The BEST Addons That Come with Blender!

so hi everyone in this video i'm going to show you some of the best inbuilt add-ons that come with blender so these are free add-ons you can optionally enable in the user preferences there's actually a surprising amount of functionality that's hidden away in these add-ons that i think would be really useful for people and just to clarify before we begin what i'm talking about is if you go into the edit and then preferences then in the add-on section you'll find a long list of add-ons you'll have all the ones that you've installed yourself it will have the official add-ons and also community-made add-ons that have been pre-packaged with blender you can enable when you need them but before we get into it this video is sponsored by nvidia and pc specialist but we'll talk more about them later so one question is if the functionality in these optional add-ons is so good then why isn't it enabled by default well the answer for that is quite simple because the more add-ons you have enabled the longer blender takes to load up because every time it starts it has to register all the classes from all the different add-ons so realistically you should only really enable add-ons that you know you're going to use because otherwise you're just going to be slowing down blender unnecessarily so i'm going to put on my glasses and we're going to get into the first add-on which is loop tools and one of the things that makes it really useful is that it gives you a collection of operations you can use to modify loops in edit mode so if you enable loop tools and then you go into edit mode say i have a cylinder here i'll select both faces so the front and back face then i'll inset them by pressing i and then if i've got that face there i can right click go to the loop tool section and press bridge and it's going to bridge those two faces together and automatically put the faces in between okay so another thing you can do is flatten so if you take this plane here with these vertices pulled up go into edit mode right click loop tools and flatten now it's going to roughly keep their positions but it's going to average it out on one axis and you can actually control specifically which axes are influenced in the properties down here you can also change the fit mode and the influence as well so if you don't want to flatten it entirely then you can change that so again that's just handy if you wanted to quickly flatten the surface okay but a lot of people already know about loop tools but i'm going to show you one little trick that it's a bit of a dirty trick that i quite like for getting kind of holes in objects so i'm going to show you this now i have a cubic shape here and if we go into face mode you can see we've got a collection of different edge loops going around the object i have a face here at the front and one at the back and one of the cheap ways to make a perfect circle for an object perfect in quotes is we're going to take these faces the front and back inset them then we're going to right click and subdivide a couple of times now you can think about the number of times we subdivide this little square here is going to represent the number of segments that are around the circle then once we've got that face subdivided a couple of times we're going to right click loop tools and then press circle so that's going to make a circle out of our subdivided faces then instead of cutting through immediately we're going to inset again so we get an extra loop and then we can right click and then bridge them so i'm going to reduce that strength down to zero i'm going to bring the segments down to one as well so we've got our perfect circle going through now i've gone to edit mode and then we can apply a subsurf modifier i just press ctrl n3 we can see that it works pretty well for a subdivision surface object but it's still not that great around the edges here it's inconsistent sharpness because we're not exactly using quads all the way around as you can see here this is an end gone but one thing we can do is we can add another edge loop here just to help tighten that up and by the way you can add an edge to it by pressing ctrl r just in case you didn't know and then hovering over the edge you want to add the loop so by adding another loop here we can tighten up that sharpening and make it a lot more consistent one thing to keep in mind though is that if you do shade smooth you might get some issues around the edge so it is a bit of a dirty method but it's a quick way of getting a circle cut through without necessarily using old quad topology so we do another one very quickly so inset subdivide subdivide circle insert bridge and we've got another one there so good to go okay so another i don't know like that comes in blender is called try lighting the reason i like this one is because sometimes it's really annoying you know what kind of lighting you want to have around an object you want to feel like a key light maybe a rim light but you think oh god i have to make every light individually and then i have to point them towards the object and have to balance the values and stuff like that try lighting is interesting because once you've enabled it you press shift a go down to light you'll find a new option called free point lights now it's grayed out by default now why is that it's because we don't have an object selected so the interesting thing this does is if you choose an object so we've got our subject here i suppose it can be an empty if you want as well go back to shift a light free point lights it's going to automatically give us free lights now the interesting thing about this is that they're constrained to the object that we had selected so if i press g to move these we can rotate them around the object and they're automatically going to point towards the object now that makes it really cool and easy to start building your own lighting setup now these values are quite low by default i'm going to kind of make these bigger and then increase the power let's do 300 maybe 300 for that one as well 150 okay so we can go into our rendered mode by the way i do have a principled volume shader attached here density 0.02 with a kind of mid-gray value so we've got some lighting going here like i said while we're in this rendered view i can press g move it down and we know that it's going to keep pointing towards the object so that's very easy while we're in the rendered view we can just modify it however we like so let me add a color here maybe something red what about something a bit yellowy there maybe even blue and bring that around so i like this tri-lighting add-on because it's a quick way you can set up this three-point lighting without necessarily having to add all the lights individually and point them all towards the object one other tip i just want to throw in is that if you are setting up your lights manually one thing you can do say if i take a area light here is you see this little yellow dot here underneath the line if you click and drag that and point it towards the object it will automatically snap the direction of the light to that point that you're hovering over so that's a quick way to make something point towards an object just grab the little yellow dot and move over to the object for each of these lights you can also modify the constraints if you click on them then go down to the constraint properties then in here you'll be able to see that it's got the track to object so you can change the object there any of the other parameters and even add more constraints okay the third one is another add-on that i think should actually just be in blender anyway the modifier tools add-on what this does is add some quite essential buttons i would think right here see i've got an object selected we've got the modifier stack properties at the top we can see these four buttons apply all delete all viewport visibility and toggle stack i think these are great they do exactly what they say we can toggle the stack basically collapse the whole thing open it up toggle the viewport visibility for the modifier stack in one button so it toggles all of them at once we can delete all of them in one go makes you confirm and also apply all of them saves you from having to press control a or clicking down this arrow and then clicking apply for like all of them individually so yeah i just i really like these buttons i don't know why they're not there by default but yeah i used a modifier stack all the time i didn't know about this one until recently i've been thinking well why haven't i used this more often now this next inbuilt add-on is a bit of a beast it's a very popular add-on it can do a lot of stuff and it's called node wrangler now traditionally i haven't really used node wrangler much because i like remembering exactly where all of my links are when i plug them in but node wrangler is great if you're used to using nodes a lot of the time and it basically speeds up the workflow for creating swapping node links and previewing things connecting things without having to move all the way back and forth between a node tree so i've highlighted four of my favorite hotkeys from the add-on there are so many more if you go to edit preferences and then find the node wrangler add-on and then you can show the whole key list and here you can see all of the hotkeys that are available to you so you can really study this add-on and try and integrate into your workflow if you like but here are some of the things that i think i would get use out of if i actually invested the time into making it part of my muscle memory when using the shader nodes okay so the obvious first one is ctrl shift and left mouse button to preview the node output now this is the most useful one i think because say you're using different shaders or you have different nodes you want to test just press ctrl shift left click on the different node group or output or anything you like and it's going to swap it to that so you can see here i've got the glossy psdf for this mounted metal again sorry not to plug my own stuff too much but these node groups are from my modular metals pack just in case you're wondering so back to the copper back to the iron back to the shader so you just control shift and click on the node you don't need to drag these links over manually hold up these are some of the most complex node groups i've ever made so how is cycles calculating them so fast well let me ask you something do you suffer from low viewport performance performance do you have trouble previewing your scene for all of that disgusting noise oh so gross do you experience crashes that last more than 4 hours 4 hours then you may be suffering from gpu deficiency fast render speeds and a high viewport responsiveness are essential parts of a 3d artist diet thanks to nvidia's rtx gpus powered by their rt and tensor cores combined with recent cycles x performance improvements you too can experience exceptional render speeds here's a comparison of one of my previous art scenes showing the frame calculation time between the cpu kudo and optics render devices realistically only the hardware accelerated options will allow me to render a full animation before i completely lose my mind which occasionally happens the tensor cores and nvidia gpus are designed for speeding up calculations in deep learning and ai applications an example of this in blender is the implementation of the optics render device and denoising features which utilize the course to let us quickly visualize our artwork by pumping out samples at a rapid pace and eliminating noise from the scene thanks to these innovations the gpu is fantastic at doing the heavy lifting allowing us as the artist to focus on creative tasks and in certain situations we can even achieve seemingly real-time performance in cycles which i talked about more in a recent video so there's a link below if you want to learn more but for now let's get back to the video so that's great another thing is detaching outputs so say you had a complex node tree right and this output was well far away and if i want to detach this thing here i don't know how to do it oh that's kind of annoying just have the shader selected alt shift d and it's done and again ctrl shift and left click to plug it back in so if you start remembering these hotkeys it's going to really save you a lot of time of just like navigating through your own complex mess of nodes okay it's another cool one alt shift and right mouse button so if you hold alt and shift and then hold the right click you're going to bring up this little ui element here and it's going to let you drag and point towards another node so the cool thing about this is if we do that it's going to bring up a little menu here and it lets us select what we want to connect so the bsdf to the surface and that would be the equivalent of doing that so let's do that again alt shift right click bsdf to surface so it's a lazy way of connecting i think this is quite handy if you're like zoomed out really far away you know how sometimes it's really hard to grab like the different node points if you're really far out but it's quite easy to see where the shader groups are so pull shift right click move over pstf to surface so i quite like that it's more of like a tactical strategic view of doing things and then there's one more which is the alt s for swapping outputs i think this should probably be called swap inputs because if you do this you see that it's moving the input point around rather than the output ones but if you have only one point in the node it's going to just move it down and toggle it but the interesting thing is that if you have two values here and then you do alt s it's going to swap those around so it's got different behaviors depending on what's available but this works for any node so we've got the material output here say we accidentally plugged the mega shader into the wrong shader output then we can use one s to swap that around so there's lots to explore of node wrangler a lot of people use it so many hotkeys so i recommend you give it a try all right now we have the extra objects add-on again this one's really cool but i forget about it far too often there are actually two add-ons available so there's the extra objects for the meshes and then the extra objects for the curves and it does kind of what you would expect if you press shift a and go to mesh you're going to see more options down here now single vert is really useful in fact actually for the new version of biogen that's coming i've got a couple of operations in there one of them is to make an object with a single verb because you might not realize how handy that actually is but i love the extra options that there are as well also like round cube so many times i'm making a cube and then applying a subsurf myself it's already there and a lot of these things have parameters as well so say we make this taurus we have all the properties down here so we can control that but what's more impressive than like these extra options for the meshes is that the curved ones are really impressive so now that we've enabled the extra objects for the curves there are so many more options down here each with their own icons then maybe if we go down to knots and taurus not plus i like this one because there are so many presets for this so let's choose like braided coil so we got this really complex braided coil exactly what it says then we can change all these parameters to get some like really abstract coil shapes with it we can change the radii as well segment resolutions and everything so you get some really really interesting shapes going with these extra objects all right so i'm going to add a coil give that material let's take a look at some of the extra meshes they have a rocker generator in here as well which is interesting so if you want to generate rocks you can do that you can have like different numbers of them let's only make one uh don't use a random seed so you can define your own seed for it you can even increase the the detail level kind of i think it's using displacement and subdiv and it also generates the modifier stack for you all right let me change the deformation i'm just playing around with more of these values make a new material for this maybe give this one a bit of a bright color i don't know let's just say we're doing something kind of abstract because that's where everyone calls it so tada with a couple of objects we made something that looks kind of mediocre but i mean it's fun there's lots of different stuff you can play with here but to be more professional one of the reasons i love using the single vert object is because when i'm doing my hard service modeling i love using the skin modifier so basically from this single object you can just drop more vertices then we can add the skin modifier scale it down and one of my recent blender tips videos actually talked about how useful the skin modifier can be you know we can go on like that so you can do a lot of single verts right from the get go so i'm quite happy that that's in there all right the next add-on is 3d print toolbox now i don't really have a very pretty demonstration for this but what it has is the cleaning non-manifold operation so if you press f3 to open up the search bar you can start typing in whatever you like non manifold manifold 3d print whatever it will try and come up but you'll find the mesh print 3d clean non-manifold operation here and if you click that it's going to assess your object and then at the bottom here we can see that it's modified vertices what it does is it looks for any floating geometry there might have been a mistake and removes that and then any duplicated geometry so um if you're doing like the remove doubles or merge by distance it does that as well i think it does something with the normals as well it basically prepares the object for 3d printing so make sure it's manifold essentially meaning that the object has a definite and easy to discover internal volume which is quite important when translating into like the physical space but the other thing that's useful about this is the same operation can be used to help prepare an object for rigging using automatic weights so sometimes you might sculpt a character and then try to do the automatic rigging for an armature and then you'll get an error pop-up that says hey you know we haven't been able to resolve these different bones sometimes not all the time but sometimes using this 3d print clean non-manifold operation can fix that problem so that's why i think it's a really useful tool so one more add-on i'm going to show you here is one that i think is actually quite fun it's not as serious or professional as the other ones but i think it actually looks pretty good and it's the real snow add-on what this does is it adds a panel in your 3d view here real snow and then if you have an object selected multiple if you like you can choose the coverage and the height and then you can press add snow and then it just adds snow to your objects and also if we go into the rendered view and we zoom in we'll notice that it's got a proper material not only that but it also has displacement like micro polygon displacement so if you check the modifier stack you'll see that if you're using cycles you'll have the adaptive subdivision enabled on the modifier so you can actually get some really high quality snow effects going with this now my lights are a bit bright in this scene so i should probably just dim those down a bit so here we can see the snow a bit better it's actually got quite a nice material to it as well with a bit of subsurface scattering you can click on it and have a look at the material yourself as well and see how they made it it's all nicely laid out in there like i said this is freely available so you can play around with it and i think it's quite fast to actually generate the snow over an object i mean look at this it's quite funny it's got like a new hairstyle going here and a little bit of the nose boop boop yeah it's just a fun one to play with it can do with any shape as well so you make it a plane just bring that out press that snow obviously the plane's quite a big one here to be adding snow to so realistically i'd only make some smaller objects add snow to it and then maybe instance those if you wanted to get like a large coverage but theoretically as you can see here this is quite dangerous to do because it is a lot of polygonal mess you can technically do it like this although i would not try to render all of that with the adaptive subdivision enabled so here we go a snowy scene very christmassy right in time for the holidays anyway i hope you found these interesting and maybe you can give some of these add-ons a try like i said they're all pre-packaged with blender you don't need to download them or buy anything just go into your edit preferences and then enable whatever you like and there's many other ones to discover as well so before we close this up remember this video is sponsored by nvidia and pc specialist they are working together under an initiative called in video studio which is where nvidia works with other companies to design products or creative professionals if you take a look at the link in the description you'll see a page on the pc specialist website which outlines how in video studio can help you with your creative workflows especially in regards to gpu acceleration for different applications you might use to make your content and even in premiere as well which i use to edit my videos there's hardware acceleration enabled in there as well to help building the previews for different video files if you want to get your hands on a machine that's guaranteed to make good use of the nvidia gpus then in the link below on that web page you'll find a list of nvidia's recommended specs and through there you'll be able to design your own computer which pc specialists will then build and send to you it's a lot of fun to play with they also sent me a computer here which i've called the render beast and this is a representation of what you can get from the website so thank you very much to nvidia and pc specialist for sponsoring this video i hope you've enjoyed it and feel free to let me know if there's any other in-built add-ons with blender that you think are essential for people to use because i'll be interested in trying it out myself as well so thanks for watching everyone stay safe and i will see you next time [Music]

Channel: Curtis Holt

Views: 76,648

Keywords: blender, addons, free, nodes, objects, snow, 3d printing, tutorial, wrangler, lighting, modifiers, loop

Id: 2fbfOOU_XCM

Length: 16min 50sec (1010 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 26 2021