Blender Articles

When making several related models, especially those that share texture space, I find it much easier to work on them in a single Blender file. This add-on makes exporting multiple objects at once a single click for both glTF and FBX, and additional formats can be added quite easily if desired.

After creating a few add-ons for Blender, I wanted to automate the creation of new releases on GitHub. This is a pretty simple using GitHub Actions and Workflows to handle the creation of proper .zip files for new add-on versions.

Fixing bugs in Blender add-ons can be a bit painful without a proper debugger. Luckily, it's pretty easy using the debugpy package and this small Blender add-on that helps install and start it. Once it's running, Visual Studio Code or Visual Studio 2019 v16.6 or later can be used to debug your add-on!

While working on a batch glTF exporter for Blender, I wrote a "script.reload_addon" operator to make it easier to update a single add-on during its development. It's faster than the built-in "script.reload" operator, and it does not affect the state of other add-ons. Most importantly, it adds shortcut keys for both!

I've been working on a simplified Substance Painter-style PBR workflow in Blender for models that I'm exporting to Unity, and one of the things that quickly drove me crazy was it not saving images when saving the Blender file. Here's a simple Blender add-on to fix that!

Since Unity does not provide a way to disable its automatic import of files such as Blender's .blend files, I thought I'd try to find a workaround that would still allow me to keep these files inside a Unity project's Assets folder.

I've never really liked Unity's handling of Blender files, so after doing a bit of research, I decided to write a custom importer for glTF files. It actually turned out to be less work than I thought it would be, and being able to extend the importer with additional custom properties has been very useful!