Changes to Add-on and Themes Bundling (4.2 onwards)

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You say this with a lot of confidence- what sources do you have for this? What studios are you aware of that do this?

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That’s a bit of an abstraction of the actual facts.
CloudRig was a feature set of Rigify, as in the modular parts that make up the rigging (an IK Leg, a spine chain, etc) that are included by default with Rigify, the Studios CloudRig was their version of it.
Said feature set didn’t work without Rigify, it had to be a part of Blender for CloudRig to work.
It is only now, as of Blender 4.1, that for whatever reason, a feature set isn’t enough and the Studio has taken their feature set, along with the base Rigify code and basically created their own complete ‘personal Rigify’ addon.

So now we have another rigging addon (insert that cartoon about Standards+1).

Prior to this, the Blender Studio actually used another public addon, BlendRig, but they dropped that as well. I wonder how long CloudRig will last.

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I have to echo this. Where are you getting your data on how people use addons? These statements don’t reflect any experiences I’ve seen. Is there data/telemetry reflecting this?

Here are my experiences. I am a generalist indie modeler that works in a close community of generalist modelers. I consider myself a power user and have been involved in bug reporting/triaging, especially in the rendering/oneAPI space, and occasionally make code/addon contributions, so I have at least some experience going back some time using Blender, since 2.4x.

  • Rigify is a de-facto Blender feature, not a separate addon. The number of rigging tutorials that use and refer to Rigify eclipses every other rigging framework. CloudRig and Blenrig and other similar free addons are second tier at best–no offense to the developers–with respect to the amount of community attention they get.

  • Stock Rigify is THE most common rig I see in indie models, followed by fully custom rigs in a distant second place and then Auto-Rig Pro rigs in third place. Claiming that Rigify is not used in stock form is…incorrect.

  • Most beginner and intermediate level shading tutorials either mention Node Wrangler and tell you to use it, or guide you to enabling it. This is one of the first addons I enable when I set up a fresh Blender setup. I would argue this is even more useful than Rigify to have enabled by default, but I spend more time in the shader editor than rigging.

  • F2 is similarly very common in modeling and topology tutorials.

I can’t think of any other addons that are so ubiquitous to the point of being de-facto standards. I know no ill intent is happening here, but it almost feels comically like you’ve managed to pick everyone’s favorite 3 dogs to kick out of the blue. I urge you to look more closely at how these addons are used.

Put another way, I’ve never seen people disabling these plugins once enabled, and I don’t recall many people disliking the functionality they add. For the most part, they’re seamless.

If these addons are not up to blender code standards, that seems like an issue that should be solved rather than moving them to a place where they will eventually languish. Perhaps they were never part of blender core, but at this point, users are expecting them to be there.

These should really be core features.

Thanks for your consideration.

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82

And the issue might be the standards.

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Or, as one other addon developer pointed out, the code ‘solution’ maybe hacky, but that’s only because Blender doesn’t currently provide a non-hacky way to code it.

On a side note, I really hope the creators/current maintainers of Rigify/Node Wrangler, etc are aware or have been pointed to this thread to see just how beloved their little addons are.

UPDATE

So a question, is this a one off just for the Blender 4.2 release or come 4.3 or 5.0, etc will an updated ‘Legacy Bundle’ also be provided? And by updated I mean any changes/bug fixes, etc that have been applied to the addons between releases will be included as part of the Bundle for each new Blender release?

If the above is true, then instead of making a separate 4MB download file each time, why not just included it as part of the default Blender download like it is now?

Note: I had to add the text above to this post, since the system won’t let me post another reply (limit of 3 per thread for a new user).

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I updated the post with the following session. We will need to find a place for this on the download page, as well as the daily build. Meanwhile people should be able to test it already though:

Legacy Add-ons Bundle

As part of Blender 4.2 download, there will be an option to download a separate package with all the non-core add-ons before they were moved to the extensions platform.

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85

I don’t quite understand the need for that unwanted change? To alienate as many users as possible? To ruin everyone’s workflow yet again? To break addons compatibility because ‘essential modules’ that they rely on are not included anymore or were modified? What exactly is the goal?

Sorry for my frustration, but I was writing a huge bug report about numerous regression and bugs just to realize that almost everything is ‘broken’ because you broke it with this change. Now I have to do it all over again and sort things out (actual bugs vs. missing addons).

I find this situation quite ironic. Blender developers like to promote ‘non-destructive workflow’, yet for some reason they introduce disruptive changes in the most destructive way possible. Removing ‘auto smooth’ is a perfect examples of that. It ruined the workflow, broke almost every addon that relied on it and corrupted a ton of scenes by adding unnecessary double modifiers. Even months later users are still dealing with the aftermath.

Given some of the recent and upcoming changes, it seems like Blender development is moving in some weird direction.

«All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others» (c) George Orwell

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Gotta break eggs to make an omelette.

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But did anyone want an omelette? I’m still not on board the omelette train here, myself

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Checking how extensions work in the newer builds, it seems easy enough to get your favorite tools back.

Though there is the concern that with the formally bundled addons now having their maintenance outsourced to the community, there is the chance that tools people have relied on for at least 10 years or more may now end up going belly up with no alternative (especially considering the longtime historical pattern of updating Python without giving much thought to compatibility).

I do hope the BF has a plan to at least ensure the legacy addons stay functional and not resort to a “sucks to be you” mentality if there are no volunteers available (because that would be a good way to generate calls to fork Blender).

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Who was asking for an omelette?

I agree with JohnDow, in asking - what exactly is the goal? What chronic problem for the user is it meant to solve? Blenders third party development is extremely robust and strong, and adds so much power to the user base.

Without the extensions website, it all happened and has been working quite well… If it wasn’t working well, people wouldn’t regularly discuss how great it is in the blender add-on ecosystem.

This new system deprecates (to some degree) how existing things are installed, creates a new way that’s required to provide exactly the same feature (addon) to the user, and has now also removed things from the standard installation.

Yet for all of this, I’ve not determined what the actual user benefit is… other than an official blender website where you can download some of the same things that you could formally download anywhere else.

Feels like we’re in the realm of the Sunk Cost fallacy.

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Many people asked for a centralized extensions platform over the years, and plenty of people reacted positively to the blog post and forum topics. You may not agree, but you can not be genuinely asking this if you made an effort to look?

Many users have said that keeping add-ons updated to the latest version has been difficult. We’ve also very frequently had add-on authors ask about better ways to distribute their add-ons in a more convenient and discoverable way. This stuff has been requested for 15 years.

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It is not that difficult; certainly no more difficult that most any other production software that has a plugin API.

Some of the listings on blender market have had tens of thousands of sales. So distribution is not a large problem; if you have a product that people want, people are finding it…

But I think that’s a bit of an aside. I have indeed read the original blog postings on this and the comment threads. Some of the comments expressed concern, about security and paid addons other related matters…

I didn’t see anything in the blog post that mentioned removing features from the installation, and also burying the method to install legacy add-ons.

On a side note, I did notice a PR which was trying to make it more elegant for blender to understand the difference between an add-on and an extension, and correctly choose the destination install directory so that the user doesn’t have to read header code. So that was nice to see.

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Creating “centralized extensions platform” and removing essential addons from Blender are two entirely different things.

This also has nothing to do with removing essential addons from Blender.

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Hello John. Can you give me a list of essential (bundled with 4.1) add-ons that you want maintained & included in the future? You might answer all of them, but please be specific, so I can know which ones users rely on more

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I assumed the former was the omelette, and the latter the broken eggs, in the metaphor that people were using. I was replying to the suggestion that people didn’t ask for the omelette.

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Unreal Engine comes with almost a hundred ‘bundled’ addons, extensions, plugins, etc. It can work just fine without them, but… When Epic Games rolled out their “centralized extensions platform” (EGS), they did not break everything by removing all those plugins and they did not force users to redownload them again for no reason. In the words of that ‘metaphor’, they made an ‘omelette’ without breaking any eggs.

These are the ones that I have enabled at all times:

⦁ F2
⦁ Curve Tools
⦁ Extra Objects
⦁ Images as Planes
⦁ Import SVG
⦁ UV Layout
⦁ FBX fomat
⦁ glTF format
⦁ Copy Attributes Menu
⦁ Modifier Tools
⦁ Material Utilities
⦁ Node Presets
⦁ Node Wrangler
⦁ Bool Tool
⦁ Carver
⦁ Cell Fracture
⦁ Scatter Objects
⦁ Rigify
⦁ Tissue
⦁ Loop Tools
⦁ Edit Mesh Tools

PS. Some third-party addons also rely of these and some others and messing with the ‘structure’ breaks compatibility. For examples, one of the most popular free addons ‘Interactive Tools’ rely on F2 (Mesh_F2 module). It won’t work without it. Downloading ‘F2’ from “centralized extensions platform” won’t help because the ‘structure’ is broken and ‘IT’ says: ModuleNotFoundError: No module named ‘mesh_f2’.

PS. Updated the list. I missed two addons.

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UV Layout, FBX, glTF, Import SVG became part of core Blender, so they will still come pre-installed inside Blender and I believe all of them will be enabled by default.

Rest of the add-ons you listed will be still maintained and updated for future Blender versions. Some of them have active maintainers, and those who don’t I will take care of them for basic maintenance. Some Node Wrangler functionality I’m also porting in core Blender, and will probably take care of Bool Tool.

As for installing them, you can download bundle of every add-on in 4.1 and install them at once for every Blender release, or, what I will suggest you do, is you install ones you listed one-by-one from Extensions tab in preferences. Doing that has benefits:

  • You will get automatic updates every time we’ll fix a bug for it or add new feature. You won’t need to wait for next Blender release. Because extensions don’t follow release cycle they’ll receive updates whenever they’re needed.
  • When you switch to newer Blender version all of those extensions will be automatically transferred to new version when you load settings from previous versions on first startup.
  • You won’t have the list populated with add-ons that you don’t use and just take up the space.
  • When something is broken you can report it on website, or leave a review and maintainers will see it.

As for the bugs, yes there are bugs now, because extensions were just ported and uploaded on website. We’re testing them one-by-one and fixing what bugs we’ll find that were caused by migration. Remember that we’re still in alpha and things are expected to break, but they’ll be fully ready when stable 4.2 is out.

As for my personal side note, I advise you not use Node Presets and Scatter Object addons anymore. Functionality of the first is natively implemented in Blender as node group assets and there is no need for it anymore (if it’s simplicity you’re after there are other addons that make working with group assets easier), and object scatter is also not needed since custom modifiers can give you that functionality with better UI, performance and much more features. I hope once assets are part of extensions and we can upload scatter node groups there people will depend on those less.

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Yes. True. But was this really meant for the Plugins considered as “core”?
This addresses none of the concerns people have voiced in this thread, though.

As mentioned earlier - blenders Built-In Plugins were maybe not enabled by default but for most users those were considered core/default Blender - the whole updating problem was for all the Plugins that were installed separately and assumed to be out of sync with Blender Releases anyways.

Again: Plugins Bundled with Blender - considered core. Need to be there in ecosystems without Internet. Are considered to be compatible with all same Blender Versions. Are considered safe. Are assumed not to need a separate installer or download.

All other Plugins - Plattform with centralized way to search is super useful and updates are considered important. For ‘external’ plugins it was already assumed that it may need to be upgraded to remain compatible. It came from outside Blender and its release cycle.

If you, as in the core devs, never considered the bundled plugins to be core blender then I am sorry to tell you: This has changed. Users do consider these to be Core Blender, stable and available, as they are always bundled with Blender.

Extensions Plattform - very good and highly apreciated
Removing plugins considered core from there, possibly breaking compatibility with core functionality over the release cycle - Why?
As @JohnDow said - I don’t see why it was necessary to pull the core plugins from Blender for this.

Not to mention that none of this addresses the concerns about much more complicated installations in schools or strict work environments. And that this “one time download bundle” for 4.2 is not solving these concerns. At best it’s ironing over for one last release. An LTS one at that.
Please seriously reconsider if removing very often used Plugins like NodeWrangler, F2 and Rigify really, really, really is the right move and what users want, here.

Again: In a strict work envioronment ths can be seriously problematic considering download and installation rights for Plugins that were up until now considered core.
Blender is not only a “Home User” Program any more. These concerns need to be addressed seriously.

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None of the addons are “removed” in a sense that people are imagining here. As I said before, they’ll still be maintained. When there’s a new Blender release they’ll be updated to that. Bugs will be fixed if they spill (your reports can help that). Just the fact that we were not given “Core” at the front of title doesn’t mean they’ve been abandoned. No need to be scared of that.

They’re just moved outside main registration. And I don’t understand why bundled addons don’t solve the problems as you said? Yes it’s couple more clicks to install them alongside Blender when new version comes out, but is it really that much trouble for educational environments and studios, who are probably already double-checking and validating everything before install?

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