What Blender Tasks Are Still Wasting Your Time? Looking for Real Automation Targets

anvilinteractive

I build Blender tools with a focus on automation and production speed, primarily for game art workflows.

Before deciding what to build next, I want to hear directly from people who use Blender seriously and run into the same problems over and over—the kind where you think “this should not be manual in 2026.”

I’m not looking for abstract feature ideas or wishlist items. I’m looking for concrete, repeatable pain points that:

• You hit frequently (daily or weekly)

• Are tedious, mechanical, or error-prone

• Feel like they should be solvable with a tool or add-on

• Aren’t already cleanly solved by an existing addon

If you respond, please be specific. Context matters more than volume.

Helpful examples:

• “When doing X, I always have to manually do A → B → C because Blender doesn’t expose Y.”

• “This part of my pipeline breaks unless I double-check Z every time.”

• “I waste time fixing the same class of mistake over and over.”

Less helpful:

• “Blender’s UI is bad”

• “I want Maya feature X”

• “Everything should be procedural”

If it helps, you can include:

• Your role (environment artist, character artist, tech artist, etc.)

• The kind of assets you work on

• Where the friction shows up (modeling, UVs, baking, export, scene management, cleanup, validation, etc.)

I can’t promise I’ll build everything that’s mentioned, but I will prioritize problems that show up across multiple workflows and can be solved cleanly.

If you’ve ever thought “I should script this, but I don’t have time,” that’s exactly the kind of problem I want to hear about.

PS: Anyone whose suggestion I build will get a free copy with long-term support.

gnoop

Simple automation tools are easily done by chat GPT.   Blender is where it shines actually. 

  What I'd love to see is a kind of deeper Blender customization.   A 2d vector editor mode   with  editable spline   brushes driven by  grease pensil.  

     The whole "draw" mode is quite inconvenient currently  .  

    I want something like "skeletal" brushes  from old Creative house expression 3    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creature_House_Expression or what Microsoft later  did from  it .  

  A Grease pensil  stroke with up to 10 alternating pieces of RGBA mage , not necessarily a square dab,  rolling out along the pencil stroke one after another randomly .   Same as roll out brushes in Zbrush  but doing different random order each stroke + start end caps  .   

  Not like ID animated brushes in Substance Painter  Which use square dabs only switching by ID and only rotating to follow spline tangent . Rather true smooth curve deform by the stroke spline instead   .     Plus an ability to randomly shift alternating things around , both dab picture planes or  instanced geometry .      In a word  a hole new draw  by grease pencil way to do both textures and geometry scattering  with a seed option.

Also an ability to have flat poly line shapes having texture/martial  fill  doing  it the way  their  scale and move gizmo would snap to supposed final  output pixel grid to avoid sub-pixel blurring. 

Plus an option to  feather their edges  by  noise  like in  old Expression.     All for a purpose or easy material  compositing .The thing that is a pain in your ass in both SDesigner and Painter.     Would be nice  to employ  Blender compositing for this  but I think  just flat shapes in regular pane   and Eveee  is ok.   

   A view lock for  top ortho cmera vs 3d .    A quick switch of all brush strokes and shape fills  to normal  map/roughness  or whatever.   I doubt Blender would have enough rea-ltime  power to do it all of those  at the same time.    Just an export script that would replace all the source bitmap used to corresponding versions keeping everythin in place . Having only RGBA  channels input  is  hard codded in Blender I think. 

 Most of this is perfectly possible with Geometry nodes + shader nodes .     Evee is ok for real time preview .   Yet the hole system that  is necessary to maintain  is a puzzle and a headache to keep synced .       But I think all this is scrip-table.        

A furter step could be  grease pensil brushes doing  fluid simulation  but I don't think it would be  real time and easy.   So far I need those Expression  tools I miss so much for decades already.