Hey there! Long story short: I’m thinking about writing some plugins to speed up my work now that 2.8 is in beta.
I was writing down ideas since 2.79.
The list got quite big, so I decided to ask for opinions before starting out.
I’m looking for you opinions on:
- would this plugin be interesting to you?
- have you seen anything similar(or exact same) on the market?
- is there already an easy way of doing that in blender without plugins?
- would you buy it?
Anyways, my list so far:
- Non-destructive primitives
- Basically it adds a pie menu that creates primitives from curves and edges via modifiers[like screw], hence gives much better control in terms of changing them afterwards and easily generating some neat shapes.
One example of usage would be a non-destructive cylinder, where you can easily and at any time change the amount of sides/radius or any other primitive parameter without any problems at all.
- Array-Helper
- Allows you to create arrays with (auto-created) empty objects to easily create turning arrays and stuff
Right now arrays in blender seem harder to setup than neccessary. And plugins that have something like this(SpeedFlow/hardOps) in certain situations are not that helpful.
- Flatten
- Allows you to easily put all the vertices selected in line with the first and last one selected
- Allows you to easily flatten selected polygons along the normal of the last one selected
- LocalToGlobal
- Allows you to select an object, press a combination of buttons that moves and rotates everything to make the grid’s center align with object’s pivot with the correct rotation.
Some usage cases would be: you want to easily create primitives in the local space of some object; you want to easily measure/change rotation differences between objects.
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Polygroups
Basically a port of ZBrush’s functionality: different colors on parts of one object, ability to easily isolate and mask certain parts; bake ID map from polygroups, etc. -
Smooth Groups
A port of 3ds Max functionality: smooth-shade between grouped polys while flat-shade between non-grouped and different groups. -
Origin extension
- lets you select a face and move the object’s origin to that face.
- move origin to face and rotate origin according to one of the edges(ability to flip/change edge via contextual buttons)
- It also lets you choose several objects and via a hotkey it lets you change the origin of all the objects to the active one(it optionally can delete the object it changes the origin to if you’d like to create an emоpty or a plane to serve as a substitute of an origin).
- it also allows you to create a an empty aligned with origin of the selected object to serve as a proxy for changing the origin of the object
- Modifier-Helper
Basically it’s SpeedFlow my way(which might be better or worse, depending on the person).
It allows you to track and change your modifier stack in a much more fluent way: add/remove/reposition/apply/etc modifiers with only contextual ui (so you can work in fullscreen 3d view).
Speedflow has some great ideas, but I found myself confused over ui a lot and there’s no support of 2.8(as of yet), so I thought it might be a good time to create some competition and strive for a better product.
Next are free plugins that are easy to make. I wonder, if anyone else have a need for them.
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AutoAlign
Lets you [via a one button shortcut] align(scale to 0) vertices and stuff via axises(like s-x-x, s-shift+x shortcuts and stuff)
Right now to do this, you have make sure that transformation pivo is set to active selection, and then scale-axis-0. -
PolyCount
Allows you (via button combination) to view the stats on your selection only: poly/tris/verts count.
Default blender stats show count of everything non-hidden.
Thanks for you opinions!