[Teach me Senpai] Serpens is great! [Blender Addon] (Patreon)

Hey Gearheads!

This underpriced addon at $15 is a great tool for speeding up your Blender workflow.

Serpens helps you build addons without python programming knowledge and has a great support community on discord.

Here are a few things from the current version of my addon that I've built for my own workflow.  I plan on releasing a lot of these features in one form or another, but the order will likely depend on interest.  If you see something helpful for your current workflow let me know and I'll release those first.  This offer is open to everyone, not just patreons.

These are my porting buttons.  If you're into porting / converting any models from one format to another, this is pretty handy to have.  I tried using the quick shortcut button to add these to the menu, but that always bugged out for me, deleting my quick favs when I reset blender.  This has worked out much better and saves me from digging through menus to import a file.  This is a great replacement for the CATs plugin, since I was just using the mmd panel for importing, so I'll be adding the global CAT importer to this as well or at least buttons for XNA and MMD.

As part of the porting process files get lost and extra stuff is sorta deleted, so these help me with clean up.

This is the real "meat and potatoes" of the addon.  This focuses on my major workflows of animation and scene preparation.  There are certain things I do every time I convert a scene to VR and now instead of spending 5 - 10 minutes going through all the settings that need to be changed, I can do it in one click.  I also added some stuff for going between engines, desktop render settings, camera controls, etc.  That way I don't have to stay on a particular window select or swap back and forth when the main stuff I need is in one place.  When I building out a scene I also need content for it, so I have website quick buttons at the bottom.  That way if I need to grab a quick prop or double check the notes on a character I want to use, I can just click the shortcut from within Blender.

This one is Amazing for animation.  Animation (especially lewd ones) generally start with 2 poses, start and end or both extremes of the movement.  From there you can tweak the graph curve for anticipation and follow through to emphasize the pacing of the movement and/or add additional keyframes, but pretty much everyone starts animation with 3 keyframes.  This button allows me to do that much quicker.  I can pose the character, set the length of the loop based on the fps of the animation and click the button.  The button will add a keyframe to the current one selected, the last one for the length and then move to the middle keyframe between them so the opposite extreme pose can be done.  Basically, this one little button saves me about 1-2 minutes per bone used for the animation, which is typically 8-20+ bones, and that adds up.  I also have a similar setup for adding shape keys.  So a blink is cut down by 50-80% the time as well.

If you work in cycles, you need a denoising node in the compositor.  It's not the only way, but it yields the best results for me and is recommended by many of the high-level blender youtubers.  So this one button, adds and connects the denoising node.

The first couple of buttons, just save a tiny bit of time as they are the same as the options found in the render dropdown menu.  The other two though, make sure all the file format options are the best for rendering a png image or an mp4 video.

Adobe doesn't like giant VR image files when it comes to video sequencing, so I use Blender.  These shortcut quickies make it that much easier for rendering image sequences into a video.  I use 3-5 of these buttons with every render, cutting down the time from opening blender to starting the render by at least 60%.

A lot of these are a combination of quality of life and personal workflows and individually may only appear to save a tiny bit of time, but it allows me to focus on the important part and get the annoying parts out of the way.  More time on content and less time hunting down buttons/options/features I use constantly and this is just scratching the surface.  There's so much you can do with Serpens, it would cost more not to have it.