Hey folks! I started this project a while back as a private / internal addon to help optimise and improve my non-destructive & hard-surface modelling workflow in Blender. It was initially planned / released as a paid addon, but I’ve since decided to release it for free. Blender has given me an amazing opportunity to learn, grow, and express my creativity both from a visual, and development perspective — and while it’s a bit cliché, I guess this is my way of “giving back / paying it forward”.
It’s still early days, and I will actively continue to develop and improve the addon — just because it’s free doesn’t mean it won’t be getting any love! Completely open to suggestions, feature requests, or general feedback.
At the time of writing this post I’ve only put together the written documentation, but I’m planning to record an intro video that will cover all the basics of the addon soon - as well as a series of tutorials moving forward. So if you’re more of visual / video person, hang tight
Just released a new version (v1.15.0) — which added the Profile Extrude operator, and a couple of other small updates. Also, to help clarify what’s changed between releases going forward, there is now a public changelog available on the documentation website.
For those of you that have ND installed already, you should soon see an automatic “Update Available!” button appear in the N panel UI (it takes about an hour to detect a new release). Clicking on this takes you to the Gumroad page where you can grab the latest available version at any time.
My plan is to hopefully try and record an introduction video for the addon this weekend, and some smaller feature-dedicated videos over the coming weeks.
In the meantime, please shout out if you discover any bugs/issues, or have any feedback.
I’ve literally just gone through and updated the grammar, spelling, and formatting across the documentation — it should be even clearer and more to the point now.
Also don’t feel bad, I appreciate any and all support, monetary or not. Even just testing it out and letting me know what you think of it, reporting bugs, suggesting new features, or sharing the link is a great way to help
Thanks for the feedback! I’ll try add in a setting for the text resolution / DPI - that way you can adjust how big it is on your monitor.
As for blank sketch, I’ve just finished recording the intro video (waiting for it to upload to YouTube & process) which goes through an example use-case starting with blank sketch. I’ll embed the video / add a link to it here once it’s ready.
Just released a new minor version (1.16.0) with a couple of fixes, but also added a preference setting for the overlay DPI — you can now increase the value so it’s more readable on your monitor.
The intro video is also on its way, just waiting for YouTube to finish processing.
Third, the shortcut menu has also had a bit of a tidy up, with most operators now grouped together by relevance:
Forth, the mirror operator has had some enhancements, it now properly bisects across the mirror axis and allows you to flip the axis for mirroring in a negative direction:
Also thank you to everyone who has downloaded the addon so far, it’s only been out for 4 days now and it’s already at 200+ downloads! Look forward to hearing any feedback or seeing what you make with it
PS: Forgot to mention, after updating to v1.17.0 - you’ll will get an “Update Available!” notice in the main UI panel and the shortcut menu for all future updates (makes it easier to know when updates are available, as some people like myself don’t often work with the N panel open). There’s also a new “View Changelog” button that appears under the update button which you can click on in order to see what’s new before you update.
Are you able to check that there are no conflicting / overriding shortcuts already bound to SHIFT + 2 in Edit > Preferences > Keymap? You can see an example of my keymap here (notice how I’ve disabled “Select Mode”, and “Mark Sharp” under mesh). You can also click the button I’ve underlined in green and simply choose another key-binding that works for you
FYI, the reason why it still wasn’t working in your case is that Blender tries to find the most specific key-bind when one is pressed. In this case, the ND key-bind lives in the more general space of “3D View”, however, because there are more specific contexts, such as “Mesh” and “Object Mode”, if a key-bind exists in those, it will override what’s set in “3D View”.
So given your screenshot, you’d have to disable the “SHIFT + 2” key-binds in Mesh and Object Mode as well:
There have been two recent updates back-to-back, bringing ND up to v1.19.0
— Couple of highlights —
All Boolean & circular array reference objects will now automatically be placed in their own “Utils” collection, making it easier to show/hide all of them at once while you work (collection name configurable in the addon preferences).
Between v1.19.0 and v1.21.0 there were a few additions & improvements, the most notable (and a highly requested feature) being able to adjust overlay values using the mouse position:
You can also now customise the ND menu shortcuts and the overlay Pause and Pin keys under the addon settings:
