ingestion - import a Photoshop manifest into planes plus a root bone (re-import reuses the planes and the armature and preserves painted weights - intact on a same-placement layer, reprojected from the sidecar on a changed one).
  • Export to Godot - validate the scene, write the .proscenio, and one-click re-export to the same path afterwards.

Each capability has its own panel below; the bind modes and the automesh-vs-reimport weight rules are detailed in Weight Paint and Mesh Generation.

The sidebar

Every panel renders on any selection and warns (rather than hiding) when it needs a different one. Each header carries a status badge plus a ? that opens the matching help inline (see Header affordances below).

  • Outliner - sprite-centric flat list of slots, meshes, and armatures.
  • Element - per-element settings (Polygon2D vs Sprite2D, texture region, drive-from-bone).
  • Slots - the project slot list and per-slot attachment detail.
  • Skeleton - the armature picker, bone list, pose helpers, and Quick Armature.
  • Mesh Generation - trace a sprite alpha into a deformable mesh.
  • Manual Mesh - hand-author a mesh silhouette vertex by vertex, the manual counterpart to Mesh Generation.
  • Weight Paint - bind and refine bone weights (mesh elements only).
  • Animation - read-only summary of the actions the writer exports.
  • Atlas - pack source images into a shared atlas.
  • Pipeline - import a Photoshop manifest, validate the scene, and export the .proscenio.
  • Helpers - viewport authoring aids that sit outside the export.

Header affordances

Every panel and subpanel header carries two controls on its right edge, and a sub-box inside a body (the sprite Material Preview block) repeats the same pair on its title row. On a narrow N-panel both are dropped so they do not overlap the title. The conventions below hold everywhere, so the per-panel pages do not repeat them.

The ? help button opens that feature's help inline - a popup with a one-line summary, what it does, how to use it, where it fits the pipeline, and any caveats - plus an Open online docs button that links to the matching page in this section. A row whose own help differs from its subpanel (the Save Pose to Library button under Pose Mode) carries its own ?.

The status badge shows where the feature lands in the pipeline. Hover it for the band tooltip; click it to open the legend below. The godot-ready band uses a Godot mark, blender-only uses a Blender mark, and the rest use a built-in icon.

Status badges

The single legend for the four bands a status badge can show. Every panel header's badge resolves to one of these, and clicking any badge re-opens this legend.

  • godot-ready - exports to .proscenio and ships in the Godot importer; edits to its fields reach the runtime scene.
  • blender-only - an authoring shortcut that lives entirely on the Blender side and never reaches the export.
  • planned - designed, with a UI placeholder, not yet implemented.
  • out-of-scope - intentionally not exported (IK constraints, shape keys, anything Godot does not consume).