As an art director your responsibility is to overlook the visual aspects and coordinate the work of other artists on a project, you choose the style, look and general feel of the project, today lets look at 10 blender addons that will help you create a rich detailed render, from stylized anime look development, or creating ultra realistic animals, or simplifying how work is done using tools like motion trail and friendly pivot, these are just some of the very useful tools we are going to look at so lets dive in.

1 Fade | Toon Asset Pack

if you are making Npr renders like cartoons or anime, Fade is a collection of tools and shaders that makes toon rendering easy, stylized shaders are hard to make and when you finally make one, it is not a solution to every style you want, the fade addon comes with tools that can help you achieve any type of material, look and detail you can imagine.

2 Wolf Animation | Vfx Grace

if you are working on a movie or short film and want hyper realistic animals with animation, check out vfx grace, these guys produce the most detailed models anywhere on the internet. and most importantly they use blender so what you see is what you get, they use the software you use, the render engines you use, and animation tools you use, so there models are going to fit into your project pipeline smoothly.

they have a wide range of animated animals from birds, wolfs, chickens and more.

3 Motiontrail3D

animation is hard, animation without visual guide lines like motion trail is even harder, this addon is going to help you visually see how any changes in the animation are going to affect your animation.

take out the guess work in animation, with the help of motion trail, the feed back is in Realtime so you don’t have to rely on playback only to animate.

4 Uber Compositor

rendering without compositing is like selling cakes without icing, it just looks myee. but compositing is tricky and knowing what looks good takes alot of experience, its not just about knowing what each node does, you also need the eye for good contrast, color balance, correct colors on top of other effects that can be applied on a render to make it look great, having this eye for detail and what looks good takes a while, so while that happens you can try uber compositor which is an addon for compositing by artists who have the experience and knowledge to make great looking renders, it will save you alot of time and make your final renders look polished.

5 Autofocus Pro

have you ever tried adding depth of field to your renders, most of the time the render is going to be out of focus especially if the objects or the camera is moving, this is why the Auto focus addon is a very popular addon, with just one click the addon automatically focuses on the objects you want, keeping them in focus through out the animation or until you choose to focus on another object.

6 Friendly Pivot For Blender

Sometimes i wish using the pivot point was this friendly, and now my wish is granted thanks to this friendly pivot point. this addon gives you total control of the gizmo and helps you align you objects to the orientation of the gizmo.

7 Playblast

when working on animation you cant rely on viewport playback to see the timing of your animation, mostly because the viewport uses variable framerates and depending on what you are playing back the frame rate and drop or go up which can make the animation appear faster or slower, you can of course create a viewport render but that has its limitation too, every time you rerender the previous render is overwrited, this addon gives you alot of new functions including creating unlimited previews, different output formats adding timestamp and more.

8 Mask Tools

getting the look you want, is going to involve creating alot of different masks based on parameters like edge distance, teselation, face angle, normal direction and more, you need masks based on these parameters to create seamless blending between materials or create multiple layers of different materials.

the mask tools addon is a collection of masks and tools that are going to assist you in material blending, texture blender and painting.