The BEST Blender 3D Addons in 2021 FREE and Paid

today we're going through the best blender add-ons we'll start with the best free add-ons then dive into the best paid add-ons this video is sponsored by datacamp today we're going to be looking at what i consider to be the essential add-on list for blender i use all these myself and some of them i use on every single project i'm going to start with the free add-ons which most of these are free but then after that i'm going to cover paid add-ons towards the end of the video let's get started collection manager this isn't the flashiest add-on but it's one of the most useful add-ons this gives you an easy to use pop-up menu that allows you to organize your outliner collections from anywhere in blender it's a bit easier to use and ship things around in the outline itself loop tools this gives you a bunch of tools in edit mode to easily edit edge loops most importantly it gives you this circle tool that lets you convert an edge loop into a circle with the click of a button i use this one constantly extra objects this adds a bunch of extra objects to the add menu there's one for mesh and one for curves i personally use the quadrosphere option quite a bit and the spirals in the curve section node wrangler i'm surprised this one isn't just enabled by default this gives you a bunch of shortcuts to make using nodes easier for example pressing ctrl t on an image will give you a full image mapping setup pressing ctrl shift t will allow you to import a pbr texture setup ready to go there's much more which you can view in the documentation images to planes this add-on allows you to import images as planes bygen this is an amazing tool by curtis holt which has a bunch of crazy cool generative modeling presets which you can apply to your models i can't believe this is free but definitely check it out it's really great for abstract or sci-fi renders or motion graphics blender gis or blender gifs this mapping tool allows you to import mapping data to generate cities it's a great way to quickly create a detailed map of any city bool tool this tool is super handy for using booleans the default workflow is a bit slow and requires a lot of clicks and modifiers where this adds a lot of shortcuts to speed up the entire process doing a lot of those steps for you ivy gin generates you guessed it city buildings no i'm just kidding it's it's actually ivy but i use this in my castle scene and it utilizes particles and can slow down a scene quickly if you're trying to generate realistic iv so just be a bit mindful of the settings but it's an incredibly cool add-on that'll automatically generate iv up whatever kind of object you select discombobulator the discombobulator is a great tool for adding grebel to your objects if you don't know what grebel is it's those little doodads and nonsense details you see on things like giant sci-fi spaceships and star wars to add detail and interest riggify rigify allows you to position preset armatures onto your characters and then automatically attach and create controls if you're using any character within the presets i highly recommend skipping the rigging process yourself and just utilizing this tool it has humanoid presets facial features and some other presets as well such as four-legged quadrupeds so dogs and things like that from the creators of heart ops this tool makes it easier to kit bash and comes loaded with a bunch of great free assets you can also add your own magic uv this added several basic uv functions to the uv editor and this is a great for complex uv unwraps and especially if you're doing characters before we continue have you ever considered writing your own add-ons then you should definitely check out this sponsor datacamp is an online learning platform that makes it easy to build data skills while learning at your own pace they have hundreds of courses of all different skill levels covering data fundamentals they have an introduction to python which is the language used to write blender add-ons and scripts i'm taking this course now to help me write quick little executional scripts to save time in blender on my drivers rigs and other tasks they have a bunch of other classes as well but if you want to stick to python and blender they have quite a few options i'm planning on taking the intermediate course next if you're like me and you've never done this before then you'll actually find this guided feature pretty useful i found this a great way to learn for people like me who have zero experience in this type of thing invest in yourself use my link in the description and check out the first chapter of any course for free moving on to paid add-ons none of these paid items are sponsored however some are affiliate links which i will label in the description below let's dive into it node preview i love this add-on it gives you a little preview thumbnail of what your texture is this is extremely useful for creating generative content for example when i made my polka dot generator hard ops the most popular tool in blender this tool adds an incredible array of hard surface modeling tools so good in fact i have friends who work at playstation and epic game studios that have told me this is a standard in their hard surface modeling pipeline making this some of the best hard surface modeling tools in the entire industry retopiflow it's another great industry tool this series of tools makes root apologizing much less tedious with tools that almost work like magic it's a must for anyone who regularly re-top a reputation apologizes their models in blender i wish that was a joke but that really happened while recording i'm sorry you had to hear that auto rig pro auto rig pro is more like a robust version of rigify they have this amazing auto rig feature that lets you place markers on your character and it will build the armature based on these points it has a lot of options and allows you to customize the rigs it also has some more simpler options making it great for beginner animators who don't need or want such a complicated rig they also have an add-on that lets you create your own rigging presets which is pretty awesome botanic this is a go-to add-on for adding nature assets to your scene it comes with so many and makes it super easy to add them into your project this is great for environments arc fizz and much more definitely check this one out if you're struggling to fill a scene especially in the environment they have some other great add-ons for cars materials and water too in the similar vein all making it easy for you to include these assets in your scene i'll link those below as well pro lighting i love this add-on so many renders suffer from poor lighting this add-on comes jam-packed with a bunch of preset lighting setups which you can easily add to any object or scene by just clicking the object and applying you can then rotate it and adjust the brightness even if you're good at lighting this is great to decide on a scene direction and that's how i use it a lot instead of preset lighting setups check out this add-on which contains preset camera motions taken from real-life film scenes it has an empty to focus on your subject and then plenty of preset camera moves if you're struggling to find a camera setup try out this add-on or just like the lighting if you're just looking for inspiration it's still a great tool for that as well i like to kind of toss it in scenes and get an idea what might work with that particular shot or animation uv squares this add-on helps convert uv islands into clean grids for example if you wanted to add a label to a pop can this seems like it wouldn't be used all that much but you'd be surprised how often it comes in handy this tool is amazing for two features one it helps you scatter your images if you don't know what that means it makes a tileable texture and makes it more randomized to help prevent a repeatable pattern from occurring but it also has an option to use tri-planar projection mapping which allows you to project the texture onto an object from three different angles why does this matter because if you're lazy it will solve most bad uv layouts and let you lazy smart unwrap almost any object to apply pbr textures to which is great for scene assets you don't want to spend a ton of time unwrapping if you're a fan of ducky 3d you'll like this next add-on it's the material builder suite add-on it's a package of custom group nodes that will greatly speed up your material creation workflow and blender 3d cycles rendering engine highly recommend checking this out if you're interested in creating materials yourself but simplifying the process i also recommend checking out the real-time materials add-on this gives you a bunch of real-time materials that you can add quickly right here in the add menu and the great thing about this is all these are intended for real-time rendering meaning that they render very quickly true time remapping in blender is a really cool add-on this allows you to have a simpler interface for time remapping and allows you to insert keyframes as well so if you've ever had an animation and thought that maybe you just wanted to hold the jump a little bit longer but you didn't want to adjust the hundreds of keyframes to get it to look correct you could kind of use this add-on and kind of cheat by inserting a couple keyframes if you've ever used after effects it's a very similar interface to how the time remapping works in that program last but not least maybe my most used add-on is the fit lattice add-on i use this in my projects all the time and adds an operator to automatically set up and fit a lattice to the selected object it's super useful for quick resizing or kind of exaggerating proportions or fixing areas of your model i use this all the time in my stylized work when i kind of create a character or an animal or something like that i'm not happy with the proportions i kind of use this to kind of fix those and get the final proportions i want or just to mess around as usual thank you for watching i'm always excited to see what you create from these videos please tag me at southern jotty let me know if you checked out any of these add-ons because of this video

Channel: SouthernShotty

Views: 116,534

Keywords: blender, blender addons, best blender addons, blender 2.8, blender 2.9, blender modeling addons, blender 3d, blender tutorial, blender animation addons, blender rigging addons, blender addons for architecture, blender texturing addons, blender sculpting addons, blender 2.92, blender addon, blender 2020, blender 2.93, blender plugins, blender simulation addons, blender scripts, best blender addons 2021, blender dynamics addons, blende simulation addons

Id: 9yx3oeyytzw

Length: 8min 44sec (524 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 29 2021