What Blender Tasks Are Still Wasting Your Time? Looking for Real Automation Targets
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.
Replies
Yess! My man!
I’m an environment artist with a background in organics. There are not many problems left that I would not myself try to script around, but the biggest choke point for me has been retopologizing and adding UV seams to lowpoly organic models. I'll use these rocks as an example:
When I do a highpoly to lowpoly workflow for a large rock, I typically sculpt the model in ZBrush, dynamesh the pieces of the highpoly together, bring the result into Blender, and decimate it with the decimate modifier.
The resulting lowpoly is 500 - 5k tris. I usually then have to spend 10 - 15 minutes cleaning up the lowpoly, spinning edges to get rid of skinny triangles and welding verts to kill short edges.
Then I have to define the UV seams. Autoseams provide a starting point but I invariably end up with too few or too many seams. Because my lowpoly doesn’t have a clean edge flow it takes a while, again 10 minutes or so, of selecting and marking edges as seams to split my rock up into three to five UV islands.
Then of course I have to export my models to Toolbag and bake normal and cavity maps, update the PSD or Substance Painter file, and export my final textures. That part’s not a big deal.
If I’m testing a rock in-engine it might take 3-4 iterations of this whole loop to get a rock shape that works well and intersects nicely with other rocks.
I have been looking for years, with no success, for a way to automate cleaning up and UVing the lowpoly in a way that doesn’t require 30 to 60 minutes of manual labor. I’ve tried doing it in Houdini but wasn’t impressed with the results and I prefer to stay in Blender as much as possible.
I read this carefully, and you’re not crazy; this is a real gap in most organic pipelines.
Your problem isn’t “retopo” in the traditional sense. It’s that decimation destroys semantic edge information, and every downstream step (cleanup, seam placement, iteration) is paying that tax again and again. Autoseams fail because they’re blind to intent, not because you’re using them wrong.
We’ve been working on automated quad-based retopology (Quadify) that already handles messy organic inputs well, including partial targeting. What’s interesting here is pairing retopo and UV generation as a single decision, instead of two disconnected steps. If the edge flow is intentional, seam placement becomes almost trivial, especially for rocks that only need 3-5 islands and don’t care about deformation.
If you’re open to it, I think this can be pushed into a mostly one-click Blender-side step that replaces the 30-60 minutes you described, not just speeds it up.
What engine are you validating these assets in, and are these rocks tiling, hero, or pure set-dressing?
You’re right, decimation is a better word for what I’m doing than retopo. Ideally yes, the decimation and unwrapping would all be handled in one step. Best case would be a modifier that I put on the model once and forget about.
I know there are quad-based topology solutions out there that would probably give me better auto UV seams, but triangulated meshes are better for adaptive density (putting more detail where I want it) and give me the absolute control I need over the rock's silhouette.
I’m brainstorming here, but if I could define where I want my UV islands on my highpoly, say via the vertex color, then do a decimate that preserves those island borders, followed by a UV unfold and pack of the results, that would get me close to where I want to go.
My example is from a proprietary engine but I’m mostly targeting Unreal these days. The assets I want to generate are hero or generic playspace rocks. I have a different workflow I use for tiling rocks.
Humankind evolved a lot when people started to not doing everthing for themself but specialized into some crafts.. of course one had to trade something what one could do "better" or faster then others with something the did. This again got easier when one didn't have to trade directly but use money for some "general trading exhange"..
<irony sarcasm-level="high">
Now when "everybody" can do "anything" with just the push of one or to buttons (keys).. then nobody has to speciaze anymore.. but then also noboduz has to buy something from someoen else.. so we do not need any money.. and wil be free !!
</irony>
But then.. this may be a bit off topic..
What are these tools ?
You can check them out here