am always on the lookout for some new tools that can improve and speed up my workflow in blender, some of those tools come as addons, some as procedural generators and others just updates to features that already existed, this week i discovered some exciting addons that may have went under your ladar, but can vastly improve your efficiency as a 3d artists.

Nsolve [discounted]

at number one we have Nsolve this is a totally new addon that has swept the blender community by storm, its an addon that brings new mesh editing tools and operators to blender, with this tool you get a new knife tool that lets you freely cut the mesh anywhere as you work on your model, instead of the limited knife tool that comes with blender, it also adds a new way to add edge loops that don’t stop when they bump into an Ngon, or an edge slide that you can use to slide edges from one face plain to another, something that was impossible to do before

Shoot-It

blender could have been one of the best motion graphics tool in the industry, but what it lucked is proper instancing, a proper way to add as many objects into a scene while animating, this is basically the foundation of motion graphics making thing showup and disappear, its what makes cinema4d one of a kind, thankfully, this new addon shoot it, gives us that exact behaviour, going one step ahead and adding passive rigid body, making motion graphic animations like this could be faked with a particle system or geometry nodes but you would not have any collisions or interactions between the different instances or particles, this is what makes this addon amazing.

Terrain Remix Brushes

the blender addon community continues to out do them selves, this time creating a new terrain generator addon, with a new way to add procedural features in a non destructive way, this addon uses several brushes including 127 peaks, 46 slopes and 40 valleys, these can be placed and blended into the landscape to make unique features, you also get an erosion system, multiple presets and a scatter system for adding vegetation and rocks.

Adjustable Mannequin V1.2 

every scene you make in blender will need a unique character and if you are making an animation probably multiple unique characters with a different body, different face, height and more, while making a single character can take days or weeks to make, using this customizable female basemesh will make it possible for you to start on your characters with a third of the work already done for you, these are customizable base meshes that you can easily customize without ever touching a single vertex.

Divine Cut | Smart Cloth Generator V2

when you are done designing your characters, this addon divine cut can help you dress up your characters, using there extensive tools that mark the body height, size and shape to fit a shirt, trouser or dress with just a few button presses.

Graphpilot | Animation Easing

mastering animation is about mastering timing, to do that you have to understand your animation curves, the problem is each character can have tens to hundreds of bones and each bone can have atleast 10 curves if animated, that you will have to manually adjust to get the right timing and feel for your animation, this new addon graphpilot, is a curve easing tool that helps you adjust your animation timing with ease . you can add different easing functions to your animations by simply selecting the curves you want and choosing a desired function in the addon panel.

Procedural Moss

detail is key when it comes to render quality, if you are working on a wet, outdoor environment, like a forest scene, medieval scene and more, moss is a great way to an extra touch to your renders, this procedural moss generator can add moss to a selected mesh based on the properties of the mesh, like cavity, normal direction and more.

Sim Fx Simulation Toolkit And Presets

setting up smoke and fire simulations can be time consuming, if you want a one click solution try this simfx simulation tool, its a collection of presets and settings that are going to help you create detailed simulations in no time, from explosions, shattered objects, fluids and more.

Agedfx 1.5

the beloved agedfx addon that turns a clean scene into a decaying old abandoned place in a few clicks has been updated to a new version, this new version now comes with animated bugs and insects to make you abandoned places look more alive,

G Trash

And if you want to go a step futher, you can add dust, trush, destroyed cars, objects and more, this collection is part of G trash, a trash instancing addon that comes with detailed trash models for groceries, metal junk, rocks, abandoned vehicles and more all detailed with 4k textures.

Back_Scapes (120 Assets City)

you might also need a city to go with this, back scapes is a collection of 3d scanned popular cities that include airports, beaches, cliffs, major factories, swamps, islands and major cities like toronto, tokyo, newyork, london, los angeles and more, so now you have a complete suit of tools and assets to turn a clean scene into a dusty old and decaying enviroment, from interiors, to streets to entire city blocks using agedfx, gtrash and backscapes.

Destroyed Building Generator

since we are on the topic of destroyed and abandoned, you may want to add in a few destroyed buildings into scene, this procedural destroyed building generator creates buildings with controllable level of damage, so that you can have buildings with minimum damage, completely destroyed and partially destroyed buildings in your setting.

The City Generator

if you want a modern clean city instead you can use the city generator, which can create a detailed city borough, this is based of geometry nodes which allows for full customization of desinty, building heights, size and more, you can also simulate traffic with well modeled cars, streets and more.

Moss + Damage Generator

if you are working on a stylized enviroment, this moss and damage generator can be a great addition to your scene to make your scene pop and stand out, you have control over the damage, moss and detail on every object in your scene.

Lollipop Characters

you can take days making characters from scratch or just use premade ones, with a working rig, materials and clothing, like this collection of lollipop characters, it will save you alot of time so that you can start working on telling your story in no time.

Renderboost Addon

if your render times are getting ridiculous, Cut animated render times by up to 80% with this Addon! the way this addon works is, instead of rendering each frame of your animation one by one, you can skip some frames and renderboost will utilize its frame interpolation techniques to generate additional frames from your existing image sequence, resulting in significant reductions in time spent rendering while still maintaining visual fidelity, this is how you go from a render taking 2hrs to render to 10 minutes with renderboost.

Physical Open Waters

speaking of optimizing your renders, if you plan to have an ocean in your scene, you may want to use the physical open waters instead of the ocean modifier because its produces more detail, better waves, better reflections and is optimized to have more subdivisions closer to the camera so that you can see more detail.

Citybuilder 3D

clean cities are fun to render, but lets face it most stories are set in a post apocalypse scene, think maze runner, divergent, i am a legend, this city builder addon comes with over 100 assets that can work in a post civilization scene that most stories are about.

City Asset Pack

if you want to have scenes at the street level, you may want to create your own street with different assets, buildings, shops, and more, this city pack comes with it all. these are modular, detailed and textured for close up shots.

Khaos: Ultimate Explosion/Destruction Add-On

if you are making a post civilization scene, you may want to show what happened to the world before the apocalyse, thats where addons like khaos ultimate explosion and destruction come in, you can create realistic looking explosions with fire, smoke and debris in a few clicks with this addon, just select which building to destroy and you are set.

Simply Stitch

when your scenes are well detailed, spend sometime to detail your characters to match the detail in your environment, this simply stitch addon, can help you add intricate detail to your character clothes, with wrinkles, stiches and more so that even at closeups your character still looks interesting.

Light Wrangler 2.0 

when you put in hours and hours to create a beautiful scene, its only fair to invest in tools that will bring out the detail and hardwork you added into your scene, light is the key to making a render great an addon like light wrangler will give you the best chance at getting the best lighting setup for your scene, it comes with different lights, from diffuse lights, light goobles, and more.

Grab-It

lastly in todays list of amazing addons, lets take a look at grab it, a tool for animators that help you get your characters to grab things, like cups, balls, sticks and more, while this looks like a trivial thing that should be easy to do without an addon, any experienced blender animator will tell you to just get the grab it addon instead of figgiting with parenting that will keep breaking over and over.