Mark your track wherever you want a hit. Music Marble Animation builds the whole run — the pads, the arcs, the glow, the camera — so that every single bounce connects on the exact frame you marked. Not close. Exact.
Sync is the whole illusion. If a bounce is two frames late, the eye catches it instantly and the shot stops feeling composed. So timing is treated as the fixed thing here, and everything else is solved around it.
Each hop is solved backwards from the two frames it has to connect, so the marble arrives on your marker frame regardless of how far it travelled or how fast. Skipped beats and stray markers are handled the same way.
Pads flare on impact and settle into their own colour, a comet tail streams behind the marble throwing sparks, and the bloom is wired up for you. Press Generate and the first render is a shot, not a grey blockout.
Turn on looping and the last frame lands exactly where the first began — structure, lighting, tail, sparks and spin all carried across the cut. Render a few seconds and loop it as long as the track runs.
No node wiring, no rigging, no keyframing by hand. You supply the rhythm; the add-on supplies everything the rhythm implies.
Edit → Preferences → Add-ons → Install from Disk, pick the zip, tick the box. Paste your licence key once and press Activate.
Load your track, scrub through it, and press M everywhere you want the marble to hit. Those markers are the score.
Press Download HDRI once. It saves the sample environment beside your .blend so the metal pads have something to reflect.
Press Generate Marble Run. Pads, arcs, glow, tail, sparks, camera and bloom appear, built around your markers.
The fiddly parts of a marble-run shot — spacing, pacing, where the pads sit, whether the ball clips through one — are the parts that were worked out and measured.
Pads are not placed on a fixed grid. Each gap is measured against the typical beat of your track, so a quick double-hit gets a short step and a held pause gets a long one — and the marble crosses both at the same pace instead of sprinting through the tight ones.
A glowing tail streams behind the marble, tapering to nothing, throwing off embers that arc away and burn out. Because none of it is simulated, it is correct on any frame you scrub to — and identical either side of a loop cut, which is exactly where simulated trails fall apart.
Strapping a camera to a bouncing ball makes footage nobody can watch. This one glides on a smoothed version of the path and aims at a lightly smoothed target, so the marble stays centred while the camera itself stays calm. Focus tracks the marble at any distance.
Every option lives in the sidebar under a Music Marble tab, grouped and labelled, with a Reset button at the top for when you have experimented yourself into a corner.
Each cylinder flares white-hot on its own hit frame, then settles into a colour of its own and holds a soft glow.
Build the pads as tubes instead of cylinders, with an optional wire overlay so the bore reads from any angle.
A tapering glow behind the marble, adjustable in length, width, colour and brightness — or switched off entirely.
Embers thrown off the marble that arc away under gravity, shrinking and fading as they burn out.
Baked, smoothed and aimed, with depth of field focused on the marble. Ready to render, not ready to re-rig.
An HDRI world lights and reflects the metal. One button fetches the sample map, or point it at your own.
The glow becomes a real halo through the compositor, with the threshold set so lit pads bloom and unlit ones stay clean.
Structure, lighting, tail, sparks and spin all line up across the cut, and the duplicate seam frame is trimmed for you.
Clipping, a loop that can't close, stray objects that would break the seam — reported in plain language, with the fix named.
Blender add-ons are derivative works of Blender, so they must be released under the GPL — and this one is, as GPL-3.0-or-later, with the full licence text in the zip. It ships as plain readable source. Nothing is obfuscated, nothing is bundled, and there is no installer to trust: it is a 57 KB zip that Blender unpacks into its own add-ons folder.
It also stays off the network. There are exactly two moments it reaches out, both of them a button you press: activating your licence once, and fetching the sample HDRI. It never phones home while you work, sends no telemetry, and opens no connection when Blender starts.
Worth knowing before your first render:
No subscription, no render limits, no watermark, and no per-project fee. Buy it once and use it on every project you ever make.
Everything on this page, forever.
Your licence key and download link arrive by email the moment payment clears — nothing to send us. If anything goes wrong, email mikarmiaura@gmail.com and we will respond within 5 minutes.
| Works with | Blender 3.0 and newer — developed and tested against 5.2 LTS |
| Operating system | Anywhere Blender runs — Windows, macOS and Linux |
| Add-on download | 57 KB (.zip) |
| Sample HDRI | 92 MB, fetched separately when you press Download HDRI |
| Install | Edit → Preferences → Add-ons → Install from Disk |
| Where it lives | 3D Viewport → Sidebar (N) → Music Marble tab |
| Input it needs | Two or more timeline markers — you place them with M |
| Render engines | EEVEE and Cycles |
| Licence | GPL-3.0-or-later, full text included in the zip |
| Activations | 3 machines per key, released again with one button |
| Internet required | Once to activate, once for the sample HDRI. Never otherwise |
| Version | 1.0.0 |
No. You tap M on the timeline wherever you want the marble to land, which means you decide the rhythm rather than an algorithm guessing it. Every marker you place becomes an impact on that exact frame — including deliberately odd ones, off-beats and long rests.
Blender 3.0 and newer. It is developed and tested against 5.2 LTS, with fallbacks for the places 3.x and 4.x differ — actions, material sockets and the compositor all changed along the way, and each of those is handled.
The pads are fully metallic, and metal only shows reflections. With no environment map there is nothing to reflect, so everything renders close to black. Press Download HDRI once in the sidebar and it will look right. This is far and away the most common first-render surprise, which is why the button is right there in the panel.
Your key covers three machines — enough for a desktop, a laptop and a reinstall. To move to a new one, press Deactivate This Machine on the old install first and the slot is handed straight back.
Only once. You paste your key and press Activate, and after that the add-on never contacts the network again. It works offline, on a render farm, after reinstalling, and years from now regardless of what happens to this shop.
Yes. Blender add-ons are derivative works of Blender and must be licensed under the GPL, so this one is GPL-3.0-or-later and ships as plain readable source with the full licence text included. Nothing is obfuscated, bundled or hidden. What you are paying for is the work, the updates, and not having to build or maintain it yourself.
The add-on itself is about 57 KB. The sample environment map is a separate 92 MB file that the add-on fetches only when you press Download HDRI — so the add-on stays tiny, and you can point it at your own HDRI instead and never download ours.
Yes, and it is verified by rendering rather than by eye. The first frame and the seam frame are compared pixel by pixel and come out effectively identical. Render a few seconds and play it forever.
It should not, and every generate re-measures the whole run to check. If a long pause in your music throws the marble high enough to sail back over an earlier pad, the add-on tells you so and names the fix: tick Build Trails, which bridges long gaps with rails the marble rolls along instead of being lobbed across them.
Everything it builds is ordinary Blender objects, keyframes and materials — move them, restyle them, delete what you don't want. One caveat: re-running Generate wipes and rebuilds its collection, so make your edits after the last generate, or duplicate the collection first.
Mark the beats you want to hear hit, press Generate, and watch the run land every one of them. Eleven dollars, once.
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