Piano MIDI Playerfor Blender.
We play the piano, and we animate it. Drop a MIDI file, pick a keyboard, press Animate: every key moves the way a real one does — loud notes strike fast, soft notes travel slowly, the felt gives a little.
Played, not just keyed.
PLAGALYS is a collective of artists — music, lights, 3D. Our mission: bring authenticity and realism to 3D artists working in Blender. The add-on reads the performance in your MIDI file — timing, velocity, tempo changes — and turns it into motion a pianist would recognise.
Velocity drives speed
Like a real action: a fortissimo hits the key bed in a fraction of a frame, a pianissimo takes its time. Both travel times are yours to set.
Humanize
Felt compression on soft notes, a tiny bounce on impact, fingers that relax on long notes. No two held keys sit at the exact same angle.
Exact timing
Full tempo maps, including the stacked tempo events Logic Pro writes. Leading silence is skipped, so your part starts on your start frame.
Fast passages, handled
Repeated notes re-strike before the key is fully up, exactly like a double escapement. Debussy-proof: tested on 659 notes in a minute.
Two keyboards included
73 and 88 keys at real scale, scanned-look ivory whites, satin blacks, optional felt rail. Every key already carries its MIDI note number.
Regenerate anytime
Change a setting, press Regenerate: the old animation is replaced, nothing else in your scene is touched. Clear puts every key back up.
Audio in sync
Point it at the bounce of your track and it lands in the Video Sequencer, aligned with the first note.
Bring your own piano
Works with any model: give each key a midi_note property and it will play. Out-of-range notes fold into the nearest octave.
Glow on press
Pressed keys light up. Left and right hands split at middle C, five palettes, adjustable tint, strength and fade-out trail.
Everything in the sidebar.
Press N in the 3D Viewport and open the PLAGALYS tab. Settings are written in plain words with tooltips — no node editing, no drivers, no scripts to run.
The animation is ordinary keyframes: tweak any key by hand afterwards, render with Cycles or EEVEE, export like any other animation.
Light every note.
For tutorials, music videos or a stage look: one checkbox adds a small emission setup to the key materials. Choose a palette, or pick your own colours for each hand. The Glow fade slider decides how long the colour lingers — short for crisp staccato, long for shimmering trails on fast runs.
Palettes: Classic · PLAGALYS · Neon · Monochrome · Custom
Playing in two minutes.
Install
Edit › Preferences › Add-ons, open the ⌄ menu, Install from Disk… and pick the .zip. Leave it zipped.
Add a keyboard
File › Append from PLAGALYS_Keyboard_88_Keys.blend, collection Keyboard 88 Keys.
Load your MIDI
In the PLAGALYS tab, select the keyboard with the eyedropper and choose a .mid file.
Animate
Press Animate. Scrub the timeline, or use View › Viewport Render Animation for a real-time preview.
Free, for the community.
Piano MIDI Player
The add-on. Install the zip as is — no unzipping, no extra Python packages.
- Version 1.14
- Blender 5.2 LTS or newer
- Windows, macOS, Linux
Keyboard 88 Keys
Full concert range, A0 to C8. Textures packed, optional felt rail.
Download .blendKeyboard 73 Keys
The stage-piano range, E1 to E7. Same materials and felt option.
Download .blendKeyboards: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) — credit “PLAGALYS”. Add-on: GNU GPL v3 or later, like Blender itself. Free for personal and commercial work.
Need help? Read the FAQ and contact support.
More accurate timing with MIDI files that contain many tempo changes. Notes stay locked to the music from the first bar to the last.
New Glow fade setting, independent of the key release. Cleaner relighting on fast repeated notes.
Start at first note: skips the silence a DAW leaves before a region exported mid-song.