Collection Utilities Addon

Collection Utilities addon provides a myriad of quality of life conveniences for collection creation and management utilities targeted towards instancing and managing, collections and organizing scenes. It provides tools to preform operations in bulk that would otherwise be tedious and time consuming to do manually.

These include things like

  • Batch Creation of Collections From Objects ready for instancing.
  • Setting collection instance offsets in bulk.
  • Name Transferal between datablocks
  • Collection Hierarchy duplication without duplicating objects

Features

Create Collections From Objects

Batch Collection Creation allows you to quickly create collections ready for instancing directly from a bunch of selected objects, whose origins already represents the desired collections centers

Collection from Objects

Select a bunch of objects, press Create Collections and one collection will be created, automatically named and centered after each selected object. Options for collection placement and automatic handling of child objects are available.

This saves tremendous time when you have a lot of instances to setup.

Set Collection Offset

Set Collection Instance Offset allows defining the Collection Instance Offset parameter for several collections at the same time, and conveniently define them automatically from object positions or from various options beyond the default 3D Cursor location provided by Blender.

These are often neglected, displaced when moving objects or undefined by default for newly created collections. Setting them up manually can be tedious for large numbers of collections.

Transfer Names

Transfer Names is a scene organization and management tool for people who want to keep their data tidy and neatly named, helping by transferring names between DataBlocks.

It allows copying names between various object properties to other data like from object to collection, or collection to objects, or from material to collection.

Duplicate Collection Hierarchy

Collection Hierarchy duplication allows you to duplicate a collection and its sub collections hierarchy, including child objects, without duplicating the objects themselves.

This differs from default operators in that it doesn’t create new objects nor object data. Existing objects will be kept at their current collections and additively linked to the new collections hierarchy.

Useful if you want to:

  • Duplicate complex collection and sub collection hierarchies
  • Transfer collection structures verbatim to another scene
  • Make new derivative assets that have small differences, based on existing collections and sharing the same objects (say a set of plants with and without a vase)

Links

  • In the spirit of free and open source I’m releasing it here for free, in the hopes that it is useful to you.

  • Collection Utilities 3.0 Update 2023 11 17
    Addon_DPFR_CollectionUtilites_3_00.py (20.4 KB)

  • If you wish to support me, or help support the Blender Foundation through commissions you can also purchase it at the Blender Market.

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To celebrate the release of Blender 4.0 I decided to update my addons with a few minor improvements to mark the occasion.

Collection Utilities 3.0 Update

Bug fixes and improvements:

  • Fix a bug that caused early termination of name transferal procedure for all objects if an object didn’t have the name source datablock in Transfer Names

  • General simplification of code

  • Miscellaneous optimizations and improvements

New Features:

  • Transfer Names can now copy names from object materials, with a choice for active material, or material slot index
  • Transfer Names can now transfer name from the immediate parent of an object
  • Concatenation mode for Transfer Names now has the ability to completely replace a datablock name or keep it as a prefix or a suffix. This allows more complex naming conventions, by gradually constructing names through appending or prepending to current ones.
  • Strip option allows attempting to eliminate the automatic disambiguation serialization numbering Blender adds automatically to names (like .004). This is available for name transferal in Transfer Names and for Create Collections from Objects
  • Create Collections from Objects now has an option to create collections only from top parent objects (selected objects that aren’t parented to any other), saving you the hassle to manually cherry pick them.

Download link updated in the original post above

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