Blender Market – Shopping Guide

April 9, 2022April 13, 2022 New Media Supply 1 Comment add-ons, Addons, Animation, Blender Market, Materials, Modeling, Shading

Spring Sales on Blender Market started today at 12:00 am CST! Since 2018 I have bought 124 products. I share the top 50 and best Blender add-ons. Check the one-and-half-hour video, or scroll down to the list.

Note that some products are affiliated, but let me explain. Sometimes a developer comes to me asking if I can promote their addon. It occasionally happens that I have to say no. This is because I have to keep also my audience happy. And sometimes, I promote products without being an affiliate. In short, what I do here is share a list of products I am genuinely enthusiastic about.

Please bear with me with the presentation in the video: This is the second time I recorded it, because a few hours before, I got halfway through the list, and it already took 2 hours. So I re-recorded without going too much into small details.

Six tips to improve buying experience on Blender Market

Check the Blender version. I once forgot it and had an add-on that was not compatible with the Blender version I used.
Check the reviews. It doesn’t say everything but might give an indication. For example, there could be just two reviews, and one review give two stars because the buyer had the wrong expectations. (He didn’t read the product page carefully). Or a developer gets bad reviews when he didn’t update for a year and starts to update later on again.
Is the add-on or product for something too specific, or is it a bunch of (handy) tools? If you know that you won’t buy that many add-ons, a bunch of tools is ok. But if you are an add-on junky like me, you want add-ons that are for a specific task.
Will you use the product frequently, like every week for a few hours? Some add-ons are too particular, like making snow. You might get excited but think about it. Will you specialize in making snow scenes? Or do you think you will make snow scenes over and over again?
Is the developer active on social media or has a presence online? For example, I bought a product, and no one knows who the developer is. He was an excellent developer but was not really into Blender. After there were no sales enough, he focussed on something else. As a result of no updates to make it compatible with the current Blender version. If a developer has a presence online, you can figure out if the developer is really into Blender or not.
Learning curve and documentation. Sometimes you use an add-on for a few weeks, do something else for a month and then turn back. If, in that case, you need to dive into lengthy documentation again, you might give up using the product. I prefer intuitive add-ons. Some add-ons are designed such that you can start right away. Maybe it’s the UI or a convention.

Why we buy Blender Products

Have some fun with explosions and other fancy stuff.
Be more productive so that we can make more revenue.
To learn from.
We don’t want to miss the boat.
We feel an urge to make our ideas a reality.

Blender Products I recommend

Modeling

Boxcutter and Hardops
Awesome products if you are a die-hard hard surface modeler. I used it for quite a while, but since I am not purely focused on modeling Fluent is fine for me.
Fluent
A compact and user-friendly add-on for hard surface modeling.
Mesh Machine
A must-have to fix all kinds of problems you will experience when you do hard surface modeling. My favorites: Boolean clean up, plugs, stash, fix normals, unf_ck.
KIT OPS
Chipp Walter has quite some products. This is my favorite add-on of his. Kit-bash and hard surface. You can create your own assets.
Angle Tool
I use this when I create modular assets. It is much easier to make angles than using Blender’s built-in tools.
Safe Ngon by Kushiro
Wow, this is such a useful tool. When you do bevels on a hard surface model with ngons, the bevels will easily overshoot when some edges are not placed properly. Look up Safe Ngon on Gumroad to see it in action.

Materials

For PBR textures: go for Quixel Megascan (And Quixel Helper addon).
Instamat – Quickly make some materials (during modeling). Or as a base for further design.
Smudgr Pro – Add quickly Smudge, Wear, Dust, etc. At the end, you can bake the node setup to a PBR material.
Grungit – Similar to Smudgr Pro but with another workflow. Grungit will first generate nodes, which you then can adjust.
Material Nodes (EEVEE Production Suite). – My own addon. Building blocks to make your own procedural material.
FX Nodes (Available soon on Blender Market, now on Gumroad). Check this out! It will bring you into another dimension “Change the paper, not the ink”
KIT OPS Bevel – Tired of overshooting bevels on your highly detailed hard-surface model? Try KIT OPS bevel
Grabdoc – If you cannot afford Decal Machine, check out Grabdoc.
Anti Tile – Tired of repeating tiles on PBR textures? Use Anti Tile to get rid of the tiling effect.

Remesher

Often s_cks, but….

Quad Remesher (Not on Blender Market). It is the best, but quite expensive.
Otherwise, check if the Tessalator is your thing. This was my favorite once.
Boundary Aligned Remesh This addon will preserve the edges. Handy for letters, definitely.

The problem with remeshers is that it kills details. But! What if you keep the original and then bake normals from high to low poly?

Cams

So far, I can manage to control cams manually (bind to markers, parent to other objects, and use modifier in Graph Editor, etc.). Otherwise, many cam add-ons are nice, but I cannot advise on that.

EEVEE

I love EEVEE because if you know how to set it up correctly, you can render out 4 seconds per frame (720p). NoiseFree! You can’t do this with Cycles. If you want to save time and also resources, check EEVEE Production Suite. Also, Definitely Materials System, Fade, Flare Lens Flare are interesting.

Cycles

For the highest quality production (but resourceful), use Cycles. And to save some of the resources, check K-Cycles.

Animation

Character

Other Awesome products

Fade (Make nice toon scenes)
Node2Code (This is how I got that Aha moment learning Blender API).
Flared Lens Flare (Works in EEVEE, and gives an extra “realism”. Great Effect).

My own awesome products

EEVEE Production Suite (save time, save resources)
Vox Importer. The latest addon. Import from MagicaVoxel to Blender.
Blocker. My favorite shape generator. Simple silly addon but useful.
MOAS-GEN. Use profiles to generate modular assets.
Modulator. Placement and management of Modular Assets. Comes with a library as well.
Inserts for KIT OPS. A variety of inserts.
Quixel Helper. Helps Quixel Bridge do his job properly.

Great Creators

There are many great creators on Blender Market and Gumroad. I cannot mention them all, but from the top of my head here are a few:

Oliver J Post is Very helpful, patient, and shows professionalism in marketing, design, and communications.
Mark Kingsnorth is very mindful and helpful in customer support. Also, the addons are lower priced than usual.
Iyad Ahmed is my colleague in the Blender community and he is a master in coding. Very passionate about all the nerdy stuff like coding, algorithms, and patterns. Check out his FX Nodes.
Great quality products like trees, vegetation, and vehicles are made by Poligoniq and Bproduction.
Amandeep gives away loads of free products. Check also his commercial product Rantools which is a huge collection of tools (Good thing to buy when you are not planning to buy loads of addons and want to have value).

Let me know if there is a Blender product missing here.

You can also check this one-hour long recorded live stream I made a few days ago:

Blender Market – Shopping Guide

Six tips to improve buying experience on Blender Market

Why we buy Blender Products