Easy Exploded List

EasyExplodedList is a quality of life imrovement for Blender and is a must-have for anyone that works with the high to low poly or the exploded mesh baking workflow. This add-on will help you quickly prepare your objects for baking. Saves you the trouble of renaming and sorting your meshes in an exploded view manually.

Quickly prepare your meshes for baking with a correct naming convention (configurable low and high suffixes), explode your meshes with effectively one button press (separate your mesh objects from one another in order to eliminate baking artifacts that are caused by intersecting raycasts).

Once you have finished renaming and sorting your objects, you can bring them into a different baking software such as Substance 3D Painter or Marmoset Toolbag 4 and easily bake, without having gone through the tiresome process of preparing your objects for a bake manually, naming them (which can get tedious if you work with complicated meshes that contain over 40 objects) or having had to move and explode them manually.

Features

• Create exploded list from selected objects.
• Add selected objects to existing exploded list.
• Undo exploded list and put objects back at their previous locations.

• Add _low suffix to selected objects.
  
• Add _high suffix to selected objects.
  
• Copy selected object's names to their datablocks.
• Sort to selected meshes collections.
• Configurable low and high suffixes as well as configurable collection names.
  

Simple user controls and button control panel for as quick as possible bake preparing.

Highly configurable settings menu that is just as easy to use as the UI buttons.

FAQ:

How does EasyExplodedList improve my work speed?

It allows you to rename objects on the fly, all you have to do is select an object and click the renaming button. Afterwards, you can in just one click create an exploded list from an unlimited amount of meshes.

What kind of setup do I need to have prior to using EasyExplodedList?

You don't need any setup other than to have lowpoly and highpoly objects that you wish to prepare for baking! Make sure they're aligned with one another before creating an exploded list, exactly as you'd normaly have them for baking.

For the "Create Exploded List" feature make sure you have selected at least two low and high objects with the same name. For example: cube_low and cube_high. That way the addon would know to keep them together.

Below is the documentation, all features are explained:

Create Exploded List:

Sort selected objects in a grid while keeping the lowpoly and highpoly meshes aligned.

NOTE: Only objects that have the pre-configured suffixs (the suffixs you define in “lowpoly suffix” and “highpoly suffix” fields in the settings section) will be sorted together. Any other objects will get ignored by the sorting  mechanism.

Add to Existing List

Add new lowpoly and highpoly objects to an already existing exploded list.

NOTE: This option is greyed-out until an exploded list is made.

Undo Exploded List

Move objects back to the location they were at prior to the creation of the exploded list.

NOTE: This option is greyed-out until an exploded list is made.

Add _low Suffix to Selected

Adds the pre-configured suffix from the “lowpoly suffix” field to selected meshes. If a mesh is a duplicate of another and has a “.001” suffix that Blender automatically added, the numbers will be removed and instead the suffix will be added. If the mesh already has a suffix and its the pre-configured “highpoly suffix” then it will replace it to the lowpoly suffix. Also, copies the new mesh name to its datablock.

Add _high Suffix to Selected

Exactly like the “_low” suffix button but reversed.

Adds the pre-configured suffix from the “highpoly suffix” field to selected meshes. If a mesh is a duplicate of another and has a “.001” suffix that Blender automatically added, the numbers will be removed and instead the suffix will be added. If the mesh already has a suffix and its the pre-configured “lowpoly suffix” then it will replace it to the highpoly suffix. Also, copies the new mesh name to its datablock.

Copy Obj Name to its Data

Copies the selected mesh name to its mesh datablock.

Reset Origins to Center

Reset object origins to world center (0,0,0 in the scene) prior to sorting into grid. Forces objects to keep their relative positions and prevents mis-alignment issues.

Validate Object Suffixes

Make Easy Exploded List automatically validate that all selected objects end with a correct suffix (one of the pre-configured suffixes, the lowpoly or highpoly suffixes).

RECOMMENDED: When objects don't have the correct naming convention, the grid sorting algorithm ignores them and on Blender's end it looks like nothing happened. This prevents that kind of situation.

Lowpoly Suffix

The suffix that defines lowpoly objects. Easy Exploded List uses suffixes to differentiate between lowpoly and highpoly meshes and sorts them together.

Highpoly Suffix

The suffix that defines highpoly objects. Easy Exploded List uses suffixes to differentiate between lowpoly and highpoly meshes and sorts them together.

Sort to Collections

Automatically sorts your selected objects into a "lowpoly" and "highpoly" collections. The collection name's are configurable via EasyExplodedList's settings section.