Add-on to animate structure growth

Sebastian Staacks writes:

I created an addon for Blender that helps animating the growth of structures. You can feed an image to the plugin and it will create a second image with non-color data that can be used in a shader to animate it. The best way to describe it is by showing you what it does to a simple black and white image representing a maze:

Now, as mentioned above, the addon does not directly create the shader required for this specific look. Instead, you get animation timestamps packed into a non-color image that allows you to animate any property of your shaders. Typically, in a basic shader you would change the color depending on whether a pixel's timestamp is older or newer than a reference timestamp to animate the maze. But you can of course use this to animate multiple properties at different times during the animation.

In the example above I used it to control the displace output of the shader and created hills shortly after the reference timestamp matched the timestamp of a pixel and finally settled for an indentation for older pixels and hence the entire maze at the end of the animation.