In Blender 4.2 a new feature was introduced: Blender Extensions. The Blender Extensions platform is the online directory of free and Open Source extensions for Blender. The goal of this platform is to make it easy for Blender users to find and share their add-ons and themes, entirely within the Free and Open Source spirit.
DAZ Importer version 4.1.0 is a legacy add-on, but the next release will be an extension, which I eventually hope to upload to the Blender extensions site. As a first step the Diffeomorphic add-ons have now been converted to extensions in the development version.
Download the development versions of the DAZ Importer and the other Diffeomorphic scripts. We see that Bitbucket adds some extra stuff to the file names. Before installing the new add-ons, make sure that no old add-ons remains, following the instructions in
Safely Installing a New Version .
In Blender 4.2, open the Blender preferences window and go to the Get Extensions tab. Press on the arrow at the top right and choose Install from Disk.
Navigate to the place where the downloaded files are saved, and install the import_daz zip file. The default settings work fine.
And the new extension is installed.
We can now repeat the procedure to install the remaining add-ons.
If we switch to the Add-ons tab we see that the extension appear here too.
The add-ons are installed in the
Blender/4.2/extensions/user_default directory. This is the location of Blender extensions. Legacy add-ons, like previous versions of the DAZ Importer, would be placed in the
Blender/4.2/scripts/addons folder. Make sure that the same add-on does not appear in both locations.
The Diffeomorphic add-ons are backwards compatible and the same files can be installed on Blender 4.1. The main ones are even compatible all the way back to Blender 2.83, although some features may not work correctly. Let us review how to install the add-ons on Blender 4.1.
Here we go to the Add-ons tab and press the Install button.
Select the import_daz file and install it. It is not enabled by default, so we press the checkbox to the left.
However, when we repeat the same process with one of the dependent add-ons like the Shell Editor, the add-on can not be enabled. Instead there is an error message.
The reason is that this add-ons uses the DAZ Importer, which much be named
import_daz. When we look in the addons directory, we see that the add-on is named like the zip file. With extensions this problem doesn't arise.
GNU Public License
The Blender Extensions platform only accepts GNU GPL compliant software. Previous versions o fthe Diffeomorphic add-ons were released under a FreeBSD license. Although BSD is GNU GPL compliant, GPL is preferred, and therefore I chose to change the licence of the Diffeomorphic add-ons to GPL, more precisely GNU General Public License v2.0 or later. This change should not affect the end user in any way.
