Why Don't Blender Integrate Usefull Addons As a Default Feature?

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

Hello guys. As you know there are many awasome addons(paid) for Blender. I have no problem to pay for good addons but the problem is that if authers stop supporting these addons we cannot use them. For example: Hard ops, zero brush, bake tool, retopoflow etc. Cannot blender foundation buy these usefull addons and add to blender as a default feature?

1 Like
2

You have it backwards. By paying for those add-ons you’re helping to ensure that the authors will continue to support them.

3

@Fweeb

In the case of Hardops,
MasterXeon said he’ll stop developing Hops on version 1 so… eh…

It’s not always dependent on sales.

But I see where you’re coming from.

4

Typically we only bundle add-ons with Blender if the authors request their work is included.

Blender could include any GPL add-ons, which is (nearly?) all of them.

The main issue in doing this is that someone has to maintain them.

If we include existing add-ons which are currently sold online, it’s likely to reduce sales/donations from the original authors.
Further, we can’t easily support users who report issues very well since we didn’t develop the add-ons - this isn’t such a great situation.

… Or we invest time to learn their code-base and support their tools,
but that takes time away from Blender development.

… Or the Blender-Foundation could hire the original authors to maintain them,
however this assumes everyone who pays for the add-ons currently would divert their payments to the dev-fund.

On the other hand add-on authors don’t have some monopoly on functionality they add in their add-ons,
in a few cases it might make sense to include similar functionality in Blender its self.
While this could be seen as some disincentive for add-on developers, in practice this doesn’t happen all that often.

@SoftwareEnginer, a nice property of open-source is if the original maintainer drops support, others are free to take over development (including the Blender-Foundation).

5

I think you got me wrong. It is fair to pay even 500$ dolars for some usefull addons. However, for example if Hard Ops is not developed anymore and if we get some compatibility issues in the future Blender versions what will happen? I want to know this because it is okey to invest some money which may be lost in the future but it is not okey to invest my time for uncertain things… Sorry I am still noob and I am trying to figure out things. (Sorry for bad english guys).

6

I think by ‘add to blender’ he means - add these features to master, not as an add-on.

7

For some addon like F2, it make sens, for hardops or else, not really.

To include an addon as a tool in master, I think it’s not always easy, the addon must suit the blender workflow and make sens with the current tools.
In fact the devs must develope a new tool with the addon as reference, but not include it directly.

8

Its always a tricky question, especially for software developed by a single person.
If they loose interest or for whatever reason cant work on it anymore - what happens?

In general if software is important enough, and the source-code is available,
someone else will pick up maintenance.

9

This is always the case with one-time paid software (see Softimage). You ultimately buy only the current version of software, without guarantee for the future versions. Which is sometimes ok - maybe you won’t need the new features added to future Blender versions, in the case development of these add-ons stops. You still weren’t cheated in any way I guess. The add-on works in the Blender version it was developed for.

10

Older versions of Blender never go away, it’s not ideal but if an addons becomes incompatible then you can always use the last version of Blender that supported it and work with that version. I understand that this is not ideal because it can complicate your pipeline but if you are not a coder sometimes you have to be flexible like that.

It is my understanding that any addon that uses the Python API has to be released with a GPL compatible license (I have yet to see any license info for Hard Ops) so there is always the option to modify the code any abandoned addons if you want to make them run with newer versions of Blender.

11

paid add on should not be free provided with, however how about Manuallab’s makehuman alike models ?.
to have real people models inside blender.

And that its not maintained by blenderinstitute, isnt a big problem.
i mean blender has always had has its bug, thats normal and accepted, lower the bar a bit, and most likely community will drop in to help fixing if things go wrong.

12

I always felt it would be useful if there could be an online pool of addons that Blender could list as an option to download or something. I think there is something similar to that in the scripting forum but I haven’t really looked at it yet.

13

Don’t forget since Blender day one almost everything that has developed in blender was an add-on that got incorporated into the build eventually.
So blender is what it is by free contribution mostly.

14

hm yes, your right there.
https://blenderaddonlist.blogspot.nl/ lots of free stuff

15

you can also check my sig for huge list of addons all in one d/l
d/l the lot, you can zip the ones you like individually & install or copy paste into your addons/addons_contrib folder.
Speaking of addons contrib, there’s been a huge boost recently to the list & lot’s of fixes & also changes in release:

  • Addons Release:

  • ANT Landscape: Add xy offset positioning.

  • Object Cloud Gen: Add Cycles Support, remove broken particles.

  • Dynamic Spacebar menu: Complete rewrite. One Button menu containing all 3d view menus & more.

  • Sapling Tree Gen: Complete rewrite. Updated UI & internal methods.

  • Official Pie Menus addon: Add hotkeys list in addons preferences.

  • 3D View Navigation: Add User View Navigation.

  • Mesh Extra Objects: Add Discombobulator, Geodesic Domes & Beam Builder.

  • General: New method to Name the Tab Category’s from addons preferences

  • Addons Contrib:

  • Mesh Extra Tools: New Pen Tool, Offset Edges, Edge Length, merge of Select Tools, Menu redesign & remove broken redundant functions.

  • Align Tools: Add Advanced Align operator.

  • Rock Gen: Disable in edit mode.

  • Removal of mesh building objects addon.

  • New:

  • Camera Rigs Addon: Dolly & Pan Rigs for Cameras

  • Bool Tools: Rewrite of the Booltools addon.

  • 1D scripts: new studio tools from 1D_inc.

  • Basic Modifier Tools: Quick Show/hide tools in modifier panel.

  • Quick Render Settings: Basic Render settings from the UV/Image Editor.

  • Carver: advanced cut & boolean tool by pixivore.

  • Simple Curve: Add Curve standard primitive shapes.

  • Archimesh: Architectural design addon.

  • Arrange On Curve: Align objects along a curve by Mano-wii.

  • 3D View Pie Menus: Extended suite of individually activated Pie menus for the 3D view.

  • Measureit: Renderable 3d view measurement display system.

many of these are submitted to Blender for review and hopefully we can improve the built in list for 2.78

16

WOW. Thank you for this great information. Keep doing great job!