Hi everyone. In this video, I'm going to show you some of my favorite add-ons to use with Blender 2.8 Some of these add-ons are free to get your hands on, whereas others are paid. Some come prepackaged with Blender whereas others need to be downloaded from elsewhere on the Internet. I will just say before we start that this video is not being sponsored by any of the developers featured in this video This is just a particular collection of add-ons that I've had personal experience with and can genuinely recommend. So first of all, we're gonna start by taking a look at Hard Ops. I've been using this add-on for just over two years now and I can honestly say it's probably my favorite one because of just how much time this saves me every day. In one sentence, Hard Ops is a toolkit for speeding up people's content development workflows with a specific focus on hard surface design. Through the use of well-designed menus you can very easily access a multitude of useful operations and settings. It's all very sleek and lightweight designed to be as non intrusive as possible. The figurehead developer for this project is Jerry Perkins aka masterXeon. On their YouTube channel, you will find demonstrations of their plugin as well as personal work and tutorials. One of the features I use the most with Hard Ops is the quick sharpening and beveling operations where with a button press and a click the selected object will magically have a bevel modifier attached and all of the edges with strong angles will be automatically marked as sharp, giving us this really clean look. This add-on has a heavy focus on providing extended non-destructive boolean functionality while reducing the amount of cleanup time required afterwards, which makes it not only good for hobbyists but also for large-scale production environments. This add-on goes hand-in-hand with the second add-on in our list, which is Box Cutter. This add-on is also managed by masterXeon and serves as both a standalone tool and a companion add-on to Hard Ops. What Box Cutter lets you do is easily cut shapes out of other objects. You also have the choice between a destructive and a non-destructive workflow so if you want, any shapes you cut out can be preserved as modifiers in the stack for further manipulation afterwards. One thing I really like about this add-on is its respect for the orientation of the selected object. I can choose between cutting shapes in the local space or the world space or any other orientation I like and swap between them with ease. There are many settings to play around with and documentation is available online. Both of these add-ons were available for previous versions of Blender, but with 2.8 new opportunities for add-on integration into the interface have appeared, meaning that tools like Box Cutter can now have dedicated spaces on the toolbar. This makes it easily accessible although most of the time you'll be swapping to this tool with a simple hotkey press which is "Alt + W" by default. Hard Ops and Box Cutter both have so many more features than I've mentioned here but I'll links in the description to where and go and find more information if you're interested. But for now, we're going to move on to the next add-on in our list. This is called MACHIN3tools and this is a free one that I really like because it's the first add-on that's ever convinced me to use pie menus. It's got so many useful features and it's all available for free. You can download it from the GitHub page from the link in the description, and I'll also put a link to a half an hour long feature overview video in case you want to dive in and see what it can offer. Speaking of pie menus, if you've watched any of my time lapse videos you might have noticed some of the menus flashing up on the screen occasionally. I use all of the pie menus provided by this add-on with the single exception of the save menu. That's only because I like spamming "Ctrl + S" to save. You also have complete control over remapping so you can customize it however, you like. The creator of MACHIN3tools is someone who appropriately goes by the name of MACHIN3. They also have a couple of great paid add-ons available as well, which are called DECALmachine and MESHmachine. There are a collection of videos online showing off their potential. Okay, now we're going to move on to a few free tools that are actually already packaged with Blender, and these are LoopTools, TinyCAD, and 3DPrint Toolbox. All you need to do to activate these is go into the add-ons section under "Preferences," tick the appropriate check boxes and then save user preferences. LoopTools and TinyCAD are really useful because once you've activated them, you can get to their functionality really easily by using the context menu while in edit mode. For me this is by right-clicking but for you this might be different depending on your input setup. The thing I use LoopTools for the most is to bridge faces. For example: If I insert faces on opposite sides of a cube with both of the new faces selected, I can right click, go to LoopTools, then bridge, and It will automatically connect the faces. But as you can see there are all sorts of other operations you can experiment with. TinyCAD is a bit more niche but I'll show you why I found it useful in the past. When I've done things like modular environment work I've quite often started by planning points out on the 3D grid. I'll create vertices and edges between them as I start to construct a plan for the pieces. But a problem arises occasionally where I want to create a new vertex at a point where edges are intersecting. Normally this would be quite tedious to do, but with TinyCAD it's literally a matter of selecting the edges, right clicking, going to TinyCAD, and then using the "Vertex at intersection" operation. This has saved me so much time in the past. And now we move on to the 3D Print Toolbox add-on. The reason I like this add-on is because of a single operation called "Clean Non-Manifold and Inverted" which should just be called "fix all my mistakes." Now as you can tell from the name of the add-on this was originally designed to help people prepare models for 3D printing, but the reason I find it useful is for rigging characters and other objects. This is because sometimes when I make characters I use all kinds of add-ons, and I quite often do one half at a time and use the mirror modifier, and this can sometimes cause a bit of a destructive mess with gaps and overlapping vertices that are hard to see with the naked eye. When going to rig a character that has difficult-to-find issues like this, sometimes Blender has a problem with it and gives you a useless message basically reminding you that you're bad at modeling. What usually follows is a few frustrating hours of trying to find and fix the issues; but not anymore thanks to this "Clean Non-Manifold and Inverted" operation. It will fix most of the issues for you. Zacharias Reinhardt also covered this particular operation in detail in his video "How to Solve Common Sculpting Problems in Blender" which I highly recommend because he explains it much better than I can. So that just about covers it for my favorite add-ons to use with Blender 2.8. Using all of these together turns Blender into something that I can only describe as ridiculously powerful and I'm sure that as 2.8 grows and the community produces new tools it will just keep getting better and better. So that's the end of the main video. So what we're going to do now is just talk about recent news and go over some comments. So we just mentioned Zacharias Reinhardt at the end of the video there and if you haven't seen, he's rebranded his channel. It's now called CG Boost instead It sounds like they've got a lot of exciting content coming and he's just released a trailer for his new course. The video is titled "Start Your Journey as a 3D Artist" So if you're a beginner I recommend keeping an eye out for that. Also just to mention I know that some Mac users were having trouble with the old nebula tutorial, or they couldn't get the content to work properly and that was because of a bug. It was fixed and now it should be working fine. So if you're having trouble beforehand I recommend updating your Blender and then trying again. User Johan went back to inform everyone that was having trouble so thanks Johan. So if you wanted to try out the content before but couldn't then now's your chance to try again. Unity and Unreal have also started putting out new videos demonstrating the potential of their engines. There are some really cool looking stuff there so I'll leave links in the description if you're interested in taking a look. A lot of people have been talking about Nvidia's new AI tool as well which lets you draw out sketches of landscapes and then it will generate a photo-realistic looking image from it. That spells out a lot of potential for the future of AI-powered tools in the digital art space. Now let's take a look at some comments. From the new atmospheric lighting video, someone says "this is what I was looking for. I don't have an artistic background, so true examples of lighting, composition, and colors explained are hard to find. I don't know why, but 99% seem to only do modelling." Well, that's an interesting point. Some artists like the specialize on becoming very skillful in certain fields whereas others like myself tend to generalize a bit more, but it really depends on what you're going for. Because some people only do this for professional reasons, some people only do it for hobbyist reasons and there are many reasons for why you might go any one way or the other. I think it's quite often that you'll find that people doing this just for fun like to experiment a bit more and touch different subjects so they'll become a bit more multi-skilled all-round. I follow a lot of incredibly talented artists. Some of them are very specialized whereas others are generalists. It really doesn't matter what way you want to go. It's not a matter of one way being better than the other. It just really depends on what you want to do. On a personal note, I like to provide as much variety as I can so I'm gonna keep experimenting with as many fields as possible to hopefully make some more interesting and engaging content. Someone says "best robot voice." And yeah, I do sound like I have a robot voice during the tutorials but that's because it's all scripted. It's nice to prevent unnecessary mumbling. And the reason for that is because a large chunk of my audience comes from countries where English is not the primary language. So doing in a scripted format makes it a lot easier for people to translate. The statistics say that we've had views from over 70 different countries, which is crazy to think about so I'd like to be as accessible as possible. I do keep track of how my content moves around other platforms. I've seen people re-uploading it on other video streaming services which usually I wouldn't be okay with, but it seems like this is only really happening in situations where YouTube is banned in certain countries. So people are re-uploading it on the services where more people can view the content, which I'm okay with. But speaking of translation, I do have community transcriptions enabled on this channel so if there's anyone that wants to contribute by translating some of the videos on this channel than you can do that and you will be credited for it as well. Again, just before we wrap this up I want to say thank you to everyone that's been downloading the resources. Especially those of you that decided to give donations on the free ones. Across all of our distribution sites we've had thousands of downloads which is very encouraging and it really just helps to ensure that more free content will be coming for you in the future. So if you've made it this far through the video, don't forget to leave a like, comment, subscribe, and ring that bell. You can follow me on social media to stay up to date on content, and you can also join our Discord server to take part in discussions and share your work. Don't forget to tag me in any work you make as well. I've been really interested in seeing all your work on Instagram and Twitter. So thank you for watching and I'll see you next time.
