Hi guys, just wanted to share with you that my first commercial addon for Blender has just recently been launched on the new CG Cookie Market website!
It’s a simple addon that can save you a lot of time if you work with textures in your materials and especially if you have groups of related textures you would like to keep together in an organized fashion (such as diffuse, normal, specular etc).
If you feel this addon would help your workflow, please head over to the marketplace site, and support the development of this addon with a small purchase. This will help continue work on the addon. Feedback regarding ways to make it even more helpfull to your workflow are most welcome.
The realm of commercial addons for Blender is rather new, but there can be some definite benefits going this route.
More reliable support for integrating the addon into your pipeline
It will be easier for the dev to invest time in keeping the addon in sync with new Blender versions
It’s simply an alternative method to support the development of the addon, since the addon script has to be GPL licensed anyways
Check out the demo video below and for more info you can visit this link: http://get.automaps.ca
Nice job, Todd! I am not really doing any job with textures at the moment, but I will start pretty soon, and then I will get this add-on.
Anyway, I could not help but start dreaming a bit when watching the video.
This is just a personal dream list but perhaps it can give you some ideas for improving this later on.
It would be great if I could quickly switch resolution. So instead of just recognizing the group name, it also recognized resolution (Wood_2K_DSP/Wood_2048_DSP), grouping all resolutions under the same group.
Being able to keyframe that resolution would be even better, since I could bump up to 6K in a closeup, and reduce to 1k in a distant shot.
And the ultimate dream would be (just throwing it out here) to have the addon check how much memory is left during render, and then have it select the highest resolution it can for every texture. (This could of course be done by manually entering an “Allocated Memory for Textures” into the addon and then press an “Optimize Textures”)
The textures could have a priority slider, giving biased amounts of resolution to certain objects (higher to objects with a texture on a large area and places where very high resolution is important, or lower to places in the distance).
Hi Gustav, glad you liked it! Your ideas for future extensions of the addon are really interesting, thanks for that.
Of course it would be easy to swap out a low res group for a high res group manually before rendering since they would technically have different group names, but the idea of finding a way to automate it is definitely an interesting concept. Those are some great “thinking outside the box” ideas! Thanks for that.
I am not really doing any job with textures at the moment, but I will start pretty soon, and then I will get this add-on.