Add-ons

How to protect your add-on from downloading through aggregators

Nikita
2 Comments / Blender 3D / /

With the Blender popularity growing, the number of add-ons created for it by third-party developers is growing too. A lot of high-quality professional add-ons are written for Blender now. Over time, the number of add-ons is becoming more and more. And on this wave aggregators appeared – programs and services independently searching for add-ons and allowing Blender users to install add-ons quickly, many at once, and bypassing add-on distribution channels selected by their authors. What caused a negative reaction of add-on developers.

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Blender add-on: BIS v. 1.6.4.

Nikita

BIS (Blender Interplanety Storage) updated to v.1.6.4.

  • Two new modes were introduced to work separately, one for materials (easier to use) and the second – for node groups (for advanced shader making). In the “Material” mode, the entire material is stored and loaded. In the “NodeGroups” mode, everything works without changes, a separate node group is saved and loaded for the convenience of creating complex shaders.
  • In the “NodeGroup” mode uploaded node group adds to the current open node group instead of the node tree root as before.
  • The experimental mode can be enabled/disabled in the add-on preferences.

Blender autocomplete modules

Nikita

Nutti, the author of the “fake-bpy-modules” project, has made the installation of the Blender Python API autocomplete modules through the pip platform. Pip installation is faster and easier, but sometimes we just need to copy the autocomplete modules to our project but now they are not included in the Nutti’s GitHub.

Copies of the autocomplete modules for Blender versions 2.79 and 2.80 can be downloaded directly from here: https://github.com/Korchy/blender_autocomplete

 

How to get global vertex coordinates

Nikita

To get the vertex coordinates in the scene global coordinate system when the object’s scale was not applied, we need to multiply the local vertex coordinates by the object world transformation matrix:

Add-on preferences panel

Nikita
4 Comments / Blender 3D / /

When developing add-ons it is often necessary to give an ability to set a number of parameters that affect the whole add-on work to the user. For example, the user can specify a directory for saving/loading files, set some default variables or switch between add-on modes. Of course, the interface for setting such parameters can be placed in the add-on panel, but it is better to place it in a separate add-on preferences panel, which is located in the “Preferences” window under the add-on installation panel.

The main advantage of the add-on preferences is that they don’t reset when Blender restarts. The user does not need to configure the add-on preferences each time, it’s enough to set the necessary parameters once, personalizing the add-on for convenient work.

Let’s create an add-on and define a parameter, placing it in the add-on preferences panel.

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