My Favorite Blender Addons to Save Money!

Pro Blender creators have tons of add-ons at their disposal costing them thousands of dollars yet they don't seem to care about that are they all Filthy Rich or is there some other reason they don't mind spending the big bucks on add-ons to explain why Pros don't care about spending all that money I've created a framework that puts add-ons in three different categories and scores them out of five within each every add-on you want or need will score relatively high in at least one of these categories but also be multiple or even all three of them so in this video you'll not only learn about a bunch of useful add-ons but also learn how to judge whether an add-on will be worth buying for you the first category consists of all the tools that focus on improving your workflow in blender they help you do certain tasks faster and more easily reducing the time you have to spend doing them these add-ons can include things like automations adding new tools currently not available in blender or decreasing your render time and that is why category number one is called time save the second category mostly speaks to highly reusable add-ons add-ons filled with amazing assets or materials add-ons that allow you to create modify and reuse entire scenes efficiently they often come with libraries presets and asset management systems to help you maintain consistency and an organized workflow I've named this category reuse the third category is for all add-ons which take your output quality to the next level and give it that premium polish these can be specialized features that make your work Stand Out amongst the crowd help you finish projects faster than the competition or deliver more than what a client asked for I call this category upsell the higher an add-on scores in each category the better it is for you to get they say that time equals money and if that's true which in my opinion it absolutely is when you're doing a job then saving time saves you money let me give you a practical example two 3D artists let's call them A and B take on similar jobs of creating a 3D model of an ancient Temple artist a has a budget of $2,000 and artist B has slightly less at $1,800 artist a does everything themselves as they're a proud 3D artist they're great at modeling and sculpting so they can model the temple sculpt in wear and damaged to make it look ancient and voila this takes them around 30 hours in total to do meaning their calculated hourly rate for this project came down to about $67 artist B also does all the modeling themselves but instead of sculpting in all this detail like artist a does they use this neat little add-on called One Click damage this adds randomized damage to anything you want in one click oh and to make it even easier they also use cracker to very quickly add some procedurally generated cracks for added detail this sets them back $36 in total for the two add-ons however since sculpting takes a lot of time and they don't have to sculpt anymore they are able to finish this project in around 16 hours this means their calculated hourly rate is around $110 even with the initial budget being 10% lower than artist A's budget and the $36 already deducted from the total price so you see time is money not to mention client wants a ruined City next well you still have these add-ons which are now essentially free to them plus the time you don't have to spend working on a project is now available to take on another project spend with your family play video games I don't know whatever you want to do you have more time to do it a onear rating in this category means this add-on doesn't really speed things up and a five star rating means you can probably do things around twice as fast with then without the add-on with that said here's a bunch more add-ons that score big in this category quick Baker the quick Baker add-on takes blender's baking tools to the next level and speeds up your baking a lot it makes baking intuitive and easy and offers many features and maps to get better results in your bakes real pixels creating animated screens and having them look good is not easy it's a lot of work and this add-on by blender wizard polyur does all the magic for you it allows you to easily create customizable displays that look amazing and real and can even play back videos UV packmas this add-on gives you full control over packing aligning and stacking UVS although it doesn't unwrap your models for you generating a functional UV pack with clean and correctly skilled UVS saves you a lot of time if you do game or movie assets sculptor's toolbox this is a sculpting brush asset pack containing hundreds of highquality sculpt tools technically you can sculpt in all kinds of detail till manually or make your own brushes but using these brushes will give you better results with a lot less effort and time droplet generator this add-on allows you to easily generate droplets on any object with geometry notes it's light easy to use and looks amazing creating a setup like this yourself takes time especially if you have to do it multiple times so these are all examples of great add-ons that as a major benefit have used saving time but another great reason to buy add-ons that looks from a completely different angle than just saving time is the next category the idea of this category is probably quite easy to grasp but let me explain it nonetheless reuse means that an add-on has the potential to be used in many different projects particularly ones cater to your work an asset pack with a bunch of sci-fi assets might have amazing reusability if you do a lot of sci-fi scene kit bashing but if you only do realistic environments this reusability will probably be close to zero therefore the level of reuse depends on what you do a onestar rating means it's may be useful a couple of times to most of you and five-star means almost every project will have some use out of this add-on this is not to say that some onestar rated add-ons might be extremely reusable to some of you and other five star ones might not be at all but these are General ratings aimed at the average blender user I would strongly recommend giving add-ons your own ratings within the three categories to see if the add-on fits your needs reusability Works in a different way than time-saving when it comes to justifying the purchase instead of having you essentially earn back time in this case the add-on price can be spread out over many projects I guess you could call it price per use let's look at another example two add-ons both priced at $40 one add-on provides a very Niche solution and you can probably use it once or twice meaning the average price per use is $40 or $20 the other add-on costs the same but you feel like you can use it in almost every project you'll ever do let's say you'll be able to use it in 200 projects during your career that puts the average price per use on only 20 cents completely different and a clear-cut example of why you want to buy add-ons with a high reusability anyways here are some bangers that you'll never stop using realtime material do I even really need to explain this one this add-on by Og blender Creator ducky 3D contains over 290 high quality and mostly procedural materials there's probably not one project you couldn't use this add-on for the idea for this add-on originally is to save time while maintaining the power of really complex procedural materials but I think the reusability speaks more for itself than the time saving botanic this highquality library of trees and plants is perfect for every environment scene creating your own plant assets is very timec consuming so using an add-on like this also saves you a lot of time and as these assets are all of a very high quality they will make your work look better as well poly Haven this asset browser lets you easily access all of poly Haven's amazing assets materials and hdris I've used poly Haven for years and you've probably seen me use it in many many tutorials and being able to now use it natively within blender makes life a lot easier they have something for every project and all their assets are high [Music] quality population humans tell a story and breathe life into a scene that's why this add-on is so useful for anyone doing environment archist concept art or any type of artwork where you need humans the add-on allows you to easily add crowd simulations to any scene whether it's people walking down the street cheering in a stadium or or working in an [Music] office gobos Goos are amazing for creating realism visual Intrigue and depth in your scenes they're not hard to make but getting 149 different highquality Goos with some even being animated is awesome I've mentioned this atom before as I really like it and basically use it in all my renders as you can tell these sometimes have quite a nice time-saving and UPS quality too but the biggest and best way to really justify buying add-ons might just be the next category upselling is probably the most vague of the three categories but it has the highest potential to really make an impact on you whether you're working at a company or freelancing increasing the money you make is something we all strive for for us artists the easiest way to increase our paycheck is to become better at what we do increasing our our output quality the amount we can do in a single time frame or becoming an expert at something are great ways to have clients be willing to pay you more so how does that work you say SMI you probably know him has done some amazing freelance work so he knows the ins and outs of how clients work so I'm talking about upselling to clients and you're one of the guys I know has worked with a lot of clients you know big and small what I'm trying to explain here is that by offering more to a client whether that's through experience or add-ons which will help you create better results efficiently you can upsell essentially yeah yeah 100% if you have like an idea in mind that you want to do for a client so let's say this guy maybe give it some life with like Greenery and some scenes behind it you can just put that into the price of the project and be like hey the project is going to be you know 1,000 bucks then you have like a surplus of budget to put towards an add-on that helps you with that like grass world or you know something like that that shows all we need to know guys upsell is the way to go yes a onear here basically means there's no premium quality from this add-on of the get-go and a five-star rating will improve your final output quality or speed a lot so here are some add-ons that will give your work that premium shine real water water is one of those things that easily looks very CG having an add-on do the heavy lifting for you by simply adding realistic water to your scenes is awesome this add-on adds waves foam volume IC depth and shadows and even costic cine pack I've spoken about camera movement before for example in this video here and how it can really upgrade the way your work looks but getting solid camera movements isn't easy cipac does that for you with over 100 pre-animated fully customizable camera moves there's zooms flyovers cinematic shots and so many more real cloud clouds are hard to make and get right that's why having an awesome Cloud Shader and a library of over 200 VDB clouds is a purchase you won't regret they look amazing are fast to render and can simply be dragged and dropped into your scenes I think clouds that look great add something to basically any scene and make all the difference in the vibe a project can have dust particles plus just like real Cloud dust particles plus is an another one of those highly reusable time-saving and quality improving add-ons it's done by the ogs from creative shrimp like glab alexandr and contains easy to use and procedural particle effects particles of dust fire moths shimmering lights and many more options will add a ton of realism to your scenes PR lens 2 a while back I did a video on lighting this one and touched on the subject of bouquet and other lens effects PR lens 2 makes this easy by giving full control over bokeh and venting effects these are natural results of a real world camera and therefore We'll add a lot of realism to your blender scenes now all of the ratings so far I gave were all done with the average blender user in mind obviously some ratings will be incorrect to you as an individual and that's why I advise you to use this framework for yourself instead of just using my ratings but even with all the perfect on spot and ready to go there's still a major mistake that I see a lot of beginning 3D artists make that keeps them from growing and learning so watch this video next to learn how to overcome this very common issue

Channel: Kaizen

Views: 65,266

Keywords: Blender addons, Blender tutorial, make money with blender, free blender addons, blender 3d addons, 3d addons, best blender addons, pro blender artists, blender pro

Id: ZTZFENXX39o

Length: 13min 46sec (826 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 22 2023