Oct 10, 2020 - Explore Alf Holm's board 'Blender addons and packs', followed by 594 people on Pinterest. See more ideas about blender addons, blender, blender tutorial. Free Generative Modeling Addon for Blender 2.8 2. By Curtis Holt on June 11, 2019 Add-ons. Curtis Holt writes: Hi everyone! In this video, I'll be showing you my new. This addon makes the process and workflow easier, and much more manageable. It basically bakes all the shading and light information on your objects so you don't have to keep re-rendering all the frames of your animation. It works best in ArchiViz and games, and works for both Cycles and the Blender Internal renderer.

1. Blender Tools Addons
2. Best Addons For Blender 2019

There’s more reason than ever to check out Blender, and with Danny Mac’s list of essential addons, this free software could become your go-to choice!

Introduction

This year I made the jump from Maya to Blender and have been completely blown away by how powerful this free software actually is. My initial impression was that in areas where Blender falls shorts against other 3D apps, which in some cases it does, I can forgive it since it excels in others. That was before I discovered the world of Blender Addons. The abundance of addons not only fill the gaps found within vanilla Blender, they put the software above and beyond any I’ve used to date.

1. Node Wrangler (free - ships with Blender)

Blender Tools Addons

The second I discovered Node Wrangler I knew jumping over to Blender was a good idea… It’s incredible! Managing nodes with this addon is such a nimble experience. My favorite feature is that with a single click you can see how each node is affecting the model, which is incredibly useful for debugging the network. It would be difficult to explain all the different features here so I would encourage anybody reading this to check out the link where they are illustrated and explained. You won’t need to download it though, since it ships with Blender by default. You just need to turn it on in the user preferences.

2. TexTools (free)

One of my initial gripes about Blender was that the UV tools were lacking compared to other 3D apps. It hadn’t previously occurred to me that there’s probably an addon to improve that. TexTools is a very powerful UV solution adding over 40 functions to the existing UV toolset, some of which I’ve never seen before. On top of this it is also a powerful baking tool and Color ID generator. Oh, and it’s free! Again, I couldn’t explain all the features here so I would urge you to check out the link for more information.

3. Gaffer (free / $19.95)

Gaffer fills a hole in Blender’s default toolset in the form of a Light Manager and is a very nice compliment to the Pro Lighting Studio addon mentioned later in this article (though it’s great by itself!). Gaffer groups all your lights into one manageable UI along with all the important settings, speeding up your lighting workflow enormously. It also has a HDRI manager that allows you to quickly cycle through your HDRI’s and filter them based on tags. As with most things Blender the developer has kindly made it available for free but requests you buy it if you find it useful (which you will). Watch the demo to truly see what this addon is capable of!

4. Pie Menus (free - ships with Blender) + Pie Menu Editor ($16)

Pie menus are essentially radial menus you find in Maya, making it easier to learn Blender if you’re coming from a Maya background. The nice thing about the pie menus is that it brings menu items to your cursor as opposed to the other way around. As with Maya, once you learn where each of these items sit you can access them very quickly with a simple hand gesture. Alternatively, you might prefer to build your own custom pie menu to reach the tools you use the most.

If you wanted to create a custom pie menu it’s not too difficult to do with Python – Blender offers a template script to get you started. However, this does of course require some Python knowledge so I’ve included a link to a neat addon called Pie Menu Editor which presents a much more user-friendly way
to do it.

5. Retopoflow 2.0 (free / $86)

Retopoflow is designed specifically for retopology and is such a feature rich and polished addon it feels more like a separate app altogether. Having been in development for several years it has some incredibly powerful functions, such as adjusting the topology with Bezier curves after it has been laid down, or automatically filling in big gaps with polygons. If you’ve seen my retopology tutorials you’ll know for the past 5 years I’ve favored 3D-Coat for retopology, but Retopoflow has completely blown it out of the water. Again, I don’t have enough space to do it justice here so watch the demonstration and you’ll see what I mean. It’s free, but you can also buy it here to support the creator.

The awesome thing about this auto-rigger is that it isn’t just restricted to humanoid models; you can rig all sorts of complex creatures with it

6. Auto Rig Pro ($19.50 - $40)

As someone that likes to take as many shortcuts as I can when it comes to rigging, Auto Rig Pro is a godsend. It behaves in a similar way to the Mixamo auto-rigger in that you place markers on a few regions of the body and the addon will place the skeleton inside the body automatically – and it’s usually very accurate. Of course, the benefit of using Blender over Mixamo is that it utilizes Blender’s existing toolset, giving you a lot more control over the rig. The awesome thing about this auto-rigger is that it isn’t just restricted to humanoid models; you can rig all sorts of complex creatures with it!

7. GoB (free)

If you saw my previous article 10 ZBrush plugins I love, and why you’ll know GoB is a must for anybody that uses ZBrush alongside Blender. GoB is an unofficial version of GoZ for Blender which will allow you to transfer all of your models and textures between ZBrush and Blender with just a button click. Unfortunately, it is not yet backed by Pixologic and consequently can be a little fickle. That said, it’s a major improvement over manually exporting and importing.

8. Hair Net (free)

An area I feel Blender falls short compared to other 3D apps is its hair system. A key feature of a hair system such as XGen in Maya is the ability to create guide hairs from other modes such as geometry or curves, which Blender can’t do by default. The Hair Net addon allows you to convert geometry, curves or fibers from ZBrush into guide hairs that Blender understands, making it a must for anyone that wants realistic style hair in Blender.

9. Pro Lighting Studio ($127)

This one is a little expensive but well worth the price in my opinion. Setting up lighting can take time and this addon dramatically reduces that by providing over 150 preset light rigs and 49 HDRs for you to cycle through. The rigs will automatically scale and orient to suit your model but this can be adjusted to your heart’s content. Pair this up with the Gaffer addon and you have yourself an extremely powerful lighting setup. On top of all the lighting options you also get a choice of floors and backgrounds which are easily editable for presenting your models. Highly recommended.

10. Danny Mac Eye Designer ($29)

Okay, I’m clearly biased with this one but a tool I developed specifically for my needs is bound to make my top 10. The Eye Designer is a versatile add-on that allows for quick and easy creation of great looking eyes. The addon is designed to be as simple as possible, putting the modeling, iris shading and cornea shading onto an array of simple sliders. There’s also a handful of fake specular highlights for times when you just need that extra pop. Check out the demo where I go through all the different properties available.

Best Addons For Blender 2019

Fetching comments...

Related

• Tutorial: Photoshop

  Making Of 'Betty'

• News: Inspiration

  3dtotal's most popular tutorials of 2020 so far

we are going to talk about 16 of the best Blender addons for Architectural visualization that you can use to create amazing interior and exterior scenes in a short period of time in the best possible quality.

some of these addons are for speeding up the modeling process, others are for generating procedural elements that are hard to create manually and some of them are for getting faster results and better quality renders.

16_Real grass

Real Grass is an addon that allows you to add a pack of PBR grass and weeds models to your scene.

The pack comes with:
– 8 Grass species and 6 Weeds species with different variations.

The UI of the addon makes it easier for artists to add the species they need to fit their scenes, just select the ground and hit Add to see the results.

Also, it is possible to change the seed, the number of the particles and the scale to allow artists to generate the results they like.

Paid/$20: https://blendermarket.com/products/real-grass?ref=247

15_Building tools

This add-on is interesting because it makes it possible to create nice buildings or houses really fast by adding procedurally some of the most important elements for a building like floors, Windows, Railing, Doors, Balconies, and Roofs.

Building tools works using the same principle as the add-ons that are used to create or place intricate details on the hard surface model but instead of that, it is used to generate architectural elements real quick. This one is especially good for getting quick exterior Archviz results.

Free: https://github.com/ranjian0/building_tool

14_Real trees

Real Trees is an addon that allows you to easily create forest and nature scenes. It contains 20 models of the most common trees in the world. You can use the High poly models for extreme close up scenes, while the Low poly models can be used to create forest scenes.

This add-on can be useful for both close-up shots also creating forest scenes in the background which is an option that allows artists to have more flexibility if they want to render a scene where the trees are visible in great detail or if they just want to create forests in the background.

Paid/$20 : https://blendermarket.com/products/real-trees

13_SKETCH STYLE

SKETCH STYLE is an addon that can be used for Ambient Occlusion, “clay” and “sketch” type renderings, like what we can find in professional software that have the ability to create nonrealistic renders such as SketchUp.

SKETCH STYLE can be used by concept artists, product and industrial designers and architects who need or like the look of line drawings.

actually what this addon can do can be completed manually using Blender but it is going to be tediously and time-consuming. Also, it can be difficult to toggle back and forth between a photoreal render setup and a Freestyle one. This tool can deal with those problems furthermore
It has the ability to selectively assign photoreal materials to the SKETCH STYLE scene.
This add-on is usually needed for preliminary design phases, and sometimes it is better to use this style of rendering because clients have an inherent expectation when looking at a line drawing that they are reviewing only concepts and not final designs.

Paid/$22 : https://blendermarket.com/products/sketch-style-add-on?ref=247

12_Blender open street map

This add-on comes in two versions one is free and the other is paid.

The free version of the blender-osm addon provides an easy way to download and import of OpenStreetMap and terrain for Blender.

Blender-osm supports Simple 3D buildings generation for creating exterior city scenes or outdoor scenes in general using the information coming from online satellite information that will be translated in the 3d viewport of Blender

the premium version provides much more options
Like the ability to Import buildings from OpenStreetMap with default materials, tileable building textures and UV-mapping appliedDefault materials and textures to mimic lit windows for a late evening setting.

also the ability to Import forests and single trees as 3D objects and having Options to use custom tileable building textures, Satellite imagery and web maps projected on a terrain.

Premium: https://gumroad.com/l/blosm

Free: https://github.com/vvoovv/blender-osm

11_JArch vis

JARCH Vis is an add-on for Blender 3D that helps artists to create certain architectural objects in a way that makes them easily customizable.

The architectural elements that can be created are: Siding elements, Floors, Windows, and Roofs

Free: https://github.com/BlendingJake/JARCH-Vis

10_Blender GIS

Blender GIS is an addon that uses satellite data to create cities and exterior environments. This addon is very similar to Blender OSM except that it is free, also it can be a little bit more difficult to use.

Using this addon It is possible to create cities instantly with bridges, rivers, railways and tens of thousands of buildings if needed.

Blender GIS is a fantastic time-saver if you want to render city scenes in a very short period of time completely for free using Blender.

Free: https://github.com/domlysz/BlenderGIS

9_scatter Objects

The Object Scatter addon for Blender allows you to scatter a mesh on a surface. It doesn’t have to be a plane that you want to scatter objects on, it can be a sphere for example.

It can be used to scatter any type of objects across surfaces like grass on a terrain, buildings on large surfaces or anything else that can take an insane amount of time to scatter manually.

The add-on is already built-in Blender and it can be used to generate some interesting results for free.

8_Archimesh

This add-on comes with Blender and allows you to create a lot of architectural elements like Rooms, House structures such as walls, Doors (with one and two leaves), ColumnsStairs (straight and curved), Tile roofs and more.

Archimesh allows visualization artists or architectural designers who don’t want to deal with some of the complex or boring technicalities of modeling to save time and have a better experience overall.

Free: https://github.com/dfelinto/blender-1/tree/master/archimesh

7_City builder 3d

This addon allows artists to Create custom cities in Blender with over 40 various 3d modeled and textured building assets that can be applied the 3d scene very quickly.

The CityBuilder 3d add-on and asset database includes three differently themed kits for rendering exterior scenes of cities or for visual effects shots using 15 3d assets in each kit.

The three options of buildings to choose from are Metropolitan, Derelict Future, and Cyberpunk Clean Future cityscape assets if you want a certain theme or environment without having to do the customization manually.

Paid/$36–$76 : https://blendermarket.com/products/citybuilder-3d?ref=247

6_True grass

As the name of this addon suggests True grass is able to generate realistic grass with 8 grass species 3 weed species 5 plants or flowers 5 mushroom species in addition to ground debris

In total in comes with 22 PBR, realistic “grass” assets for you to play with using a lot of different sitting to generate the needed results.

The parameters that allow you to use this addon come with intuitive UI, which allows you to adjust particle settings, change material settings with a custom material on each model.

Generally speaking, this addon can be a time save for creating scenes with realistic grass that make outdoor scenes more believable.

Paid/$30 : https://blendermarket.com/products/true-grass?ref=247

5_E-Cycles

E-Cycles is a Blender addon that is used to achieve better raytracing performance.

It promises to solve a real problem for artists that need high quality renders on their own machines in a reasonable period of time. Why Path tracing is important? Because it usually gives better and realistic results but it is often slow, has a lot of settings and requires expensive hardware or using render farms which can be expensive too sometimes.

Paid/$39–$549: https://blendermarket.com/products/e-cycles?ref=247

4_Grasswald

This is a Blender addon in a form of high-quality asset pack containing different species of weeds, grass, and moss as well as various kinds of debris that can be used to add a touch of realism and imperfection to exterior visualization scenes.

You can populate the scene with different vegetation species using particle systems which is a nice way of covering large surfaces very quickly. Also, it is possible to add plants individually if you want to have more control over the final result.

In addition that you can use paint density or length maps to be able to scatter plants across different surfaces in the scene manually quickly while maintaining a high degree of control over the distribution of those plant species. You can even use multiple particle systems at once if you need to.

Paid/$79: https://blendermarket.com/products/graswald?ref=247

3_Pro lighting skies

Pro-lighting:Skies is an add-on from Blender guru that artists can use to instantly change outdoor lighting to any time of the day, any weather, and achieve more realistic results because it is based on using high dynamic range images or what is known as HDRI.

This add-on is important if you render outdoor scenes using HDR images because it makes the process easier and faster since it gives artists control to choose from many different high-quality HDRI images taken in by professional photographers to mimic the realistic lighting we see in real-world environments.

This add-on can be a big-time and energy saver because it lets you test different HDRI images real quick to see which one works better in a particular scene, also it lets you change the quality of the Hdri if you have a slower machine and of course it is possible to change the intensity of the lighting to fit any environment.

Paid/$97–$197 : https://blendermarket.com/products/pro-lighting-skies?ref=247

2_Archipack

The Archipack is a Blender addon that contains a collection of parametric primitives for ArchViz. It’s an easy way to create some of the most needed elements in architectural visualization work like walls, windows, doors, floors, stairs just to name a few.
You can also use presets like the type of stairs or Windows which gives variety and a lot more options to architects and designers who don’t want to spend too much time on modeling.

Free: https://github.com/s-leger/archipack/wiki/Setup

1_Gaffer

Gaffer is a Blender add-on that helps artists light their scenes by presenting all the right settings in convenient panels for quick access and experimentation which can great for saving time, efficiency and focusing on creating better lighting without getting distracted searching for buttons.

And UI has an important role in providing you with all the settings you need easily.

But Gaffer isn’t just a collection of things you can already do, it includes tools that will speed up the workflow and help artists focus on the task at hand.

Paid/$20: https://blendermarket.com/products/gaffer-light-manager?ref=247