Mark your track wherever you want a hit. Melo Marble 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.
Download the zip from your account page, then Edit → Preferences → Add-ons → Install from Disk. Paste your licence key and press Activate This Computer.
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 a wire overlay in either Rings Only or Full Cage style 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.
Each lit pad steps its hue by the golden ratio from the last, so a long run spreads a full rainbow without two neighbours ever landing on the same colour. Set the step to zero for one hue across the whole run instead.
The ball carries its own base colour and a pair of stripes — width, spread and colour all yours to set — instead of shipping as one fixed marble skin.
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 ~210 KB zip that Blender installs as an extension. You are welcome to read every line of it.
It does talk to our server, and we would rather tell you exactly when than let you find out. That happens once, to activate, and then about once a week after that to confirm your subscription is active. There is no offline grace period beyond that right now — a temporary state, and we are bringing one back — so a connection is needed at least weekly to keep generating. The only other network calls are ones you trigger yourself, like fetching the sample HDRI. Every request carries your licence key and a machine label — nothing about your scenes, your audio, your renders, or what you make with it. There is no analytics, no usage tracking, and no third-party script anywhere in the add-on.
A machine with genuinely no network — an isolated render box, a locked-down studio floor — will pause once its weekly check-in comes due, until it can reach us again. That is the one place today's setup is stricter than we would like, and a proper offline grace period is coming back.
Worth knowing before your first render:
No render limits, no watermark and no per-project fee on any tier — the only difference is how you pay. Price adjusts automatically for your country, and tax is handled at checkout.
Cancel any time, from your account page.
Works out at $7.42/month.
Pay once, yours for good.
Refunds, handled by a person. Email support@hutzon.com if something is not right, and we will sort it out case by case rather than against a fixed window.
Payment is handled by Dodo Payments as merchant of record, so tax for your country is calculated and remitted for you and your invoice is downloadable any time. Your card statement will show Dodo, not HutZon. We never see your card details.
After paying you land straight on your account page, already signed in, with your licence key and the download waiting. Questions first? Read the support page — refunds, activation and offline use are all answered there before you spend anything.
| Works with | Blender 4.2 and newer (it ships as a Blender extension) — developed and tested against 5.2 LTS |
| Operating system | Anywhere Blender runs — Windows, macOS and Linux |
| Add-on download | ~210 KB (.zip), from your account page |
| 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 |
| Machines | 2 per licence — moving to a new one goes through support@hutzon.com, no self-service release |
| Internet required | Weekly check-in to confirm your subscription — no offline grace period right now (temporary) |
| Updates | Automatic, if installed from the repository — or download and reinstall the zip by hand |
| Payment | Dodo Payments as merchant of record — tax handled, invoices downloadable |
| Refunds | Case by case — email support@hutzon.com |
| Version | 1.2.1 |
No. You place a timeline marker 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 4.2 and newer, since it ships as a Blender extension. Install it from your account page — Install from Disk for a quick start, or add the Melo Marble repository so updates arrive on their own — and it is developed and tested against 5.2 LTS.
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.
Two, on the one licence — a desktop and a laptop, or a workstation and a render machine. Reinstalling on a computer you already use costs you nothing; it keeps its seat. Moving to a different computer goes through us: email support@hutzon.com saying which machine to free and we will do it, usually the same day. There is no self-service release button, deliberately — a seat that can be freed on demand lets one licence be walked around an office a machine at a time.
It checks in about once a week to confirm your subscription is active. There is no offline grace period beyond that right now — a temporary state we are actively working to change — so an isolated render box or a locked-down studio network needs to reach us at least weekly, or generation pauses until it can check in. A failed payment works the same way: fix it before the current period ends and nothing changes. Those check-ins carry your licence key and a machine label — nothing about your scenes, your audio or your renders.
Melo Marble is $12/month or $89/year, or $199 once for a lifetime licence with no renewal. All three include every feature, two computers and automatic updates in Blender; cancel a subscription plan any time.
Your files stay yours. Everything the add-on builds is ordinary Blender objects, keyframes, materials and compositor nodes — there are no drivers, no handlers and nothing that phones home at render time. A .blend you have already generated opens and renders exactly the same with the add-on disabled, uninstalled, or deactivated. What stops is generating new runs.
Email support@hutzon.com and we will take it from there. Refunds are handled case by case rather than against a fixed window; if one is agreed, it goes back to your original payment method, usually in 3 to 5 business days.
Add the Melo Marble repository from your account page (Preferences › Get Extensions › Repositories › Add Remote Repository, with your licence key as the access token), and tick Check for Updates on Startup — it defaults off. With that ticked, every new version arrives on its own; you can also check by hand any time from Get Extensions, or download the newest zip and reinstall it, though only the repository install updates itself.
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 210 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 itself stays small, 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. From $12/month.
Help us build the feature you want most.