A little gem that lets you smooth your meshes while retaining most of the shape and volume:

Some additional info can be found here:
KLICK

To try it out you have to get a build of the development version of Blender, take a look here for the most recent ones:
KLICK

I implemented basic vertex pinning -as you already know it from the UV-editor- into Blender’s Edit Mode, here’s a little demonstration:

You can access it by hotkey (currently Return +Alt and/or Shift for unpinning and inverting), the w-menu, the mesh menu in Edit Mode and of course the toolbox (just search for “pin”).

This tool is available in the Blender 2.5 bmesh branch (check www.graphicall.org if you don’t build yourself) but as all the serious work still has to be done in Blender 2.49 there’s also a patch for that. It looks a bit different and can only be accessed by hotkey, but the functionality is the same. You have to build it on your own though but if that doesn’t stop you here’s the link: PinVerts_2.49.patch

For future versions I have a couple of things planned, such as smooth falloff and limiting the effect to certain axes. I’ll keep you updated if there’s any progress.

Have fun trying it out and please report any problems or suggestions to me!

Yours,
Fabian

When I create textures I sometimes don’t have any/enough padding around the UV islands which might end in nasty seams on the 3D model. This tool is able to extrude the island borders by a given value in order to overcome this issue.

All the bakers out there offer this functionality but in situations where you don’t want to or can’t rebake this software might come in handy.
(You will want to take a look at the Readme.txt first though. )

Download: TexPadder_v0.1.zip

Currently there’s only a Windows version available but the code is platform independent so  let me know if there’s demand for Linux/Mac versions.

Lately I’ve been working on a script for Blender which performs some checks in order to highlight areas of a model that might need to be changed to obtain optimal results.

Currently there are functions to check the following:

• Quad torsion (extremely useful for lowpoly modelling and that’s what initially made me write the script)
• Stretching of faces
• Silhouette
• Average face area

There’s detailed information on each one of those in the script and I’d suggest you to check it out before using it.

Images of the GUI and how a result might look like (area check in this case):

Download: KLICK