I just committed myself to the horrible task of resetting prefs and reinstalling EVERYTHING in my addon section, becuase I’m getting loads of errors, some of which are not traceable to me, and some addons aren’t “behaving”.
I loaded factory prefs, saved
I restarted Blender
all addons are still there, just deactivated. I got a blank console window on startup, now there are 3 warnings about some AmbientCG things again, and I did NOTHING.
SInce a large percentage of addon devs apparently didn’t get the “extension” change (however that’s different from addons): can I just install ALL of them “the new way” or do I really have to go to every single dev’s product page and check, as some want the addon to be installed “the old way”?
On restart of 4.2, don’t import all your previous prefs, and you should be good.
4:
Start using Script Directories from now on.
Check your addons folder from 4.1 or the previous Blender version, and move that folder away from the user preferences, e.g. to your D:\ drive.
Now add this addon folder to the Blender preferences, and you see the addons pop up again.
It’s a nice way to split out versions specific addons, and addons you might not use all the time, but still want to have installed.
Also, vegetation addons tend to be HUGE, so you don’t want them on your OS drive anyway. File Paths - Blender 4.2 Manual
Thanks a bunch for the detailed description. Some addons install themselves, or theis massive load of assets on the system drive automatically, but I think it’s possible to also move those folders. Other than that, I already have all resources on my D: drive (funny, I have 9 drives in this here machine and you picked the right one )
Are you talking about assets or addons, or assets automatically stored in the system drive location? I couldn’t find an addon folder in the prefs, so maybe I’m in the wrong place.
Perfect. All addons are gone. I’ll reinstall my addons now and hope for the best.
All your installed addons should be there, and you can just move the content.
There should not be the need to reinstall.
I have one root folder that contains all my addons, separated by blender version and one ‘generic’ addon folder with some homebrew stuff and things that work across all versions.
In every blender version subfolder I have the setup as described in the docs (see link above).
Just be sure to link to the scripts folder when you set up the folder in the prefs.
For assets you can set up something similar.
I also created a root folder for all assets (not just Blender), and linked those folders back into the prefs.
This way I always have the appropriate (and working) addons per Blender version, and I don’t ’ pollute’ my diskspace with (re)importing my users pref data/addons into a new Blender installation. (Although that will not work anymore in 4.2)
The addons are what cause problems though, and whenever I chose to reinstall, verything mostly worked fine again.
THAT’S what I missed.
I’ll have to experiment with those assets anyway, since I have around 30 asset catalogs adhering to asset packs etc, I’d love to combine them all into one, but I’m very unsure how that really works. I asked many times, it always seemed sort of a “dangerous” solution (copy/pasting around the txt files)
That is a very good solution otherwise. I’ll gladly accept this, nobody mentioned a system like that before, and I always greatly dreaded the “big wipe”, since I organiza all addons via Cleanpanels and it’s a lot of work - this time I saved the config.
Thank you very much again! I love clean, organized systems - this is another step. The asset browser situation is another chapter.
Start here: Asset Catalogs - Blender 4.2 Manual
It’s again a matter of organizing stuff. Tedious maybe in the beginning, but when it’s set up easy to add to, and/or maintain.
And regarding large addon libraries (like vegetation), sometimes they allow to have these separate from the addon location. Also something to look into
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