// PROJECT 03 DROPLETS BLENDER ADDON
Quick Droplets Blender Addon
Procedural Droplets addon for Blender
// FEATURES SUMMARY
One-click creation of geometry node based droplets with surface area aware limit
Calculates surface area (m²) of the selected mesh upon creation with a hard limit with respect for the default settings values.
Simple and intuitive N-panel for making quick changes
Most necessary settings lives in the panel and are categorized for easier access. Choose between quality presets and materials.
Automatic material creation
Get started quick and easy without spending time creating materials. You can also choose from existing materials in your scene from a dropdown.
Create multiple sets of droplets while staying organized
With the smart sorting and naming of collections, materials and objects you can create multiple sets while staying organzied. The name will be handled automatically and the settings of each set will stay unique.
Safely delete droplets and purge orphan data from your scene
Avoid unused data and leftovers by using the addon's built-in "Delete and purge". Deletion through the panel makes sure to leave no orphan data. It iterates through the addon's created data and purges it all together.
// OVERVIEW SUMMARY
A simple and straightforward Droplets generator addon for Blender.
After having created simpler personal addons and scripts using the Blender Python API before, I wanted to combine my interest for details and explore the geometry node system through scripting. This turned out to be a pretty ambitious project for me that I spent quite some time on.
My goal was to create something that not only does the work, but also giving it a go at keeping the project professional and well structured. I started with a single file script while exploring and testing things out, and later on split that into multiple files to keep it better organized.
The challenges I came across during this time were quite many and overwhelming, but I learned a lot from it. After I had almost finished a "first version", I found out the hard way that I had not set any limitation or hard cap on how big the surfaces could be for the generation. This resulted in a scene with 79,000,000 vertices and some long waiting time (based on the default addon's settings).
From that time on I spent most of the time focusing on making the addon failsafe and dedicated for "real sized" small objects and products instead of scaling. This taught me how to calculate face areas and to set limits.
// RESULT RETROSPECTIVE
The addon is currently at the stage where it is stable and does the work well for simpler tasks.
There are however a bunch of extra features I would like to add in the future.
Some ideas and thoughts:
- Shapes based on different custom meshes instead of spheres, for more variety and realistic result.
- Option to animate
- Water streaks
- Collision awareness
The addon can be found on my Github:
https://github.com/VLTNXV/Quick-Droplets
// GALLERY SCREENSHOTS
