The Wonderful World of Blender Add-Ons

ANT LandScape

Author: Jimmy Hazeout

ANT Landscape is a relatively simple add on to start with but can be used in conjuncture with other techniques for some amazing results. The add on is simple to enable with-in Blender itself and free making it a must use for an artist trying to make their own large or small landscape scenes. With a large assortment of tools and adjustable values, a unique mesh can be quickly put together to build off of and further refine. Like everything else in Blender, this tool alone does not an art piece make. It is up to the artist to choose how to use this tool and what to add to further enrich the final render.

All that being said, this is a wonderful tool even on its own and can make some fantastic random variation that a user would not be able to make on their own. I have placed my own example as a basic material display showing that even a few minute’s work can create a visually interesting idea.

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  ANT Landscape Example

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  In Action

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  Example Render

Sapling Tree Gen

Authors: Andrew Hale, Aaron Buchler, CansecoGPC

Another great addition to an environmental artist’s tool belt, Sapling Tree Gen is a great tool to quickly make the skeleton of a tree. This is another add-on that can be quickly installed and enabled through Blender’s user preferences making it free and user friendly. This tool is able to instantly create a high customizable mesh in the shape of a tree with no leaves. Everything about the tree can be changed from the trunk and the amount of branches to how many times those branches split, their angles, and where they stop in relation to boundaries you place. Textures can be quickly added to change the look of the tree and additional subdivisions can be generated to add detail. The lacking part of this addon though is the leaves. While it can quickly create the trunk and branches, its capacity to make leaves is limited. By default, simple leaves will be generated at the tips of the thick branches. This makes for a tree with very few leaves. This can be overcome though through the addition of other techniques and textures.

Overall, while not the best way to make a realistic tree quickly, it can be used to make fun cartoonish trees or act as the basis for proper trees. I’ve worked with this add on personally to make some realistic looking trees with only an extra hour or two of work.

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  Wireframe Example

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  Sapling Gen in action

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  A Basic Tree

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  A Full Tree

Archimesh

Author: Antonio Vazquez

This add-on moves away from the more natural random ideas of the previous addons and instead focuses on human creation. More precisely, it grants the ability to create pieces of a home quickly. By that I mean, you’re able to simply add in the shapes of things like; windows, doors, archways, columns, stairs, railings, shelves, and more. Everything you can add with this add-on is customizable to a great degree. Windows can be divided and sills edited while stairs can be edited down to the letter, just to call out a few features. Thoughtfully, the added in doors and windows have boolean “hit-boxes” that allow them to easily cut holes to fit them into a wall you’ve already made. The downside here of course is that the added architecture is fairly plain and simple. Like many tools, they work best when built upon with other techniques or as a way to block out a scene before you make your own custom parts.

As for me, I’ve used this in some of my most recent renders where the detail of the windows and doors won’t go that noticed. With how customizable even the materials of the furniture is, I can still make it look like it fits perfectly at camera distance, cutting down on work time tremendously.

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  Basic Meshs

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  Book Props

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  In Action

Node Wrangler

Authors: Bartek Shorupa, Greg Zaal, Sebastian Koenig, Chrstian Brinkman, Florian Meyer

This is a special one amongst this list. Instead of doing something fancy like generating worlds or trees, it’s a fantastic organizing tool for the shading nodes. Blender’s built in shading nodes are powerful but also require a lot of editing to get looking good enough for the final render. The system in places by default works, but will quickly become cluttered and difficult to read even with groups to keep things compartmentalized. It’s a big waste of time coming back to a material you’ve made and being forced to re-learn the connections. The Node Wrangler was made to mitigate this issue. A material artist can use this to streamline work with the nodes and organize them for better future use. As well as the organization abilities, a host of shortcuts are added that aren’t available in default Blender. There are so many shortcuts and time savers that listing them all here would be a bit extreme.

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  Node Wrangler

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  Disorganized

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  Node Wrangler

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  So Many Shortcuts

The Grove10

Author: Wybren van Keulen, F12 Team

The Grove10 is the only add-on of this list that I have not personally used but my interest in it compels me to add this to the list. The Grove10 has been in active development with Blender for seven years and is spearheaded by Wybren van Keulen and the F12 team. This is like the amplified version of the previously mentioned Sapling Tree Gen add-on. This has been recommended to me by a teacher of mine as the highest standard tree generator on the market. It can perform a host of different actions that are otherwise impossible to do with Sap Tree and very tedious to try and do free hand. With the click of a button you can create a tree from a preset. From there you can make any number of edits to it such as the leaves, the bend of the tree, drawable branches, wind animation, and even age simulation. True to its name, The Grove10 goes the extra mile and is able to “grow” large amounts of trees from saplings and age them up to the inputted year.

There are a mix of two reasons I have not yet used this add-on. For one, it is not free and included with Blender. This is a product made by a hard working team with a price tag to match at around $300 per download. Secondly, I want to learn to do what this does first and then utilize this streamlining program later should the need arise.

Here are some links to their site and a trailer for what the program can do.

TheGrove10 Website Grove10 Trailer

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  Example Tree

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  Growth Gif

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  Example Tree

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  Tree Progression

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  Amazing Tree

Honorable Mention: Polligon Material Converter

Author: Patrick W. Crawford

This didn’t make the list because of how niche it is but I use it so much I felt it deserved a spot here. The online texture marketplace Polligon has a giant library of virtual assets. I’ll typically use it to buy high resolution textures like grass, dirt, rock, tile, ect. To improve the user experience of adding textures and their non-color info, Polligon made the simple add-on here. With it, Blender can quickly open and load the PBR textures and make them usable. You’re also able to better group them together in the shader nodes tab. Overall this is a pretty small addition to Blender as a whole but if most of what you get is off this site, it’ll save a lot of time and headache.

Polligon Site Polligon Add-On

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  Poliigon

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  Materials For Sale

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  Example Provided