Smoothies are still a totally genius way to use your blender even if it is cliche, especially when you take advantage of a super-high powered blender’s ability to puree everything (INCLUDING GREENS if you dare) into a creamy, luscious soft-serve texture. Keep in mind that this version of Blender may crash, so don’t use it for important work. The installation procedure of an experimental version of Blender is different: you download a ZIP-file, which you then have to unzip. You can then navigate to the unzipped folder and click on the “Blender.exe” executable file, which will start Blender.

Barely a day goes past without a new addon being released. It's awesome, but it's hard to keep up. So I've searched the community to find 12 of the best addons available today.

Last year we shared this list of free addons, but a year has passed and the Blender Market is booming. So in this post we'll look at both the best free and paid addons available...

1. Asset Flinger

What it does: Allows you to quickly and easily import your objects into other scenes.

Probably one of the coolest free addons that speeds your workflow. It works by adding a new toolshelf in Blender which lets you access your assets and easily import them to your scene just with a click. It's still a work in progress, and has a lot of features to be added in the future, but it's pretty awesome as-is!

• Price: Free!
• Author: Manu Jarvinen

2. RetopoFlow

What it does: Makes retopologizing a mesh, much, much faster and easier.

Probably the highest quality paid addon around. Created and supported by CGCookie, this addon is made for professionals.

This addon exists because when you sculpt something, you're not thinking about structure of your mesh. So the resulting mesh is ugly. But in order to apply textures, animate it or just make a clean render, you need to convert it into a cleaner mesh. Normally this involves a painful click-by-click method, but this addon makes it much, much easier. It's a toolset designed just for retopologizing something, and it's awesome at it.

• Price: $71.25
• Author: CG Cookie

3. The Grove

What it does: Generates beautiful trees.

This works much like the Sapling Addon that comes with Blender, however, it has more improved features and a simplified interface for easier growing of trees. It's still constrained to Blender's operators which means you can't move, scale or rotate the tree until after you've finished editing all the parameters (kind of annoying). But it does as advertised, and makes great trees. It's the best tool for making trees in Blender, than anything else currently available.

• Price: $119.80
• Author: Wybren van Keulen

4. EasyFX

What it does: Allows you to add compositing effects to your renders very quickly

If you're sick and tired of making complicated node setups just to do basic things in the compositor (like add a vignette) then this addon is for you. It gives you a plethora of the most-commonly used effects and adjustments right inside the Image Editor. The very nifty UI exposes the internal parameters that would be rather tedious to work with if you fiddled with it yourself.

• Price: Free!
• Author: Nils Söderman

5. Mirage

Allows you to: Easily create complex terrains

This is the ANT Landscape addon on steroids! If you're an environment artist tasked with making a largescale landscape, this will save you hours. It shines in it's easy-to-understand interface with helpful tools like showing you the vertex count of a terrain you're about to make before hitting that 'Generate' button.

• Price: $25
• Author: Diego Gangl

6. Matalogue

What it does: Gives you quick access to all the materials and lights in your scene.

Making complex scenes, means dealing with large amounts of materials, lights and compositing setups. This tool by Greg Zaal alleviates all these frustrations for you by giving you access to all this in one tab in the Node Editor.

• Price: Free!
• Author: Greg Zaal

7. Asset Sketcher

Allows you to: Quickly distribute your objects by 'painting' them into your scene

Placing assets/objects manually in your scene can get pretty tiresome. But thankfully, this addon makes the job easier and more artist-friendly by utilizing a painting stroke approach to placing objects. It's as simple as clicking and dragging on your 'canvas,' (plus more tools). Awesome!

• Price: $29.95
• Author: Andreas Esau, Matthias Esau

8. Animation Nodes

Allows you to: Animate almost anything in Blender!

This addon brings parametric modeling and animation to life! I've been wanting a feature much like Houdini where you can input node values and have them drive object properties. By default, this is possible through Blender via constraints and python coding--but this addon makes it intuitive and easy to use. It makes it easy to do mechanical rigs, motion design, and programming. It opens up a whole array of possibilities!

• Price: $0
• Author: Jacques Lucke

9. BakeTool

Hassle-free baking of textures for your scene

Remember the baking tutorial we did a few years ago? This addon makes the process and workflow easier, and much more manageable. It basically bakes all the shading and light information on your objects so you don't have to keep re-rendering all the frames of your animation. It works best in ArchiViz and games, and works for both Cycles and the Blender Internal renderer. So cool!

• Price: $14.95
• Author: Cogumelo Softworks

10. BLAM Blender Camera Calibration Toolkit

Easily match the angle and perspective of a reference photo

This addon makes combining a render with a photograph a piece of cake. Using some clever programming, it accurately guesses the focal length and angle that the photo was taken with, so you can effortlessly put a render over the top :) We mentioned it one of our recent tutorials.

Blender Use Gpu

• Price: Free!
• Author: Per Gantelius

11. IK-Text Effects

Add special effects to any text in Blender

If you've ever envied the effortlessly results from tools like Adobe After Effects, this addon is for you. It's a powerful toolset for animating text in Blender.

• Price: $14.99
• Author: IK3D

12. Gaffer - Light Manager

Take full control of all the lights in your scene

This addon makes your lighting workflow a whole lot easier! Lighting in Blender can be fun, but it can also be frustrating when you have too many lights to manually adjust, and begin to lose track of which does what. Using this addon will alleviate those problems. It gives you control over your scene's lighting setup from a single panel, tweaking settings without needing to find and select each light one by one. A must have for big scenes!

• Price: $17.95
• Author: Greg Zaal

Allows you to: Quickly and easily add realistic outdoor lighting to your scenes

Disclaimer: We made this, so we're biased.

Outdoor lighting is more complex than just a sun lamp, so we created this addon to give you real world lighting inside Blender. It works by using real skies that were captured in HDR, and feeds it in Blender, providing both accurate lighting and reflections across the entire scene.

It comes with 80 HDR skies, that you can cycle through effortlessly:

You can even try the demo before you buy. I used it myself in this scene.

• Price: $97 - $197
• Author: Blender Guru
• Buy it: http://www.blenderguru.com/product/pro-lighting-skies/
• How to Use it: http://www.blenderguru.com/install-pro-lighting-skies/

Do you have your favorite addons that aren’t on the list? Post in the comments below!

Home > Stichting Blender Foundation
File extension list filtered by software name

Blender

Found 47 file extension associations related to Blender and 18 file formats developed specifically for use with Blender.

Blender User Perspective

Platform, operating system:Microsoft Windows

Go to: Blender description

Developer:Stichting Blender Foundation

Blender Foundation software list & details

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Blender

Developer / company:Blender Foundation

Blender is a free 3D graphics program, which is used for modelling, UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging, water and smoke simulations, skinning, animating, rendering, particle and other simulations, non-linear editing, compositing, and creating interactive 3D applications, including video games, animated film, or visual effects.
The application is released as free software under the GNU General Public License, Blender is available for a number of operating systems, including Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

Features of Blender:

• Photorealistic Rendering
• Fast Modeling
• Fast Rigging
• Realistic Materials
• Animation toolset
• Sculpting
• Fast UV Unwrapping
• Full Compositor
• Amazing Simulations
• Game Creation
• Camera and Object tracking
• Library of Extensions
• Video Editing
• Flexible Interface

Blender Uses

Blender icon

Blender icon
size: 128px x 128px (.png with transparency)

Search converter

Sample related conversions

Blender works with the following file extensions:

Note: You can click on any file extension link from the list below, to view its detailed information. The list of extensions used or otherwise associated with the application may not be complete, because many common file extensions on our website, such as jpg (pictures) or txt (text files), can be opened by a large number of applications, or are too general file format. However most, if not all directly associated file extensions should be listed with its appropriate program. Although its likely, that some file extensions may be missing from the list of associated file extensions with the application, yet they can be opened, be part of, or otherwise be associated with the program.

Blender default file extension associations

Blender User Preferences

.blend.blend1.blend2.bmpw.bphys.bpkey.bpwx.c3d.glb.gltf.jgwx.off.pgwx.ply.pngw.tfwx.tifw.wrl

Common file extensions used by Blender

Pastry Blender Use

.3ds.dxf.eps.kmz.obj.svg.u3d

Other file extensions associated with Blender

.ac.ase.bvh.dae.exr.flt.gz.jp2.lwo.md2.md5anim.md5camera.md5mesh.mdd.mot.ogex.ptx.slp.txt.x.x3d.xcf

Immersion Blender Use

Comparison table of actions that Blender can perform with each of its associated file type ^beta

Blender Use Pose Brush

This table might not contain all possible associated or supported file types or may contain incorrect data.
If you need more information please contact the developers of Blender (Stichting Blender Foundation), or check out their product website.