

Go to the end of the article to get our solution to download all the must-haves at once. In fact all of them are provided to our 2D animators in all our projects. So here is a list of add-ons that we found very useful and important to have. Which is fine, but will make the add-on impossible to include in Blender.

That allows add-ons creators to experiment with UI ideas, sometimes doing dirty or unsupported workarounds. Add-ons are a good way to do that, as they are completely optional to use. There are specific UI rules, and sometimes we need to do something different and be able to ignore the UI guidelines.

New code included in Blender must be bulletproof, so decisions can take longer, and add-ons creators might not have the time for that. Stability is not something easy to achieve in fact, and add-ons created for a specific use case may not work properly in other cases, or mixed with other add-ons. Stability is part of it of course, but so are the User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI). These rules were designed to offer a consistent experience to all Blender users. You may not be aware, but the process to include features in Blender needs to follow some rules. There are many reasons why these add-ons aren’t included in Blender, even though they are usually free and open source. So users and studios created add-ons to tackle some of these questions. For example make an action quicker, or bend the tool to specific studio cases, or try out some experimental feature. But the workflow can always be improved or adapted to some specific situations. Grease pencil is packed with everything you need to make your own 2D animation.

This article exists in French / Cet article existe en français So why use add-ons? We will also explain why they are not included in blender, and offer you an option to install and update them all easily. In this article we will list the ones we use, what they are good for and where to grab them. It’s already a wonderful tool, but it can be greatly improved with some add-ons. When you download Blender, Grease Pencil is included. Grease Pencil is this great module for 2D animation within the open source 3D application Blender.
