Good news, there will be Spring Sale on Blender Market from 20-24 april. In case you have plans to invest some extra, then this is a good time. Not only I am here to recommend my own products, but I will share you my experience with other products as well. But first allow me to talk about my own products.
Yes, EV Express is the pearl of New Media Supply’s assets and addons for Blender. A year ago I started to work on this addon, and it grew out to a stable and useful addon. I love to render in EEVEE because it renders fast. But setting up a scene in EEVEE takes time. And that is what this addon is for: Setting up a scene in EEVEE to showcase your model with a few clicks. Well, there is to much to tell about EV Express and the best place to look for more info is the EV Express frontpage on Blender Market
There are some awesome things to tell about the Level Builder addon. First, this addon offers you asset management and different ways to add your assets to the scene. Secondly it encourages you to used linked objects, meaning that you can build huge scenes with less RAM usage. Now, the Assets for Level Builder is not the addon itself, but is quite a huge library of assets. And these assets are modular, meaning you can snap them together. Take a look at the description on the front page of Assets for Level Builder on the Blender Market.
So, after making loads of modular assets, I got tired of it and decided automatise the process and the MOAS-GEN addon was born. Instead of working a few days to get a new batch of assets, I can do it now within a few hours. First you can define profiles. Then the MOAS-GEN addon generates parts of it. And you, or the addon, can generate assets from these parts. On top of the, the MOAS-GEN addon has some unique modeling tools. Take a look at the MOAS-GEN addon front page on Blender Market.
Also part of the Spring Sale on Blender market is the Material Nodes addon. This addon has some cool nodegroups. Some of these nodegroups are: Fabric, Filter Paper, Glass, LED, Plastic foil, TileMaker, Level Correction, and more nodegroups to build your own shader. So these nodegroups are modular. Read more about it on the the front page of the Material Nodes addon on Blender Market
After Blender 2.8 bump-maps started to bother me because they look pixelated and processing is quite slow. So I wanted to use normal maps, but the problem was that you can’t turn procedural textures in normal maps. A solution was: semi-procedural materials. That is, using tile-able normal maps en use a few tricks to prevent visible tiling. For example, you can load two normal maps and for for the albedo a multiplied noise texture. EEVEE shaders comes with a set of normal maps and masks. Another thing that bothered me about materials and textures I found on the internet was that nearly none of them were using plausible albedo values. And still I see node setups using contrast and brightness which are broken formula, or not suitable to adjust textures in Blender. And also some textures come with pure white and pure black pixels, etc. These EEVEE Shaders use plausible albedo values and show a consistency. There is still a plan to make an addon for it, but it’s a long term plan.
Time flies, and before I talk about some other addons, I mention also Inserts for KITOPS and the Plugs for MeshMachine. For a complete overview of all the products by New Media Supply check the it’s shop on Blender Market. Oh yes, and I forgot the Organics Asset Pack which i made because I find organic model often so mesmerising.
Check for an overview of New Media Supply’s products in this video:
I think we all know Decal Machine and MeshMachine. The developer, MACHIN3 is a real magician. Ok, I should say: he is the magician under the Blender Addon developers. Especially the plugs feature in MeshMachine ….awesome. It makes me speechless.
Autorig pro is also a nice addon I want to mention. Because I am very lazy doing anything with rigs, I like this addon where you can click on parts of the character and generate a rig with a few clicks.
Layer Painter is now a matured addon. The developer deserves succes because he worked hard and is very patient. I think I will use this addon more often. Initially you cannot combine addons like this one with another addon that works with nodegroups. But you can use Bake wrangler for example to bake and switch over to another addon. This is one of my workflows creating materials.
There are way more addons, but time flies for me. I quickly name a few which are useful to and I am happy with: Level Builder, Node2Code (which learnt me how to code), Fibonarray, Audvis – Audio Visualisation, Grungit, Yes and Render+ (check it out), and of course addons by Chipp Walters, MasterXeon, and Jose Conseco (Did I spell that correct?), Group Pro, Fluent. Awh, need to go now, hope to complete this list soon.