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)

I have BoxCutter and HardOps as well still have not tried them but I invested also in SpeedFlow and Fluent as well as Cuber and Ice tools pro all of thse are for hard surface modeling finally found a couple of Fluent tutorials that are healpful in how to use the tool hardops and box cutter tutorials are usually to fast and can not follow along but just recently Josh Gambrell and Ponte Ryuurui (BlenderBros) released a detail tutorial set that I got that focuses on using Boxcutter and HardOps. Now one add-on that I do not think has been ported for Blender 2.8 and above yet but was a great UV tool in 2.79 is the TexTools for Blender it was a tool that was originally for 3Ds max and it does make UV mapping a bit easier as well as baking normal and AO maps I think some other developer is working on porting for 2.8

I don't use many paid 3rd party addons, but here's a few I found invaluable to my personal workflow:

Photographer (probably THE single most important camera tool I use every time I create a scene. Wouldn't render a scene without it)

Drop-It (simple but useful little addon for instantly dropping objects to either the grid, ground plane, or other objects in the scene. This is free.)

Camera-Plus (another great camera tool for making quick and easy changes to the camera position or simple camera animations)

HDRI Maker (outstanding for HDR environments with Eevee, has some handy features for shadow catching)

Animation Layers (wouldn't animate without this one. Extremely useful for mocap or BVH editing)

Sorry, can't link to any of the pay ones from here but they're all on Blender Market I think.

I should have gotten HDRI maker when I still had the 50% off coupon when I got the Extreme Pbr Evo With 1100+ Materials Addon For Blender

Lobo3433 posted at 5:35PM Fri, 02 October 2020 - #4400842

I should have gotten HDRI maker when I still had the 50% off coupon when I got the Extreme Pbr Evo With 1100+ Materials Addon For Blender

HDRI Maker and Photographer are the two paid addons I probably use with every single render or animation I make now. Especially Photographer is a great way to manage multiple cameras, DOF, exposure, and camera animations all in one place.

LuxXeon posted at 9:34PM Fri, 02 October 2020 - #4400856

Lobo3433 posted at 5:35PM Fri, 02 October 2020 - #4400842

I should have gotten HDRI maker when I still had the 50% off coupon when I got the Extreme Pbr Evo With 1100+ Materials Addon For Blender

HDRI Maker and Photographer are the two paid addons I probably use with every single render or animation I make now. Especially Photographer is a great way to manage multiple cameras, DOF, exposure, and camera animations all in one place.

Handling cameras is something I think I could use allot of help on and your the second person in this past week I heard mention the Photographer add-on I added it to my wishlist on Blender Market so I do not forget it the next time I go shopping at Blender Market

Lobo3433 posted at 8:16AM Sat, 03 October 2020 - #4400829

I have BoxCutter and HardOps as well still have not tried them but I invested also in SpeedFlow and Fluent as well as Cuber and Ice tools pro all of thse are for hard surface modeling finally found a couple of Fluent tutorials that are healpful in how to use the tool hardops and box cutter tutorials are usually to fast and can not follow along but just recently Josh Gambrell and Ponte Ryuurui (BlenderBros) released a detail tutorial set that I got that focuses on using Boxcutter and HardOps. Now one add-on that I do not think has been ported for Blender 2.8 and above yet but was a great UV tool in 2.79 is the TexTools for Blender it was a tool that was originally for 3Ds max and it does make UV mapping a bit easier as well as baking normal and AO maps I think some other developer is working on porting for 2.8

I purchased Hard-ops & Box cutter back in mid June but only recently started "deep diving" it with help of video tutorials in September.

Together they effectively turn your Blender installation into a custom fork, completely different from the base install.?

However I am going to forge ahead with them as I am planning to build some really complex Sci fi environments (see reference pic,) for my current animation project based in the 343 Industries "HALO" universe of the popular video game franchise.

That is amazing look no where near that level personally but your work is inspirational truly amazing wolf359

For clarification the pic I post is the actual work product from the artists at 343 Industries...not mine ?

I will be trying to emulate that general asthetic for my current animation project and have no doubt the hard-ops /boxcutter tools will help me greatly in that objective?

I am not ashamed to admit that alot of my sci fi work is heavily influenced by certain video game franchise lore( HALO, Mass Effect,Titanfall), as gaming cinematics is the only place any decent sci-fi is being produced these days .....But I digress.?

OK still was amazing work

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?

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.

Thanks. I'll stick to the old fashioned way for my DS stuff :)

I used to develop clothing content for the Daz genesis figures before my complete migration to the Reallusion/CC3 Eco system and as most clothing is more or less "organic" modeling ,I dont use/need the Hard ops tools for that type of content.

However for detailed props or entire environmental sets, the hard ops tools offer a tremendous advantage over the "vanilla" Blender modeling tool set in terms of speed & efficiency for keyboard based workflows.

In my particular case , having a content creation tool that also happens to have three render engines(Realtime EEVEE &,Cycles,Radeon pro for high quality path tracing) allows me to greatly simplify my pipeline & ignore any any concerns about matters like N-gons or any other procedural/application specific solutions.

I‘m having alot tools sitting in my Blender, but what I regularly use, nearly for every work, are these:

• Extreme PBR Evo (paid)
• Gaffer (paid)
• Cycles Material Vault (paid)
• Material Library (free)
• Simply Cloth Pro (paid)
• UV Squares (don‘t remember but someone here said it‘s free)

Other addons I use from time to time:

• Kit Ops Pro (paid but there‘s also a free version IIRC)
• EV Express (paid)
• Pro Lighting Studio (paid)
• Wireless or Cablerator (paid)
• Extra Lights (paid)
• MDTree (free)

wolf359 posted at 1:01PM Mon, 05 October 2020 - #4401011

I used to develop clothing content for the Daz genesis figures before my complete migration to the Reallusion/CC3 Eco system and as most clothing is more or less "organic" modeling ,I dont use/need the Hard ops tools for that type of content.

However for detailed props or entire environmental sets, the hard ops tools offer a tremendous advantage over the "vanilla" Blender modeling tool set in terms of speed & efficiency for keyboard based workflows.

In my particular case , having a content creation tool that also happens to have three render engines(Realtime EEVEE &,Cycles,Radeon pro for high quality path tracing) allows me to greatly simplify my pipeline & ignore any any concerns about matters like N-gons or any other procedural/application specific solutions.![GENESIis-1 SENIOR OFFICER UNIFIED ALTERNATE.png]

I agree... if the models are staying in Blender like they do in your workflow. However, there are a lot of people using Blender for content creation which will end up in other software packages like Daz or whatever. I actually use Blender now for most of my modeling for products that will end up on other marketplaces like CGTrader or Turbosquid. Most of the time, I need to convert the model for use in 3dsmax as well, because that's the format that sells best on those markets. Places like Turbosquid actually require all models to have quad topology if you participate in their CheckMate Certified program.

It all depends on where and how the end results will be used.

There is a relatively new add-on just recently added to Blender Market called Baya - Blender To Maya Bridge which seems to be promising to build a bridge between Blender and Maya personally since I want to develop content for Poser the biggest issue there is usually scaling which have almost got it to a workable solution of exporting from Poser at 40% and then exporting models made in Blender to import into Poser at a .04 scaling factor that is getting me a roughly accurate size ratio not perfect but close enough still tinkering with it thou

Hard Ops and Boxcutter, TexTools (yes it works with 2.80+), Drop It, Gaffer, Material Utilities. I am really starting to get to grips with Hard Ops and am loving it. It saves an enormous amount of time and has some pretty sophisticated tools. The Step operation is amazing. SilentWinter, Hard Ops does not rely on boolean operations at all. It is probably best described as a tool that packages a whole load of steps into one or two mouse clicks and adds some extra goodies on top. As a small example, in vanilla Blender you need to right click an object, shade smooth, then turn on auto smooth and set the angle accordingly. In Hops, you hit Q, then select the Ssharp operator and it's all done for you. Use Csharp instead and a bevel modifier gets added as well. The time saving is enormous.

RubiconDigital posted at 5:39AM Wed, 07 October 2020 - #4401124

Hard Ops and Boxcutter, TexTools (yes it works with 2.80+), Drop It, Gaffer, Material Utilities. I am really starting to get to grips with Hard Ops and am loving it. It saves an enormous amount of time and has some pretty sophisticated tools. The Step operation is amazing. SilentWinter, Hard Ops does not rely on boolean operations at all. It is probably best described as a tool that packages a whole load of steps into one or two mouse clicks and adds some extra goodies on top. As a small example, in vanilla Blender you need to right click an object, shade smooth, then turn on auto smooth and set the angle accordingly. In Hops, you hit Q, then select the Ssharp operator and it's all done for you. Use Csharp instead and a bevel modifier gets added as well. The time saving is enormous.

Indeed... Also all of the Boolean cutters are kept live for endless adjustments and can then all can be "smart applied" with one click leaving only your edge bevel modifiers live for last mintute adjustments when deciding on what the scale of the final model will be in the context of is intended environment (table top or room sized)

My biggest regret about HOPs/BXCTR is that I did not learn to use it productively, straight away, when I bought it back in June, and continued to model with "vanilla" Blender.☹️

I am already planning to redo some of the assets for my current animation project because I know they will be so much better now that I am implmenting these tools in the workflow.

They can be a bit overwhelming to start with. I don't find Jerry's videos that helpful, unfortunately. Watched a lot of videos on YouTube to get the hang of things. In the end though, they are pretty great tools.

RubiconDigital posted at 5:21PM Wed, 07 October 2020 - #4401124

Hard Ops and Boxcutter, TexTools (yes it works with 2.80+), Drop It, Gaffer, Material Utilities. I am really starting to get to grips with Hard Ops and am loving it. It saves an enormous amount of time and has some pretty sophisticated tools. The Step operation is amazing. SilentWinter, Hard Ops does not rely on boolean operations at all.

It uses Boolean modifiers.

Sure, the boolean workflow is a big part of HOps, but it doesn't rely on booleans being used. It helps out with so much more. That was what I was getting at.

My biggest regret about HOPs/BXCTR is that I did not learn to use it productively, straight away, when I bought it back in June, and continued to model with "vanilla" Blender.☹️

Well.... At least now you know how to get it done without the script if need be ?

CHK2033 posted at 10:19AM Sat, 10 October 2020 - #4401223

My biggest regret about HOPs/BXCTR is that I did not learn to use it productively, straight away, when I bought it back in June, and continued to model with "vanilla" Blender.☹️

Well.... At least now you know how to get it done without the script if need be ?

Quite true. Technically I only started modeling with Blender back in April after Dumping My aging Maxon C4D for good.?

To be completely honest the HOPS/BXCTR tutorials have shown me automated ways to do things that I was not even aware that I should have been doing manually.?

At any rate it is hard to imagine working without it now as it has is drasticly sped up my asset creation for my current animation project.?

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