I have been Blender curious but a long time but work pretty much exclusively in C4D since V8. I am determined to into Blender and make occasional progress. I bought several plugins from the Blander marek, for tru-fx (true earth, true mars and true terrain) and thought they would be a good motivation to do my next science explainer in Blender. Sadly when installed them in Blender, it seemed to say it worked then I couldn’t find them anywhere. I can’t find any tutorials that help. They don’t appear in the adding list.I ma sure I am missing something super basic. decades with one software has really frozen my brain! Any advice would be welcome, thank you!
Welcome 
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installing addons is mostly super easy: open Edit → Preferences → Install… then choose the zip file; seldom this is only one py file). Then the addon (and only this) should be shown in the addon list. Then you can have a look at it’s info when you expand the entry… there should be an Documantation link. If you wanna use it you have to enable it. Some addons do show some extra settings after enabling… for example something like shoe in menu only or show in sidebar…
So you may re-think about your installing process (until this day there are some obscure tips about extracting a zip into a special directory which even sometime would work if the tip giver would mention to hit the Refresh button; but that isn’t the th recomended way just click bait) and most of all:: do the addons match the blender version !?
True earth for example : Software Version 2.81, 2.82
And you are using?? (You are aware of the fact that you can have mutliple versions of blender running on the same machine?? I’m on linux and this is no problem at all… mac and win: sometimes another world)
There were some API changes so if it is correctly installed you may find it with the search feature (Edit → Menu Search /F3).
It seems to be that even true-vfx.com is somekind of outdated ??
There also seems to be no posts about it here on BA (except yours)…
That is what I did to install them and I think what you said about version number might be right. If I unzip the file and open the blender files within it, the plugins open but are VERY slow. In fact is slowed down my entire system. I thought that might be the 24k image files so I tried them in C4D which has a notoriously slow viewport and they were no problem at all there. I noticed I was the only one who ever mentioned the add-on here and thought that did not look good! I think I Zamscrewed for using these plugins but since 2 of them cost 1.50$ it’s not such a huge loss. Thanks so much for your insight. I am still determined to to do this project in Blender!
True-Earth and Mars aren’t addons, so you don’t install those. Only True-Terrain is an addon which needs to be left zipped and installed via the user prefs.
If you have any issues with this, please follow along with the installation video:
Thank you so much for this! I look forward to learning how to use this add on and use it in a project I am working on.