SilentWinter posted at 10:00PM Sun, 04 October 2020 - #4400993

Paid: I use Mask Tools and Extreme PBR 2.0 (both from Blender Market) - makes texturing within Blender easy (though these days I use Substance Painter more often for final texturing of models taken into Daz).

Free: I use UV-Squares (haven't tried it with 2.9 yet but it works in 2.8) and TexTools - both really help with uv-mapping. And, of course, I activate a bunch of addons that come with Blender like extra meshes.

I'm interested in HardOps but curious if it relies on booleans and results in either many n-Gons or messy topology?

I don't use HardOps or Boxcutter, but yes they are relying on boolean modifier operations for most of the modeling procedures. There are many videos documenting the use of these addons, which illustrate how they function. HardOps, in particular, is using a customized UI workflow which is leveraging boolean modifiers with bevel modifiers and hard edges to create clean, hard surface shapes from boolean cuts in a procedural way. In Blender, these models will look and render just fine because it is taking advantage of AutoSmoothing and edge beveling by angles and hard edges, but the resulting topology will indeed contain ngons. This can be corrected by triangulating the mesh, but again this can generate all sorts of shading and/or rendering issues if you plan to export the models to other software packages without retopology.

I would recommend only using the resulting models for 3d printing (if you triangulate the surface first) or rendering from within the Blender ecosystem. If the models are going to be redistributed for use in other software packages, then you will likely need to retopologize the models first or figure out a way to clean up the ngons with manual editing.

______________________________________

My Store
My Free Models
My Video Tutorials
My CG Animations
Instagram: @luxxeon3d
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/luxxeon