Overview
These are the add-ons I recommend using, most of which I use on a somewhat frequent basis. Add-ons marked with a label, are add-ons I love and think are essential. “Built-in” add-ons are add-ons that are shipped with Blender.
Many of these add-ons are free and others come with a hefty price. If you’re willing to spend some money, then these are the only ones you really need:
- Hard Ops & Boxcutter Ultimate Bundle - Which includes both Hard Ops and Boxcutter; Essential for any 3D artist ($40)
- UVPackmaster - Only if you do a lot with UVs ($44)
- MESHmachine - If you feel like spending a bit more, I would recommend picking up MESHmachine as well ($40)
Where to get Blender add-ons
Gumroad takes less of a cut from the creator than Blender Market, so try buying add-ons from there.
Other Blender add-on lists
CG Cookie also has a good add-on list (which live updates as time goes on).
UI Improvements & System Overhauls
Power Save(Never again lose progress) - [Discord] - (free)GoZ/GoB(Fluent workflow tool between ZBrush and Blender) - (free)Batch Ops™2(Allows for hiding, renaming, disabling, … things at bulk in creative ways) - [Showcase] - ($$)- Extra Image List (Bigger texture preview) - (free)
- ARMORED-Theme Candy (Makes customizing UI easy and fast) - ($)
- Mouse-look Navigation™ (Good for graphic tablets and people accustomed to ZBrush controls) - [Documentation] - (free)
Hard Surface Modeling
Hard Ops(Hard Surface Modeling tools suite, a must-have for every modeler) - [Documentation] - ($$)BoxCutter(Boolean operations) - [Documentation] - ($$)MESHmachine(Modify, revers bevels & Boolean cleanup) - [Documentation] - ($$$)
Kushiro’s Tools
Kushiro has many great add-ons which are showcased on Kushiro’s channel.
Select Sim(A MASSIVE time saver tool, makes selecting fun) - (free)- Grid Modeler (Block out & Speed modeling) - ($$)
- Cut Corner - (free)
- Safe Ngon (Boolean cleanup) - (free)
- Quad Swords (Dicing tool) - (free)
- Attach Align (Great snapping tool) - (free)
Other Hard Surface
Cablerator(Cable maker) - [Documentation] - ($$)- Geo Cables (Another cable add-on, great in combination with Cablerator) - (free)
- Bool Tool (Primitive version of BoxCutter) - [Documentation] - (Built-in)
Loop Tools(Tool suite, things like Relax Mesh or Make Circle) - [Documentation] - (Built-in)ARMORED-Toolkit(All kinds of little scripts accessible through the search menu (F3)) - (free)- Edge Flow (Mesh manipulation) - (free)
- Bygen (Organic & Procedural modeling) - (free)
- Smart Fill (Smart F fills, I don’t use it anymore because of making F not instant anymore) - ($)
- Smart Select - ($)
- Cell Fracture (Destroy objects) - [Documentation] - (Built-in)
- Screencast Keys - (free)
- UnBeveler - (free)
- Orient and Origin to Selected - (free)
Sculpting
I don’t use Blender sculpting add-ons anymore because I sculpt in ZBrush.
Sculpt/Paint Wheel(Easy access to sculpting tools) - ($$$)- Sculpt Layers (Import ZBrush SubDiv levels)
- Brush Manager - (free)
Rigging
For rigging in Blender, you need one of these two add-ons. They are even helpful when you create your entire rig by yourself (which I don’t recommend with your first couple of rigs).
Rigify(My preferred tool and more commonly used) - [Documentation] - (Built-in)- Auto Rig Pro - ($$$)
Animation
- Relative Ease (Helps with creating snappy and modern animations.) - (free)
- Commotion - (Animation offset tools) (free)
Texturing
I don’t do texturing in Blender.
- DECALmachine (Add hard surface detail as textures) - [Documentation] - ($$$)
- Bpainter - removed by creator
Asset, Material, HDRI
I don’t use any of these anymore because I’ve switched to Substance Painter, Mari and 3D Coat for texturing. Blender’s node system used for texturing is very inflexible and a pain to work with, when the projects goal is to be real-time / game-ready or rendered in any other software.
- Kit Ops Pro (Kit Bash modeling & Adding detail to your Hard Surface models) - ($$$)
- Blenderkit (Material and asset library) - (free and paid)
- EEVEE-Materials (Material library) - ($$$)
VFX
- Mesh Trails (Made by dillongoo and the best stylized VFX system for blender) - ($$$$)
UV
UV Packmaster- ($$$)UV Squares- (free)- Dream UV - (free)
- TexTools - (free)
- Selects all UV islands on one UDIM - (free)
Node
Node Wrangler(Node managing tool) - [Documentation] - (Built-in)- Node Preview (Shows the texture result of every node, extremely helpful for understanding complex node networks) - ($$)
Generation & Procedural
- A.N.T Landscape (Landscape generator) - (Built-in)
Clothing
- Simply Cloth Pro - ($$$)
- Simply Wrap Pro - ($$$)
Retopology
- Quad Remesher (Similar to ZBrush’s ZRemesher, made by the maker of ZRemesher) - ($$$$$$)
- Retopo Flow (Retopology, performance is quite lacking (not worth the price by a long shot)) - ($$$$$)
Other
3D Print Toolbox(Find and clean up bad geo) - [Documentation] - (Built-in)Cut Copy Paste- (free)Copy Attributes Menu(Copy any attribute from one object to another) - [Documentation] - (Buil-in)- 3D Viewport Pie Menus - [Documentation] - (Built-in)
- Conform Object (Make objects perfectly hug curved surfaces) - [Documentation] - ($$)
- Send2Unreal - [Documentation] - [More Unreal x Blender add-ons] - (free)
- Abnormal (Extended normal editing tools) - [Showcase] - (free)
- Hair Tool (This is probably obsolete with Blender’s 3.4 update, which overhauls the hair workflow) - ($$$$)
Unsorted
I haven’t used any of these enough, but they seem interesting.
- Material Utilities
- Texel Density Checker
- Cloth weaver
- Tree vegitation
- Botanic
- Hdr maker
- True terrain
- Nyserga
- Graswalt
- City builder 3D
- Animation extras
- Spread objects
- Mirror selected bones
- Anti seam
- Moleclular script
- Cube surfer (Related to Moleclular script)
- Mira tools
- Instant meshes remesh
- Speed retopo
- Retopo mt
- Zen ui
- Checker (part of zen ui)
- Real camera
- Renderman
- Mashine tools
- Pivot transform
- VMesh
- X Muscles system
- Animiade
- Ivy Gen
- Auto Mirror
- Geo Sign
- Real Water
- Lazy Vfx
- Assets Library Builder
- RealCloud
- Stylized Tree And Plants Library Flora Paint
- BMesh
- ND
- Import Autodesk MAX
- Ucupaint