Blender Add-ons

Before I knew I wanted to become a programmer, I actually wanted to be an animator. This would end up being a skill that I would develop alongside my programming skills. I first started with an educational copy of Lightwave 3D before moving on to Modo.

Surprisingly I didn’t really invest in learning Blender for a while, as I always felt the interface and tooling lacked the polish of other tools on the market. That is, until Blender 2.8 was announced. After seeing the new interface, features, and re-newed developer organization, I decided to give the beta a try and realized that Blender was something I could really invest in.

However, there were still some features that I felt were missing. To my surprise, Blender’s add-on ecosystem had a number of community-made solutions available to combat these missing features. Seeing what could be done using Blender’s plugin architecture inspired me to try my hand at resolving any remaining issues myself.

I found that I really enjoyed creating add-ons to solve problems or simplify workflows. I decided that some of these add-ons were worth “marketing” and began creating branded documentation sites to accompany them on Gumroad (all of which are now offline).

Over time, I found myself spending too much time creating and maintaining add-ons and began scaling back my ambitions. I still make add-ons as needed, but now I typically keep them for internal use or just post them as open-source projects on GitHub.

# Here’s the list of add-ons

Note

Some of these add-ons are still maintained, while others have been abandoned or merged into other tools. This is a non-exhaustive list.

  • Quick Symmetrize — Likely my most personally used add-on. Adds a new operator to the context menu that allows you to quickly bisect and symmetrize a mesh along the X, Y, or Z axis. Supports both modifier and non-modifier workflows.
  • Subdiv Shortcut — A simple add-on that adds some shortcuts for the subdivision surface and multi-resolution modifiers. This add-on has proved quite popular on Gumroad and still sees at least a few downloads a month, entirely through organic traffic.
  • Modifier Manager — Adds new utilities for working with Blender’s modifier stack. These new operations allow bulk selection, application, removal or copying of modifiers on objects in the current scene. Blender has started to add some of these features natively, so I stopped maintaining this add-on.
  • Catalyst Tools — A collection of somewhat random custom tools (including ID mapping) that I created to help me with game development. This is probably the most direct successor to the Modulum add-on.
  • Command Config — Adds useful keybinds and some minor menu changes that are customizable via the add-on’s preferences. Whenever I install or update Blender, this is usually the first add-on I install.
  • 3D Cursor Rotation — An attempt to replicate Modo’s “Work Plane” functionality that I never finished.
  • Find Distance — Operator that finds the distance between two objects in Blender and copies the result to the clipboard. I built this add-on to help me determine the difference between empties and bones so that I could more accurately place sockets in Unreal Engine.
  • Modulum — A collection of various operators created to assist in modeling and texturing, focused around use for game developers. This add-on has since been split up and added into other add-ons that I created and is no longer available.