Hallo everybody,
after a year in Blender I’m still getting confused about using addons or simply Blender for modelling.
I have a BIG PROBLEM and I think it is very common to all those who model in Blender. I’ll explain:
1- I don’t understand the real differences between the three most popular types of addons (essentially Fluent, MeshMashine and the HardOps / BoxCutter couple).
In short, what are the REAL differences since all the “youtubers / endorsers” say more or less the same things …?
The big problem is you can’t learn a lot of addons (which also change continuously) and at the same time try to keep up with a thousand other Blender updates …, so I would like to make a final choice, learn only one addon and continue with that. For example, I like to do a Hard Surface modeling with a CORRECT TOPOLOGY, possibly with a correct Edge Flow, without Mainfold, Ngons, etc. some decent UV maps to then work on them in external software such as Substance painter.
Alongside this need, however, I notice that more and more modellers complain that they have wasted a lot of time for nothing to model objects in an impeccable way that could actually be modelled in much less detail because there are many areas in which the LOD (Level of Detail) is low, the meshes do not move and therefore not all this care is needed in the modelling, and you can instead use Booleans and various inserts without taking care of the topology and UV maps since the shading would not suffer precisely a low level of LOD .
This confuses the question a lot, and therefore I ask which in your opinion are the best modeling addons for a correct workflow (no Ngons, no Mainfold, great Topology and UV map …) …,
and which ones for low Lod speed modeling, where we don’t care about creating Ngons, horrendous topologies and unmanageable UV maps.
To these doubts about what kind of addons to use is added the fact that Blender in this year, from version 2.8x to 2.9x has added a lot of tools and improvements in modelling, and therefore it is no longer possible to understand whether to continue using addons (after understanding which are the best for your workflow …!), or if it is no longer convenient to rely on addons because Blender has now integrated everything (or almost) what was missing in its tools.
In short, it would be really nice if someone who does modelling professionally and intensively could give us their opinion on the state of things right now.
I’m going crazy with it …
Thanks in advantage for replays!