Current latest version: 1.5

Verified to work with Blender 4.4

This is an addon for Blender that can be used when you want to export a large quantity of STL files with different variations from one another. Let's say you've built a 3D model of a character. You have a group of different types of clothes, another group of different kinds of weapons, another group of different kind of backpacks etc etc. If you want to export every single possible combination of said objects, it can be very time consuming to do it manually. That's where this addon comes in.

Minimum price is €9. That means if you like my work and you wish to donate, you can enter a custom value above €9.

Here is a short video tutorial:

(This video tutorial was made for v1.0 so it is a bit outdated. Please refer to the instructions below for more up to date instructions, or watch the video guide made by Artisans of Vaul)

Instructions

Manual setup

Manual setup means you manually create all your categories and their variants. First create a category (1). In this example case it will be a "Hats"-category. Then create variants for this category (2), as many that are needed. Each variant needs a name and an input. The name can be anything you want, something to help you remember what object it is. But the input has to correspond to something in your Blender project. Either the name of an object (a Mesh) or the name of a Collection. You can also as an input enter a list of object (Meshes), separated with semicolon, like this: "Object1;Object2;Object3" etc etc.

Auto-generated setup (recommended)

This is the recommended way. Instead of manually creating all of your categories and their variants, you can automatically generate them.

For this feature to work, your project needs to be organised in the following structure:

You have a Root-collection, in this example named "All". In this collection, you then have a collection for each category, in this example; "Hats", "Glasses" and "Facial hair". In each category collection, you can have objects (meshes) or collections (containing several objects) for each variant.

In the example above, if I just click the Auto-generate button I will immediately get this configuration:

Much faster then setting it up manually.

Mandatory objects

Maybe you will have objects that are mandatory, meaning they will not vary but rather be a part of every combination. In this example project it would be the objects eyes and face, that make up the head. In this example I have conveniently added them to a separate collection, called mandatory. Before moving forward I should define this collection int the Mandatory field in the addon UI

Generate Combinations

When you're done defining your mandatory objects, and all of your categories/variants, you can now generate all of the combinations. You can either export them directly to STL (by clicking the "Export to STL" button), in which case they will be put in the output folder that you can define yourself. Or you can generate them in file, meaning they will become separate objects that are created right in your Blender project. In this example case it would look like this:

The amount of combinations will be:

(variants for category1) * (variants for category2) * (variants for category3) etc etc etc

So in this case it is 3*2*2 = 12 combinations

But let's say I add another category, piercings or something, and I have 3 different types of piercings, then the amount of combinations is suddently 3*2*2*3 = 36 combinations. The more combinations the more of a time-save this addon is.