Add-ons

The Add-ons section lets you manage secondary scripts, called “Add-ons” that extends Blender’s functionality. In this section you can search, install, enable and disable Add-ons.

Blender Preferences Add-ons section.

Finding Add-ons

Searching

Blender comes with some pre-installed Add-ons already, ready to be enabled. But you can also add your own, or any interesting ones you find on the web.

Supported Level

Blender’s add-ons are split into two groups depending on who writes/supports them:

• Official: Add-ons that are written by Blender developers.
• Community: Add-ons that are written by people in the Blender community.

Categories

Add-ons are divided into categories by what areas of Blender they affect.

Enabling and Disabling

Enable and disable an add-on by checking or unchecking the box to the right of the add-on you chose, as shown in the figure below.

Enabling an add-on.

The add-on functionality should be immediately available.

Note

Add-ons that activate or change multiple hotkeys have a special system of activation. or example, with the “UI: Pie Menu Official” add-on for each menu there’s a selection box to activate the menu and its hotkey.

Tip

If the Add-on does not activate when enabled, check the Console window for any errors that may have occurred.

3rd Party Add-ons

There are hundreds of add-ons that are not distributed with Blender and are developed by others. To add them to the list of other add-ons they must be installed into Blender.

To install these use the Install… button and use the File Browser to select the .zip or .py add-on file.

Now the add-on will be installed, however not automatically enabled. The search field will be set to the add-on’s name (to avoid having to look for it), Enable the add-on by checking the enable checkbox.

Refresh

Scans the Add-on Directory for new add-ons.

Tip

User-Defined Add-on Path

You can also create a personal directory containing new add-ons and configure your files path in the File Paths section of the Preferences. To create a personal script directory:

1. Create an empty directory in a location of your choice (e.g. my_scripts).
2. Add a subdirectory under my_scripts called addons (it must have this name for Blender to recognize it).
3. Open the File Paths section of the Preferences.
4. Set the Scripts file path to point to your script directory (e.g. my_scripts).
5. Save the preferences and restart Blender for it to recognize the new add-on location.

Now when you install add-ons you can select the Target Path when installing 3rd party scripts. Blender will copy newly installed add-ons under the directory selected in your Preferences.

Add-on Information

You can click the arrow at the left of the add-on box to see more information, such as its location, a description and a link to the documentation. Here you can also find a button to report a bug specific of this add-on.

Add-on Preferences

Some add-ons may have there own preferences which can be found in the Preferences section of the add-on information box.

Some add-ons use this section for example to enable/disable certain functions of the add-on. Sometimes these might even all default to off. So it is important to check if the add-on enabled has any particular preferences.