most generators and addons should be standard features in blender, but most of them do not meet the high standards and code quality required by the blender development team.

They are not held to the same standard as in built tools and most of them are experimental and do not follow most industry standards. while this might sound like a limitation its also what makes them superior to built in blender modeling tools. because they can be anything and as long as they produce exactly what they say they do, no one really cares how they are doing it behind the scene.

Procedural Transportation

like this procedural transportation generator, this is not how cgi traffic would be generated in a hollywood movie, most studios would make a more sophisticated system from ground up, that follows traffic rules, sees pedestrians and more but why complicate things when simple is enough, you just draw a line and cars will appear, there several cars of different models and types and the traffic behavior is convincing enough for most projects.

True-Terrain

another example is true-terrain, in a hollywood movie, Movie studios would use something like houdini and build an intricate system, that understands weather patterns, the latitude and longitude and how they would lead to erosion, the soil composition how each layer would work and affect the sorounding vegetation and more, but again who needs all that if all you need is a good looking environment with snow caped mountains, may be trees, and a system that allows you to easily edit and make beautiful landscapes. that is what true terrain is, its fast and produces amazing looking landscapes.

Real Damage – Realistic Internal Damage

and yet another example is the real damage addon, if hollywood made this addon it would take years and be over 10gb, just take sometime and watch houdini webners on youtube, look at the process they goto to make generators for games and movies, they go out in the real world for more than a month study the material, take an engineering course, get a masters in chemistry just to generate damaged concrete, but we have no time for that, this real damage generator may not consider the chemical composition or stress forces in a concrete but when it comes to adding internal realistic damage to your models it does a great job.

Pivot Transform 3 + Gizmo 3D Cursor

what i love about addons and generators is that they dont have to worry about industry scrutiny, hollywood people complain about how blender tools don’t meet their standard and they need this, need that, but we are artists we only care about the end product and any tool that helps us make that easier to achieve is god sent in our eyes, the pivot transform is that sort of tool that just works and improves how you model in blender.

You can align it to the normals of the desired polygon, rotate and move it, or place it in the center of the object and the 3d cursor.

Grassblade – Addon For Grass

speaking of making art easier to make, a collection of 500 assets comes in handy, especially if that collection is a set of grass, bushes, weeds, plants, trees, and more. things you always need when making any type of render. this grassblade is a large collection of nature assets and it keeps growing with new assets being added.

Pro Align Tools

a new feature can take atleast a year to be added in blender, thats why addons and generators are better they dont have to be coded to perfection like blender inbuilt tools, they just have to improve blender, like this pro align tools, i have not dug into the code to see if its rewritten to perfection but i know it works perfect for aligning objects in any way i want.

Anytree – Trees With Any Shape

blender inbuilt tools are exactly that, tools but sometimes you need more than that, you need a starting point and that is what generators and addons are, a starting point, take an example of this Any tree generator, its a tool but its also a set of starting points for generating any type of tree that can be animated and form any shape, to get to this stage using builtin tools you would need a few days and alot of experience with geometrynodes and modeling, here you just need the anytree addon.

Procedural Building Generator 2

another great starting point is the procedural building generator, its not just a generic building collection, its a starting point for generating buildings, you just drag the generator onto a mesh and that mesh turns into a building, and you have a number of designs to choose from.

Auto-Building

and the beauty of these generators is that there is always more, like this auto-building, its also a building generator that has different templates and styles, it also has stylized designs if you are working on non photo realistic renders.

Explosion Generator

builtin blender tools will always be limited to tools that are multipurpose, they can be used for many things so that limits how creative developers can be with the kind of tools they make, but in the addon and generator community that limitation is not there, so developers can make any tools that are great at one specific thing like this explosion generator. it creates stylized realtime explosions with just a drag of a mouse

Knitting Generator Addon 

or this knitting generator, if you are weighting for a knitting tool in blender, dont hold your breath, a tool like this is only possible because of the generator and addon community.

Fluent : Materializer – Material Tool Suite

tools a side libraries like this fluent library will never be shipped with blender by default, while they are unimaginably important, they require alot of work and its expected that you will create your own materials, but materials take alot of time thats why libraries like fluent materializer are important.

Flip Fluids

sometimes a tool may already come installed in blender but the addon community thinks they can make a better one, like the flip fluids addon, which comes with more options and a better fluid simulation system than the builting tools, its much easier to use and you get more forces and control than the built in manta flow.

Geo-Scatter 5.4

or Geo scatter which is could be thought of as a better particle system than the blender built in system for scattering and instancing objects, and another plus is that it comes with its own library of plants, rocks to scatter.

Memsaver

sometimes addons are the only way to achieve something, for example there are no dedicated optimization tools that come preinstalled in blender, this is why memsaver exists, to bridge that gap, it cuts the rendering time in half by optimizing your textures to produce fast renders while maintaining the quality.

Light gobos

some features that are added to blender by addons would be features that we would never see in blender if it wasn’t for the addon community, like the light gobos collection, a collection of shadow caster which are animated to add more detail and contrast in your renders.