Greetings All. There are some really amazing third party addons in 2020 that greatly enhance the feature set of Blender.

In the past I had become generally opposed to allowing third party plugins become the single point of failure in my pipeline, after being burned so many times with such poser import plugins for Maxon C4D being broken by C4D updates or the plugin makers simply quitting/moving on etc.?

However the fact that I can always keep any previous versions of Blender active ,along with the current release, with no system conflicts or financial concerns and the nearly irresistable appeal of some of the Add-ons that have appeared in the Post 2.8+ Era of Blender, have made me reconsider.?

So.. what (if any) are some of your favorite third party add-ons, paid or free??

My favorites in use today are:

Hard-ops(paid) a complete hard surface modeling suite of tools

Boxcutter(paid)a powerful suite nondestructive mesh cutting tools that works well alone & in conjunction with Hard-ops

Physical Starlight& Atmosphere (paid) infinate Physical atmospheres/skies like the Eon Vue software inside of Blender.

SSGI for EEVEE (Free) an amazing tool that give us the type of realtime Screen space global Illumination only available in Game engines like Unreal 4 & Unity giving EEVEE's Emmisive shaders the ability to act as light sources

Easy HDRI (Free) enables you to load/replace your favorite HDR's via a library stlye interface with thumbnail previews and creates the require world nodes automatically great for look dev and easy indoor lighting scenarios

Machine tools (free) a complete keyboard shortcut based replacement for all of Blender scene navigation functions.

Seriously considering Decal machine (paid)

My website

YouTube Channel