Last week or so I went into the rabbit hole of forgotten Blender add-ons. On GitHub, Gumroad and Blender websites, I’ve discovered surprisingly useful addons that only have a couple of downloads, some of them have been submitted to be added in default Blender in community addons but they’re not there. So I’m sharing these add-ons to spread the word and help you discover them too. All of them are free, of course, and tested by me on 3.4
General:
- Shape Key Keeper (applies modifiers while keeping shape keys intact)
Interface:
- ReView (somewhat better version of Saved Views included blender addon. Cleaner, less bugs and more functionality)
- Show Weights (in Edit Mode → Sidebar → Edit you can see vertex groups and weights for selected vertices)
- QuickRef (shows fully visible image inside View3D, size and position can be controlled)
- Selection Sets (save & load object selections in 3D viewport)
Modeling:
- Select Sim (more advanced select similar faces tool than default Blenders)
Animation:
- Onion Skinning (Animation Extras has best onion skinning imo. GPU based, doesn’t create meshes or materials in the .blend file)
- Wiggle (geometry nodes-based substitute for adding noise modifier on loc/rot/scale axis to get wiggle effect. Controlled from sidebar and includes pulse option)
- Frame Ranger (fit frame range to keys, exportable frame range sets and markers and many more)
- Retime (better scaling tool for graph editor and dope sheet)
- Timeline Scrub.py (standalone version of timeline scrub feature from Grease Pencil tools addon. Tweaked by me to support 3.4 and higher)
- Claymation (similar to Keymesh, but quickly manipulates shape keys (instead of mesh data) to create stop motion animations)
Rigging:
- Armature Layer Presets (gives you ability to save armatures skeleton layers as presets)
Sculpt:
- Pressure Simulation (simulates pen pressure on mouse strokes based on mouse speed)
Nodes:
- Node Presets (advanced version of node presets addon included in blender)
- Node Sharer (lets you copy & paste materials as text strings. Useful for copying nodes between .blend files)
Camera:
- Lattice Magic (has incredible feature camera lattice. Hard to describe, check out yourself)
- Overscan (adds overscan feature in Output properties. Scroll down for the latest version)
Render:
- Render Animatic (lets you render only keyframed or marked frames. Regular or viewport render. Lots of other options too)
- Dupe Render (skips rendering identical frames and instead uses one image twice)
- Render Auto Save (automatically saves images in computer after rendering. Can be turned on or off, has more settings. in Output properties)
- DuBlast (easy playblast feature with clean UI and top-notch customization)
- Image Sequence to Video (can generate video from rendered png’s in output panel. Can render it out as video, gif, or add it into the sequencer as strip)
Import-Export:
- Super IO (this is more known add-on, but in case you don’t know - copy and paste objects into the blender and more)
Scripting:
- Class Viewer (in Text Editor context menu you have list of definitions, classes and comments you can use to jump ahead easily)
- UI Classes (in Text Editor sidepanel you have the option to display every UI class in your blender in a separate text file)
- Indent Guides.py (sadly I forgot where I downloaded this from. It adds indent guides, whitespace, and more to the text editor. Visibility can be controlled and switched off.)
- Node to Python (generates python script of shader or geometry nodes)
Sequencer:
- Shot Detection (automatically detects shots/cuts in the video and cuts them accordingly)
- Multicam (shows multiple cameras in sequencer preview)
- VSE Quick Functions (adds parenting & tags to strips, change playback speed, quick cuts, quick markers and many more)
- Push to Talk (record audio directly inside the sequencer and add it as strip)
Image:
- Extra Image List.zip (in Image/UV window → sidebar → Image adds new image picker with large thumbnails, also adds remove image options in Image topbar, see comment for more info)
- Tesselate Texture Plane (transforms alpha image planes into geometry)
- Reference to Image Plane (converts empty image into a plane)
Text Editor:
- Screenwriter (lets you create .fountain files and automatically translates your writing into proper screenplay format)
Misc:
- Align to Annotation (align object, edge, vertex, or faces to annotation)
- Font Selector (preview and select fonts from local libraries without manually loading them in .blend file)
I’ll update this topic every time I see something new, so watch it if you want. And please share similar addons if you have/use them, or made them, and think will be useful for others.
