Only fill your blender jar 75 percent - Filling your blender three-quarters ensures that your food can blend properly and you are less likely to experience spillage. Blend Soup and Potatoes. You may not think of blenders as the best way to make potatoes, but they'll help you get the lumps out. Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing and 2D animation pipeline. Blender CAD Software Review. I spent some time really digging in to Blender CAD software, because there’s really a whole world there in Blender.It’s pretty comprehensive. In fact, I even have a neighbor, a friend of the family, who has a fifteen or fourteen year old son who is getting into CAD and 3D printing. Blender is a freeware. You can use the software for commercial or educational purposes, and distribute it free of charge. However, its software provider Blender Foundation, a non-profit corporation, offers enterprise pricing services and subscriptions for artists and small teams who want to access its open production platform such as Blender Cloud. Better accessibility: You can use your keyboard and screen reader software to interact with several areas of the Blend user interface, including top level menus, solution explorer, and team explorer. We are actively working on making Blend more accessible in future releases of Visual Studio 2015.
Ever wanted to go in and just animate a film without spending months to model, rig, texture, and shade a character. Thankfully, there are a number of different character generators you can use with Blender which come fully modeled, rigged, textured and ready to animate! Check out the Character Generator list below!
Daz Genesis
Daz Studio has been around for a while and they have some awesome looking 3D characters! In particular, their Daz Genesis range seems to be the one that I found most interesting. It allows you to change features such as age, gender, weight and so on through the pushing and pulling of a few sliders. It’s not exactly a character generator though. You would need to export from Daz before you can use it in Blender. The rig that comes along with it generally isn’t that advanced. I actually used the basic rig through my short film “Tripping” and found it so tedious to work with. You may need to re-rig the character using something like Rigify.
![Blender Blender](https://cgpress.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/lightwave2016modstack.jpg)
Download Daz Studio here: http://www.daz3d.com/home
MakeHuman
MakeHuman was one of the first character generators I’ve worked with. It’s pretty much the best free character generator for Blender at the moment. MakeHuman allows you to generate a huge variety of different characters. Similar to Daz Genesis, you start with a base generic character and then modify properties such as age, weight, height, race, etc until you get the look you want. Their characters don’t look as appealing as the Daz ones though, but they are getting better. The latest MakeHuman characters look a lot more improved. Another good thing about MakeHuman is that importing into Blender is a breeze. You just need to export to MHX format and Blender already has a MakeHuman plugin that will import the MHX file. MakeHuman has some other handy features like facial animation controls as well as the ability to easily apply BVH motion capture files to the character. Recently, they’ve added a library for clothes, hair, shoes and so on. I hope this library gets big one day! This makes character animation a joy to work with and why I rate the MakeHuman character generator much higher than Daz Genesis for Blender even though it still needs to catch up in terms of appeal.
Download MakeHuman here: http://www.makehuman.org/
CG Cookie Flex Rig
This one was created by CG Cookie. This is a character generator tool created within Blender itself that allows you to create a variety of different cartoony characters. The looks of the characters are great (they look very appealing) and the rig is a lot more stable than MakeHuman. This rig was made as part of their Character Animation tutorial series. This is licenced as CC-BY allowing you to use these characters in your films as long as you give credit to the creators.
Here is the link to download Cookie Flex Rig (You’ll need an account with BlendSwap): http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/61707
Anna Rig (NOT FREE!)
This is a fairly new one that I saw recently on the BlenderMarket. I haven’t used it but it seems like you can create variations of the Disney Barbie type of characters. The rig looks pretty high quality as well. It sells on the BlenderMarket for $40.
Get it here: https://cgcookiemarkets.com/all-products/anna-rig/
That’s it! Pick out a character generator and try it for yourself! If there are more character generators that I’ve failed to mention, please let me now and I will continually update this list!
Barely a day goes past without a new addon being released. It's awesome, but it's hard to keep up. So I've searched the community to find 12 of the best addons available today.
Last year we shared this list of free addons, but a year has passed and the Blender Market is booming. So in this post we'll look at both the best free and paid addons available..
1. Asset Flinger
What it does: Allows you to quickly and easily import your objects into other scenes.
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Probably one of the coolest free addons that speeds your workflow. It works by adding a new toolshelf in Blender which lets you access your assets and easily import them to your scene just with a click. It's still a work in progress, and has a lot of features to be added in the future, but it's pretty awesome as-is!
- Price: Free!
- Author: Manu Jarvinen
2. RetopoFlow
What it does: Makes retopologizing a mesh, much, much faster and easier.
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Probably the highest quality paid addon around. Created and supported by CGCookie, this addon is made for professionals. Hp 8715 scan software.
This addon exists because when you sculpt something, you're not thinking about structure of your mesh. So the resulting mesh is ugly. But in order to apply textures, animate it or just make a clean render, you need to convert it into a cleaner mesh. Normally this involves a painful click-by-click method, but this addon makes it much, much easier. It's a toolset designed just for retopologizing something, and it's awesome at it.
- Price: $71.25
- Author: CG Cookie
3. The Grove
What it does: Generates beautiful trees.
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This works much like the Sapling Addon that comes with Blender, however, it has more improved features and a simplified interface for easier growing of trees. It's still constrained to Blender's operators which means you can't move, scale or rotate the tree until after you've finished editing all the parameters (kind of annoying). But it does as advertised, and makes great trees. It's the best tool for making trees in Blender, than anything else currently available.
- Price: $119.80
- Author: Wybren van Keulen
4. EasyFX
What it does: Allows you to add compositing effects to your renders very quickly
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If you're sick and tired of making complicated node setups just to do basic things in the compositor (like add a vignette) then this addon is for you. It gives you a plethora of the most-commonly used effects and adjustments right inside the Image Editor. The very nifty UI exposes the internal parameters that would be rather tedious to work with if you fiddled with it yourself.
- Price: Free!
- Author: Nils Söderman
5. Mirage
Allows you to: Easily create complex terrains
This is the ANT Landscape addon on steroids! If you're an environment artist tasked with making a largescale landscape, this will save you hours. It shines in it's easy-to-understand interface with helpful tools like showing you the vertex count of a terrain you're about to make before hitting that 'Generate' button.
- Price: $25
- Author: Diego Gangl
6. Matalogue
What it does: Gives you quick access to all the materials and lights in your scene.
Making complex scenes, means dealing with large amounts of materials, lights and compositing setups. This tool by Greg Zaal alleviates all these frustrations for you by giving you access to all this in one tab in the Node Editor.
- Price: Free!
- Author: Greg Zaal
7. Asset Sketcher
Allows you to: Quickly distribute your objects by 'painting' them into your scene
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![Blender Blender](https://ksassets.timeincuk.net/wp/uploads/sites/54/2015/03/thumb-5.jpg)
Placing assets/objects manually in your scene can get pretty tiresome. But thankfully, this addon makes the job easier and more artist-friendly by utilizing a painting stroke approach to placing objects. It's as simple as clicking and dragging on your 'canvas,' (plus more tools). Awesome!
- Price: $29.95
- Author: Andreas Esau, Matthias Esau
8. Animation Nodes
Allows you to: Animate almost anything in Blender!
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This addon brings parametric modeling and animation to life! I've been wanting a feature much like Houdini where you can input node values and have them drive object properties. By default, this is possible through Blender via constraints and python coding--but this addon makes it intuitive and easy to use. It makes it easy to do mechanical rigs, motion design, and programming. It opens up a whole array of possibilities!
- Price: $0
- Author: Jacques Lucke
9. BakeTool
Hassle-free baking of textures for your scene
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Remember the baking tutorial we did a few years ago? This addon makes the process and workflow easier, and much more manageable. It basically bakes all the shading and light information on your objects so you don't have to keep re-rendering all the frames of your animation. It works best in ArchiViz and games, and works for both Cycles and the Blender Internal renderer. So cool!
- Price: $14.95
- Author: Cogumelo Softworks
10. BLAM Blender Camera Calibration Toolkit
Easily match the angle and perspective of a reference photo
','url':'https://vimeo.com/35153437','width':480,'height':270,'providerName':'Vimeo','thumbnailUrl':'https://i.vimeocdn.com/video/240000070_295x166.jpg','resolvedBy':'vimeo'}'>
This addon makes combining a render with a photograph a piece of cake. Using some clever programming, it accurately guesses the focal length and angle that the photo was taken with, so you can effortlessly put a render over the top :) We mentioned it one of our recent tutorials.
- Price: Free!
- Author: Per Gantelius
11. IK-Text Effects
Add special effects to any text in Blender
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If you've ever envied the effortlessly results from tools like Adobe After Effects, this addon is for you. It's a powerful toolset for animating text in Blender.
- Price: $14.99
- Author: IK3D
12. Gaffer - Light Manager
Take full control of all the lights in your scene
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This addon makes your lighting workflow a whole lot easier! Lighting in Blender can be fun, but it can also be frustrating when you have too many lights to manually adjust, and begin to lose track of which does what. Using this addon will alleviate those problems. It gives you control over your scene's lighting setup from a single panel, tweaking settings without needing to find and select each light one by one. A must have for big scenes!
Blender Software Reviews 2015 Hyundai
- Price: $17.95
- Author: Greg Zaal
Allows you to: Quickly and easily add realistic outdoor lighting to your scenes
n','url':'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMritqpU35g','width':854,'height':480,'providerName':'YouTube','thumbnailUrl':'https://i.ytimg.com/vi/wMritqpU35g/hqdefault.jpg','resolvedBy':'youtube'}'>
Disclaimer: We made this, so we're biased.
Outdoor lighting is more complex than just a sun lamp, so we created this addon to give you real world lighting inside Blender. It works by using real skies that were captured in HDR, and feeds it in Blender, providing both accurate lighting and reflections across the entire scene.
It comes with 80 HDR skies, that you can cycle through effortlessly:
','resolvedBy':'manual','title':','url':'}'>
You can even try the demo before you buy. I used it myself in this scene.
- Price: $97 - $197
- Author: Blender Guru
- Buy it: http://www.blenderguru.com/product/pro-lighting-skies/
- How to Use it: http://www.blenderguru.com/install-pro-lighting-skies/
Blender Software Reviews 2015 Acura
Do you have your favorite addons that aren’t on the list? Post in the comments below!
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