This is an addon for Blender 2.93+ that contains a collection of utilities that Catalyst has found useful when creating models, rigs, and animations in Blender - particularly for games.
Note from Nick Glenn: This addon effectively encompasses work I did in several smaller add ons for Blender over the past few years. Managing multiple, smaller projects started to become a real hassle to maintain rather than just collecting them all in a single large project. This means that many of my smaller addons may get merged into this one (or my Command Config addon) moving forward.
Download this repository and open up Blender, then navigate to your user preferences. Select the "Addons" tab and then click "Install Addon from File". When the file selection dialog pops up, select the .zip you downloaded.
If you wish to contribute to the development of this addon, I've found that the best workflow is to use Jacques Lucke's excellent (though no longer supported) "Blender Development" extension for VS Code. This in addition with the fake-bpy-module that can be installed via pip allows a much easier and faster development environment than any of the alternatives I've seen.
If you're working on Windows, be aware that you may have issues with folder permissions when attempting to use the "Build and Start" feature from the "Blender Development" extension. Either change Blender to use your custom installation of
pythonor edit the file permissions for Blender's application folder and subfolders to get around these issues.
Menu: Select
A variety of new selection operators are now available. These selection operators are available when dealing with armatures in either the "Edit Armature" or "Pose" modes.
Note: Many of these selection operators support alternate modes when activated with alt, shift, or control held. The common pattern used for this "power-user" functionality is as follows...
- Shift: Expands the current selection with the selection from the operator.
- Alt: Inverts the selection of the operator.
- Ctrl: Performs a deselect instead of a selection.
Select Deform Bones: Selects all bones that are currently marked as deform bones. Select Bones with Constraints: Selects all bones that have at least 1 bone constraint in pose mode. Select Orphan Bones: Selects all bones that have no parent assigned. This will often result in the selection of root bones. Select Unreferenced Bones: Selects all bones aren't referenced by any other bones. This means all bones that aren't a parent of another bone and that have no bone constraints (from within the same rig) targeting them. This does not currently do a reference check for object constraints or bone constraints from other armatures! Select Root Deform Bones: Selects all root bones (bones with no parents) that are set to deform the mesh.
Menu: Object / Convert To / Game Ready Rig
This feature is intended to assist with conversions of third-party armatures that are not set up correctly for game engines. It does this by creating a duplicate of all deformation bones in the armature (and assigning them to layer 32). Then it prefixes the source bone's name with TGT_ (for target) and adds a "Copy Transforms" bone constraint on each deformation bone that points to the related TGT_ bone.
Now you can solve engine bone hierarchy issues on the deformation bones while retaining the rig's animations and fuctionality.
This operation requires that layer 32 be empty and will provide a non-fatal warning if you have more than 1 root bone in the armature. This is important as some game engines (like Unreal) won't accept armatures that have more than 1 root bone.
This feature set provides a set of utilties for quickly assigning vertex colors to the selected faces of mesh. This is done for the purpose of baking ID maps using programs like Substance Painter, Houdini, or even Blender.
When editing a mesh, you can select one or more faces and use the "ID Mapper" submenu found within the "Mesh Context Menu" (the right click menu by default). You can use the "New Group" option to create a new ID group with the given name and a random color. Once a group has been added, it will appear in the "ID Mapper" submenu where "New Group" could be found before, allowing you to assign more faces to it.
Additionally, if you want to manage your ID groups in a similar way to something like "Vertex Groups", you can find the "ID Map Groups" section underneath the "Object Data Properties" panel.
Menu: Mesh / Split / Copy + Separate
Performs a duplication of the current selection and separates it into its own mesh. This is functionally similar to pressing Shift + D followed by P and choosing "selection". Can be easily added to quick favorites or assigned to a hotkey (like Shift + Ctrl + P) to streamline this common operation.
Adds a Cycles modifier to the top of stack of multiple selected channels, regardless if there are other modifiers.
Generates random noise using pseudo random number generation in conjunction with the noise F-Curve Modifier.
Adds a noise modifier to the chosen channels on all selected bones that is configured to create a small burst of "jitter". This is useful if you want to add a sharp, quick shake to an object non-destructively.
Copies the settings from the active channel's noise modifiers and adds it as a new modifier to other selected channels.
Removes all F-Curve modifiers from the selected channels.
Removes all vertex groups for the active, selected mesh that have no vertices weighted to them. Useful for cleaning up meshes that were parented to armatures, but have many vertex groups (per bone) that have nothing assigned to them.