CatsMansion

Blender Editable Timeline — Development skill for Claude Code

Development community

How to install Blender Editable Timeline

This entry records only its repository, not the path inside it, so there is no exact command to give. Open CatsMansion/blender-editable-timeline and copy the folder into ~/.claude/skills/, or the file into ~/.claude/agents/.

What Blender Editable Timeline does

Agent skill: hand a client a Blender video timeline they can edit themselves - native TEXT strips instead of baked-in captions, documented channel plan, silent VSE channel-push avoidance, sequencer_scene and view_transform fixes, seam-free same-colour compositing, and a backup scheme that survives an overwrite save.

Alternatives in Development

Overnight PRs — Autonomous overnight loop — verify issues against the codebase, close stale ones, ship PRs through /ship (bug 324 ★
PropMotion — Claude Code skill: make one 3D object perform in your SwiftUI app 108 ★
Blender Skills — Blender Skills for Claude Code - 3D product generation and camera animation workflows 92 ★

README

blender-editable-timeline

An agent skill for the deliverable that is **not a video**: a Blender timeline the client opens, drags, retypes and saves themselves.

If the ask is "I want to adjust the captions / positions / sizes myself", rendering them an MP4 answers the wrong question. Every tweak becomes another round trip through you. Hand them a project with native TEXT strips instead.

What is hard about this

Blender 5.x's VSE has six traps that all fail silently — no exception, no warning, just a wrong result you notice three renders later:

Trap	Symptom	In SKILL.md
channel reassignment	a layer vanishes; its frame range was silently shifted	§2.1 + `scripts/relayout_channels.py`
`color` dimensionality	`TextStrip.color` takes 4 floats, `ColorStrip.color` takes 3 — and the traceback points at the other assignment	§2.2
`transform.offset_*`	units are pixels with `ky = −1`; hand-written deltas fling layers off-canvas	§2.3 (two-point calibration)
`workspace.sequencer_scene`	timeline is full but the editor renders blank — while headless renders work fine	§2.4
view transform	default AgX double-grades already-graded footage	§2.5
text editing	native text strips cannot be typed into in the viewport	§2.6

Plus the two delivery-side facts that decide whether the client can actually use it: `save_version` maxes out at **32** (not 64), and a launch shortcut must be a CRLF `.cmd` written as bytes — `printf` eats `\U` in `C:\Users`.

The seam-free composite trick

A 1080×1920 character plate can be dropped into a 1920×1080 canvas **without matting**, when both share one exact background colour and every gradient/vignette is applied *after* the paste. SKILL.md §5 documents the two conditions and the BGR/RGB mistake that breaks it (canvas turns deep blue-purple, a visible rectangle appears around the character).

It also documents the *wrong* fix people reach for — recolouring background-coloured pix