What scripts/plugins have you bought?

PolyHertz

Lately I've been spending a lot of time trying to improve my scripting and coding skills, and as a consequence I've been wondering if it's worth writing ones with the express purpose of eventually selling them. But, I have no idea how common it is to buy workflow enhancing scripts/plugins for apps like 3DSMax/Maya/Modo/Blender/etc. , whether they be simple and cheap or monolithic and expensive.

So in order to get an idea what artist buying habits are like, I wanted to ask here; what scripts/plugins have you bought? No matter if they cost you $1 or $1000 I'd like to know. And if anyone who already sell scripts/plugins would like to share how its worked out for them, that would be great too.

Brian "Panda" Choi

I have paid up to $45 for boolean modeling scripts.  MOP Boolean has been the most expensive for me in recent memory.

I balk at that $500 plugin for Maya that does high poly modeling.

I feel they are incredibly necessary for triple A work.

JordanN

$295 for iRay 3DS Max.

I needed a ray tracer that could do photorealism while being very artist friendly. 

huffer

Main ones from polytools3d - polyunwrapper and AUVN, could not work without them in 3dsmax; and small stuff from gumroad like scripts for weighted normals. I would pay right now if I'd find a one-click exporter to UE4 that works with groups or hierarchy.

ysalex

I buy them when I find something that solves a problem.

The two best I bought were GMH2 for hair, and one (I think) called primgen that does some cool stuff with curve extrusions.

i would have gladly paid for just about any tool in the maya bonus tool kit, especially the curve to ribbon/tube mesh.

sacboi

A forthcoming purchase to learn more about lighting and in turn hopefully progress beyond the mundane.

https://blendermarket.com/products/pro-lighting-studio

PolyHertz

Thanks guys!

Unfortunately with this being moved into 'Career & Education' it probably wont get many more responses. This is the kind of thing where you need to poll a lot of people to get a real answer. Guess I shouldn't have said why I was asking such a question -_-

Eric Chadwick

Moved to General, and Frontpaged (it's a good cause, beyond your own personal r&d, and besides you're a long-time member).

Poll away!

throttlekitty

Brian "Panda" Choi said:

I have paid up to $45 for boolean modeling scripts.  MOP Boolean has been the most expensive for me in recent memory.

I balk at that $500 plugin for Maya that does high poly modeling.

I feel they are incredibly necessary for triple A work.

Hard Mesh is cheaper now (i think $100 with an option to pay for "support"), but too expensive still, IMO. It's got a lot of potential, but the trim meshes can often be much less than desirable and it's a throwback to the older days of Maya's stability with booleans. I did buy it but it's mostly collecting dust. The boolean manager portion is amazeballs though!


Back on topic, I don't mind shelling out for a script/plugin if I think it's worth using. It's easy to fall into a "Use all the scripts!" mentality, so I pay close attention when people pitch their work. "Can I use this daily? monthly? Where does it fit in my workflow, UI and mentality?" Some Maya scripters tend to go overboard with making panels that have too many fluffer functions to make them look bigger stuffed into some messy pack of buttons. Those are typically a turnoff unless something in their mix really catches my eye and looks like something I can pull off into a marking menu of my own. I'd rather have a single tool that does what it does very well.

For maya stuff that I've bought and use, Quick pipe, some of ADN Tools, Nightshade UV, Shellmod, KTools all come to mind.

Niknesh

It depends if you're doing only game or also VFX work. I'm guessing that VFX people would also buy shading scripts or bridges between some production programs.

Here's some of the stuff that I have used and I'm still using in Maya.

I can't recommend Fansub enough, his scripts are really (really!) useful. Quick Pipe as a prime example. Then there's also Waywo, but I never used Crease+. Finally, old but gold Ktools. 
I had Nightshade UV, but that got integrated into Maya 2017 onward.

In addition to that, Bonus Tools have awesome things in them and I highly recommend them because they are also free. 

I spent around 50$ for scripts, possibly a bit more. 

On a side note, this just being my personal  point of view, you don't really need to spend insane amounts of money on scripts and you don't need that many of them. I'd rather save money and buy Zbrush instead of Hard Mesh. I'm not saying that Hard Mesh isn't awesome, because quite frankly it is, but again, my personal point of view. I did booleans with and without scripts in Maya and realized that they work almost the same in all mainstream programs. You just need to get the hang of them.
Also, you definitely should learn what to do in case you can't use scripts, which is highly probable in some studio environments due to licencing issues. 

EDIT:
@Eric Chadwick
That piggy bank thumbnail is an epic win for the frontpage

PolyHertz

@Eric Chadwick Thanks Eric! Love the piggy bank pic you chose too :P

throttlekitty said:

Some Maya scripters tend to go overboard with making panels that have too many fluffer functions...I'd rather have a single tool that does what it does very well.

I completely agree, and its good to hear others have this same opinion. Developing large toolsets not only requires a lot of time, it can also very easily lead to 'spaghetti code' (ie. code that's excessively interwoven) making it very difficult to separate them.

Niknesh said:

I'm guessing that VFX people would also buy shading scripts or bridges between some production programs.

I made a bridge/applink for 3DCoat-to-3DSMax a few years ago which seemed reasonably popular, but I ended up selling it to Pilgway instead of to individual customers. Applinks/Bridges are definitely useful though afaik just about every major app is covered atp?

Ex-Ray

When I was freelancing plugins became very important in fleshing out the tool set that I felt were missing in the native program and specifically reducing production time in repetitive tasks. I had to use 3D Max so I ended up buying:

- XrayUnwrap 2.0 - for better hard surface & organic unwrapping control, I had a lot of parts to unwrap on some of the projects I did. 
- PolyUnwrapper -  for better UV control, packing and other neat features.
- Advanced UV Normalizer - for an unique situation I had where I had to keep all my meshes separate but needed to normalise my UV's on all of them. This one was a bit of a life saver and it did the job very quickly.

The prices of them were very reasonable and reduced my production time a lot, so I would have happily paid more. They all worked as intended and specifically in a complex, messy at the time, scene with work in progress mesh that is not perfect, this is always a risk I feel when assessing plugins as they will work perfect in a simple scene. The other thing that I appreciated is I often got emails about updates to these plugins so it's good to know they are being supported.
 

Jakro

The best addon I ever bought was Pie Menu Editor by Raoao for Blender. It's only $12 and is easily worth ten times that. It obviously allows you to create pie menus but it goes much much further and allows you to fully customise UI, macros, sticky keys, stack keys, hide default ui elements and so much more with no scripting ability required.

It has single handily caused me to fall in love with blender and pushed me to learn python

Blond

I've never paid for anything software-related but I'm seriously considering into investing some money into some Blender tutorial and scripts..

Fansub

Very interesting topic !   i wrote a huge text wall that is not 100% related to the original question but to making tools in general, feel free to tell me it's off-topic and i'll edit it out !

Depending on the software you pick, making tools can become a fulltime job that pays extremely well. I haven't published any tool for almost a year due to work but between April 2016 and December 2017 my gumroad gained over 25K-27K users, 50k USD in revenue with three scripts only on the market. It's safe to say that if i dedicated all my time to making tools only those numbers would double or even triple per year.

Gonna throw in some tips/tricks i've learned, hope this might be useful to someone. Before going further, i'd say some of the tools i've been requested to make the most are related to booleans, selection and just making transitions between softwares easier. LiveLinks are great at that, for instance.

Pricing

One mistake people seem to make very often is placing their tools at a too high price. If you look at Hard Mesh, a mesh-fusion like plugin for Maya, it has a lot of features that most artists want but due to it's price tag (around 100$ if i remember correctly) most artists can't afford it and turn to other different alternatives (KTools, Crease+, JBool, etc...).

If Hard Mesh was published at let's say 15$-25$, and the author made major upgrades paid to compensate, i'm pretty sure it would have become an industry standard in less than 6 months for Maya users.

People are used to purchasing tools for 8$-30$ most of the time, so it's better to stay within that comfort zone unless you're making the next Zbrush.

Marketing

This is the most important aspect when making tools. You can create something 10x better than Mesh Fusion/MASH but if your tool is not simple enough to be easy to demonstrate in a small, 10 to 30 seconds gif/video, you're gonna have some trouble gaining traction later on.

User interface (or lack there-of) is generally deeply tied with marketing your tools, as it has to catch the user's attention on first sight.

Facebook, Polycount and Twitter are all ideal for marketing purpose, especially the 10K Hours facebook group. What i generally do when i'm sure a tool is gonna be sold is i start making small gifs/videos that show it in action. I try to find the best use case that people are gonna be using it for then make a small gif of it. If i find myself struggling to record that gif due to the process being long/weird i go back to coding and improve it. Marketing isn't only about the user, you need to use it on your own and ask yourself if the gif you're about to publish is impressive enough for you to consider.

If you happen to know some "big shots" in the industry that can have use of your tool don't hesitate to send it to them, you never know they might take a liking to it and start talking about it, drawing even more attention.

All of this stuff generally happens at least one 3 days before release. I generally spend two weeks just doing Marketing > Improve > Marketing before release.

The art of giving away

I remember back in May 2016 when i published Quick Pipe, i found it in that pirating website everyone knows about. You could clearly see on gumroad how the sales went down a bit the moment it was there.

Instead of fighting it on there by reporting i proposed to anyone who can't afford the tool to contact me and i'll give it to them. I think by now there must be over 300 licenses that i've given away personally to some people, most of whom were students/ people from third world countries who just don't have a credit card. I come from a very poor Africa and know the frustration too well.

One might think this has hurt the sales but f* no, the people who got it for free spread the word all over, and whenever i publish something new they're always there to support me, some have a job right now and already bought the tools they originally got for free.

If you want to be successful at selling tools you need to have a "loyal" userbase that you know will always be there to support you, and supporting them in the first place is a great way of building that relationship. I know artists have their own opinions on this matter so i'd say to each their own, though

Subscription, yay or nay ?

I'm pretty sure we'll start to see more and more tutorial, scripts, brushes and whatnot makers go to a subscription-based model in the next year or so. While selling tools can be quite profitable you need to keep in mind that you'll have to provide support for years and sometimes that can out-weight any financial "advantage" you had on your first year.

Baidhir (the guy behind Crease+) and I have been  working on a 3.99$ subscription-based service that provides all the tools we would publish in the future, with of course the ability to get a lifetime license. I'm really looking forward to seeing how that will turn out. If it ends up being a successful experiment then i'd encourage anyone who wants to make this fulltime to go that root with a low price.

If you're only making one tool whenever you feel like it then there's no need to, imho.

That should be it ! Sorry in advance for my long wall of text, still not the best at english ^^' Would love to hear other people's experiences as well. I have a strong feeling that this is a huge market that has yet to be even scratched, and the more people make tools the better for everyone.

PolyHertz

Thank you so much @Fansub for the detailed write up! This kind of info is invaluable
I'm especially surprised by how much you said you were able to make from such a small number of relatively inexpensive scripts, I honestly didn't think the market was big enough to pull in anywhere near those numbers. If you don't mind me asking, whats been your experience with $0 (pay what you want) tools? I see you have one on your gumroad page, but I'm wondering if that made any notable contribution to the income you mentioned?

Fansub

Yeah that tool has earned 187$ to this day with 5,483 users who bought it (Quick Pipe for reference is at 5K users), which is well enough for something free i guess

But i like to look at it this way : the more people buy you tools, free or not, the more user contacts you have in your gumroad/whatever, which can make it easier to get a client base you can send emails to whenever you release a new product. This makes your marketing job easier as you keep publishing more and more tools.

Most Quick Pipe users have purchased all my other tools, and most AMT Normals Lite Tools purchased Mesh Blend when i released it, etc...

throttlekitty

That reminds me. With a few people, I've put $0 in the box so I can basically do a demo, but was unable to ever go back and give money. I'd get "you already have this product". Not sure if Gumroad ever resolved that.

TooLzor

throttlekitty said:

That reminds me. With a few people, I've put $0 in the box so I can basically do a demo, but was unable to ever go back and give money. I'd get "you already have this product". Not sure if Gumroad ever resolved that.

Pretty sure they haven't no, It was one of the reasons why I made my PS plugins have a free version (which other than Lazy Save are all full featured, just has an extra "Donate" button in the UI) and a Paid/Donate version. That way people had the option to do the demo and see if they wanted to use it and if they did, they could actually support as well

Mehran Khan

the 2 plugin I have bought are Poly-unwrapper and rappa tools Plus lazynizumi but that is for PS.
I think hardops and meshops style plugins/scripts for max have could get you some audience. Another missing functionality in max is the ability to do game-hairs more efficiently, so a toolbox that helps me do poly hairs more efficiently would be awesome as well.

SnowInChina

photoshop:

coolorus2 &

lazyNezumi

Blender:

hardops & a library addon i don't use.

@fansub

giving out tools for free on gumroad will attract many people who just want to take a look at it.

I've downloaded a lot of free stuff from gumroad, which i would have never bought, even for one dollar, simply because i am not in need for this tool. But for free i will take a look out of curiosity.

kanga

Speedflow & Speedflow Companion / Blender

Its an addon that handles modifiers through a pie menu (or regular menu) in the viewport. Havent really had a chance to use it much yet. I saw it here on the Blender Mega thread. pitwazou made such a compelling series of vids for Speedflow, I couldnt resist. Just got an email this week announcing the update (free) and received a download link. Now thats pretty good after sales service!

Funsub, great info!

Joao Sapiro

quad chamfer and radial simmetry. Sucks that support from the creator is really bad, bugs go unfixed and poor client communication...shame since its such a kickass tool.

odd_enough

@Joao Sapiro  Maybe the creator saw you bought them and figured their work was done. Or gave up on life.

sacboi

Sorry a bit OT, but I remember working on a personal project 2yrs ago and whilst researching additional info landed on Witold Jaworski's amazing WIP which in turn led me too his book Programming Add-On's For Blender 2.5, a pretty handy resource for those interested writing their own tools.  

Robert_Lamp

Well, i have the next plugins for 3ds Max

Forest Pack from Itoo Software Studio - 220$ per year
FloorGenerator V2.00 - 20$
The Parametric tool for 3ds Max - 220$ per year
ghostTown Lite - 90$