A free and open source addon for Blender. It renders text in Indic or any other complex languages accurately in Blender's video sequence editor. It also has some utilities for creation of guides, vignettes and shapes as VS strips.
Requirements
- Blender 2.80 or above (This addon was tested in Blender 2.82)
- pyvips
- libvips
Features
- Render complex unicode text accurately in VSE
- Supports multiline text
- Alignment
- Colors, soft shadows, fonts etc
- Imports from a text file and sequences the text slides (e.g for slides or subtitles)
- Create guides for good compositions
- Create vignette
- Create shapes like rounded rectangles, lines or circles.
Intro
Current Blender cannot render Indic text or any other complex unicode text properly. Hopefully this will be fixed in future versions of Blender. As a workaround, this addon renders the text using pyvips package as images and utilizes these images as strips in VSE. It has additional features compared to the good old Text Effect strips.
Intro Video
Download and Installation
Install pyvips and libvips
In terminal go to blender's python directory and execute these commands:
cd /home/myuser/Programs/blender-2.82-linux64/2.82/python/bin
./python3.7m -m ensurepip
Change 3.7m to the actual version if required
./python3.7m -m pip install pyvips
sudo apt-get install -y libvips
This command should show the lib.
ldconfig -p | grep vips
Start Blender and in python console type:
import pyvips
It should show no errors.
For Windows there will be a similar procedure. Search for it.
Install the addon
Download the VSEIndic.py file from this repository. Or get the zip file from the releases page. https://github.com/oormicreations/VSEIndic/releases
Install from the Blender Menu > Edit > Preferences > Add-ons > Install. Enable this addon. You will find the UI in the Video Sequencer window when you press N.
Some versions of Blender may not show the UI or addon. Try installing the python file directly after unzipping the zip.
Usage
Save your blend file first.
Just click the Create Indic Text button!
It should show the default text rendered in Preview.
Enter your text in the text box, or paste it there, and click the Create Indic Text button.
To display line breaks, just insert \n in the text. If the pasted text has line breaks, they will be used. To get italics or underlined text you can use standard HTML style markup like <i>xyz</i> and <u>xyz</u>.
The pasted text may not appear in the text box correctly, or can appear as boxes, but nothing to worry, the addon will render it correctly.
You can set the Size (in DPI), Alignment, Width of text (in % of rendered video's width), Duration of the strip and Track number. You can also select a Font from the drop down box or load a font file from Open button. You can set the text Color by clicking on the color swatch.
The Blur feature blurs the text, which should be useful for adding soft shadows to the text, by placing the blurred version of text below the unblurred strip. Change the color to something darker and adjust the Opacity and Offset of the blurred strip to get the desired effect.
The Auto Center checkbox will center the text in the rendered image.
You can make more changes and click Update Current Text to update it.
You can import unicode text from a file and produce a sequence of hundreds of text strips in a single click by clicking the Import Text button. Specify the Separator character in the neighbouring box. If you wish to import one line per strip just type \n as separator.
Fit in range will automatically fit the imported text within the specified range of frames. (Duration setting will be ignored).
From version 0.2.0 onward you can create Guides of three kinds - Center Cross, Golden Ratio and Thirds for great looking compositions. You can specify the Line Size of the guide lines.
You can create Vignette of two kinds - Corner and Box to overlay on your composition. You can adjust the Color, Density and Size of the vignette.
Note that there can be only one strip of the guides and vignette kind. You do not need more, and if you do, just duplicate them.
You can create simple Shapes in VSEIndic now. Such as rectangles, rounded rectangles, lines and circles. Specify the Width and Height in pixels of your shape. Color and Roundedness can be adjusted also. You can create as many shapes as you like and can also Update Shape if needed.
To create a horizontal line, simply make the height of the rectangle very small, for vertical lines, make width very small. For circles, make the width and height equal and set roundedness to 100%
Help | Source | Updates brings you to this page on GitHub.
Create Index creates an index of chapters and their timecodes out of the specified track. It is printed in the console. You can copy it from there, and use it on YouTube, for example.
Notes
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You will need unicode fonts installed for the text to show up correctly. All fonts may not work. For Indic languages Sanskrit2003.ttf works nicely. It can be freely downloaded from many websites.
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The generated text images are saved in a folder named vseindic in the same folder as your blend file. The images are named either serially or with date-time. These are not temporary images, if you delete them, your blend file will become useless.
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The cursor advances to the end of newly added strip automatically, so the next text gets sequenced after it.
Known Issues
- The color may appear darker than the value set.
- Shape are not antialiased at this time.
- The functions for Vignette and shapes are not optimized at this time.
- Always save your stuff!
Misc Info
This plugin has been released under MIT license, which means it is free for any kind of use and modification, but has no warranties or liabilities. Please read the license before you download and use it.
About
A FOSS Project by Oormi Creations.
A limited support is available via email.
May 2020.