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Blender Addons - How To Pick And Install The Best Ones?

Blender Addons - How To Pick And Install The Best Ones?

A comprehensive guide on installing and configuring the best Blender addons you can use in your animation projects. A lists of best ones included.

Blender addons are secondary scripts created by the Blender community to improve or extend some of the official Blender functionalities.

It might often happen that during your project development you are missing some crucial options that would make your work much, much easier.

Chances are, someone before you already had this issue and came up with an idea to create a Blender addon to make the work easier for folks like you in the future.

Some of the plugins available on the market are free and sometimes included in Blender itself (they just need to be enabled), while the others are paid. A standard price for a plugin is around $80, but everything depends on the complexity of the plugin.

How to install Blender add-ons

If you want to use one of the built-in Blender add-ons, you can simply enable it in the Add-ons section in the Blender.

To install a third-party Blender add-on, you have to:

  1. Download the add-on to your desktop device
  2. Go to the Add-ons section in the Blender preferences Blender find preference
  3. Click Install button Blender install addon
  4. Pick the add-on using the File Browser Blender pick addon
  5. Enable the add-on from the 'Add-ons' section level Blender enable addon

This should do the job. As mentioned, Blender comes with a set of pre-installed add-ons you will find in the add-ons menu. For those, all you have to do is to enable them.

Lists of Blender add-ons

Blender-addons.org

Blender addons website

A great list of Blender add-ons can be found on blender-addons.org.

They are neatly ordered in separate categories to help you easily find the necessary tools for the job.

A good tagging system enables fast browsing and picking only the plugins that are free or paid.

Free Blender Add-ons

Here you have a List of the top 10 free blender plugins! Enjoy!

Add-on Usaeg
Bool tool A simple add-on that adds shortcuts for creating booleans.
Node wrangler It add a lot of handy shortcuts that can be used to quickly make common node connections or add common node combinations.
EasyFX It adds an interface in the image editor with traditional UI elements. We can enable and disable different effects and adjust them from this separate UI.
Animation nodes It is a node system that allows you to create all sorts of motion graphics in Blender.
F2 It allows to fill with less geometry selected and it uses mouse position to determine the direction to fill.
Amaranth toolset Simply, it is a collection of features that makes life easier in many areas of Blender.
UV Squares It takes selection in the UV editor and creates square faces that are correctly aligned.
Power sequencer It has a lot of extra editing tools and shortcuts that make video editing much easier in Blender. For example, concatenate strips and align audio.
Camera Manager It helps to manage multiple cameras in the same scene and render them after one another in one go.
MB-Labs It creates characters models.

Blender Market

Blender addons website

This website is very similar to Blender-addons.org but with a quite different search mechanism.

You can filter out the add-ons with price, license type and user rating.

The cool thing about Blender Market is that most of the purchases you make will be contributed to the Blender community - helping the people behind Blender hire new developers and build new functionalities. It's w win-win situation.

Conclusion

Blender add-ons can help you in your day-to-day work or solve a specific project challenge for you. Chances are, most of the issues you will face we're already solved with add-on!

This article is here to help you in installing those add-ons and picking the best ones for your project.

In case you think something is missing, let us know in the comments!