I’m curious, how interested would addon developers be in a fully customizable UI builder for Blender?
Something similar in concept to Unity’s UI Builder (drag-and-drop layout system), but designed for Blender addons. The idea would be to allow building modern, flexible UIs without being limited to Blender’s default layout system.
While building an upcoming addon for myself, I ended up creating a declarative GPU-rendered UI framework because I wanted more flexibility than Blender’s default layout system allows.
It’s not based on UILayout, everything is drawn via Blender’s gpu module (Metal/Vulkan compatible), with a widget tree structure (Column, Row, Button, TextInput, ScrollBox, etc.) handling layout, rendering, and input.
Short answer: yes, it supports it, I use blender.gpu
The framework doesn’t call OpenGL (or Metal/Vulkan) directly; it uses Blender’s own gpu module. That means it automatically works on whichever backend Blender is using: OpenGL on older setups, Vulkan on Windows/Linux, and Metal on macOS. Fully compatible regardless of your GPU backend.
At first I considered using native OpenGL, but the Blender devs are moving away from it, so going through gpu was the right call.
Any update on the development of this project? I bought your other add-on for the color palette workflow, and I’m super interested in this project as well. Even if it wasn’t free I’d buy it as well, as I love to dabble in this stuff as a newbie with too much free time.
The framework actually already exists inside PaletteGrid if you look at the addon files you’ll find it under the bgui folder. It doesn’t include the demo panel or dev tools though, just the core framework.
Honestly, since this post didn’t get much engagement at the time, I didn’t think there was enough interest to justify focusing on it as a standalone addon. But the framework keeps getting improved as I work on PaletteGrid itself. Hearing from people like you is making me reconsider packaging it as its own thing to make life easier for other devs.
Maybe BlenderArtists wasn’t the right audience to gauge interest from, most people here are artists, not addon developers. I might look into reaching out to the dev community more directly.
Thanks for the support, and thanks for buying PaletteGrid! If you have a moment, I’d really appreciate it if you could leave a rating/review on the addon page, it helps a lot as a solo dev.
Hey! Thanks for the interest. There’s no standalone alpha build of the framework at the moment, but the framework itself is live and in production, it powers my PaletteGrid addon (https://savedpixel.gumroad.com/l/palettegrid).
You can find the full framework source under the bgui folder in the addon files.
If interest keeps growing, I’ll consider packaging it as a separate standalone tool with proper docs and a demo panel. Stay tuned!
Looks really cool! I probably wouldn’t use it myself simply because I don’t generally make addons complex enough to need a custom UI. But for more complex addons, I think this could make them far more user-friendly.
Just signed up to the website to say: Yes, please. I’m hitting some walls with Blender UILayout and would love more flexibility. This framework sounds great!
Btw, I love the idea for your palette grid addon, I’m planning to get it soon as that’s a workflow I’ve used a lot in the past.
