In the past years, I’ve developed two affordable commercial add-ons which served well their purpose, now they compose a substantial part of my income and I dedicate my time to maintain them although I’ve been finding it harder and harder to actually improve their features through releases. Tesselator Sculpt Toolkit
But with the arrival of 2.81, there seems to be a great change of many of the features of those addons if not all of them, be built in. This is great but also sort of worrying to me because well, I need to pay bills
There are plans to make Quadriflow built in blender, which is an algorithm that puts Tesselator into shame. And one by one, features of Sculpt Toolkit are getting redundant with the sculpt branch.
Maybe I should stop maintaining those two addons once 2.81 get released and jump over to other projects? Would it be fair to everyone who bought them in first place?
I guess it is understandable that you stop supporting, or even just slow it and gauge the need for updates from the bug reports due to compatibility issues with future Blender versions.
One thing you could do though is add the Blender native ones in your concise menu in the place of of your previous tools or together with them. The current Sculpt menu is a mess and you could focus on this more or create an addon to fix some of these problems.
You could also take advantage of the influx of artists from other software and think about ways to replicate some of the tools or workflows they’re used to in their tools.
You are right many people are now switching or at least incorporating Blender in their daily work so making addons that replicate these features could be a wise choice indeeed.
I will eventually do that, I don’t want to keep unnecessary code, for sculpt toolkit I am already trying to find ui shortcuts to optimize the workflow but for tesselator it means it will be a bare button.
I still don’t like the idea of having hollow addons that only change the UI, they feel like a scam imo.
I think it is natural that some add-ons become obsolete over time and you shouldn’t feel bad about no longer supporting them. Just as long as you inform your customers about it I think most will understand.
There are always other add-ons you could start developing for Sculpt Mode, since there are a lot of less than stellar areas about it still. For instance, if you could make a superior global brush manager with the ability to directly add textures to your brush from your hard drives instead of going into the Context tab in Properties, I would at least be interested in checking your add-on out.
You could always give some discount code for the current users for the new plugins you create, or maybe give some free codes for Tesselator for users of your SculptToolkit and vice-versa.
If i was an addon developer i would try to go for thing that are not going to be improve by blender in the near future like UV, painting and maybe new modifiers that could speed up modeling.
This is just my personal opinion but do keep in mind that there will be a lot of new blender users very soon!
Modifiers can only be done from source code, and uvs are far from my expertise but I can try to add more base generation tools for sculpt tool kit and make a fancier transform tool, but I am not sure if it will be as useful as it was before.
Sounds reasonable to stop supporting addons that are less necessary because the blender features are expanding. It’s natural and should be celebrated because blender gets better even if you are loosing your income.
Better import and export to other apps is always needed. Especially with all the new users coming in.
For Archviz for example a good Sketchup importer for 2.8 would be great (I would pay a good amount for this). There is one for 2.79 but it’s buggy and isn’t supported anymore.
Or a forestpack for blender => this is the main plugin stopping people from leaving 3dsmax for blender
Those are two addons I think would work great in blender and have a lot of succes.
There are some very successful addons on blender market that are earning the authors some handy money. What if the blender foundation think that the feature is so good it could be copied into the base release of blender, they could potentially deprive the original authors of income. Is this OK, or is the addon functionality off limits in some way?
(this is only hypothetical, I am unaware of any instance where this might be true)
Tesselator (which I bought and served me to remesh some models really well) could try to go in a direction quadriflow it’s no so good, sure there are some corner cases quadriflow it’s not so good, maybe in hardsurface, maybe it’s too slow in high poly models… time will tell.
I guess this is unavoidable and necessary, with improvements to the core blender the community will grow and that’s good for everyone, Addon developers can always create more tools given enough time, I just dont want to upset the people who bought my addons tho.
I was researching about this but to make Tesselator suitable for hard surface, I have to make it anisotropic, and its not a simple task for me.
I recently saw this question being discussed on a livestream between Jonathan Williamson (from BlenderMarket) and Jonathan Lampel (from CGCookie) on the topic of ‘Blender Addons, Open Source, and Piracy’. The question can be found in this video at around 1h07m50s: https://cgcookie.com/live_streams/blender-addons-open-source-and-piracy
It sounds like there would be no legal problem if the Blender Foundation wanted to directly copy the addon code as long as everything is GPL compliant, but there could be problems with maintaining the code.
One of the points brought up was that in order for an addon to make it into a release of Blender, the code would need someone to maintain it. Many of the developers on the Blender Market require financial compensation through sales in order to spend time to further develop and maintain the code. If the Blender foundation would include the addon in a Blender release, the developer would likely lose income and would no longer be able to maintain the code.
There is also some discussion on problems arising from the fact that many Blender features are written in C/C++ in core Blender and addons are written in Python. So directly copying code could be less than ideal for the code structure of Blender.
There are addons also part of the main blender release, so the C++ is not really a blocker (I think)
But yeah it seems to be self policing if BF would need to maintain an addon they didn’t write and potentially lose access to the person who does, that seems to be the speed bump that slows it down.
Maybe it might be a case of parallel evolution, there are some great ideas percolating in the addons space that once seen working it makes sense some flavour of the idea gets pulled into blender proper, even if it is a complete C++ rewrite of something that was being done in python.
Often the case is that blender developers just like addon developers, think that a feature is necessary then they go to implement but by the time blender get the feature as builtin, it leaves the addon redundant.
Do you mean remesher in 2.81 make tesselator redundant? Remesher has some benefits, but in many case I prefer Tesselator. So far, I find Tesselator the best remesher for Blender.
But ofcourse, you have to think what is best. You cannot develop an addon forever. In case you plan to stop developing, it could be an idea to announce it where you sell your addon? So the buyers won’t then complain, just in case. I bought the addon months ago, and I don’t expect years of development for that price.
I will make the possible get Tesselator out of the redundancy zone for 2.81, I think the only thing its better is at is sharp features but afaik quadriflow also can deal with sharp edges but the option is disabled by default, maybe the auto scaling with anisotropy and better grease pencil preview will help.
Tho if I fail, I’ll have to accept the fact that its not as useful as before and do what you mention and warn everyone who might consider buying it.
