Getting Started

Download our Blender Plug-In and easily load your HEAT Animations onto your characters, avatars, or 3D models.

The HEAT Bridge is necessary to be able to pull animations into Blender. If you have not already downloaded and installed the HEAT Bridge please refer to the previous section.

DOWNLOAD AND INSTALLATION

• Downloading the Blender plug-in

  1. Begin by navigating to https://heat.tech/downloads and select the link to 'Download Heat Bridge'.

  2. Unzip the downloaded file 'HEAT-Bridge.zip'. Inside this file you will find the Blender plug-in as well as the HEAT Bridge, Daz3D plug-in, and Unity plug-in.

  3. The HEAT Blender plug-in file will be located int he uzipped directory at 'HEAT-Bridge -> Plugins -> HEAT_Blender_Plugin -> heat-blender-tools-main.zip'.

Please keep the Blender plug-in file, 'heat-blender-tools-main.zip', zipped for installation to Blender.

• Installing the Blender plug-in

  1. In the Blender menu bar along the top of the screen navigate to 'Edit -> Preferences -> Add-ons'

  2. In the Add-ons menu click the 'Install' button () in the upper right hand corner.

  3. Locate the downloaded file, 'heat-blender-tools-main.zip' and click the 'Install Add-on' button ()

  4. The Add-ons menu will return and you will see '3D View: HeatBlender'. Click the check box next to the add-on () to activate the plug-in.

  5. Close the Add-ons window and press the 'N' key on your keyboard to open the Sidebar. You will now see 'HeatTools' in the sidebar along the right hand side of the viewport.

HEAT tools in the Blender sidebar

You may need to restart blender in order for the installation to work.

UPDATING THE HEAT BLENDER PLUG-IN

• The HEAT Blender plug-in is updated regularly. You can easily update the plug-in directly from Blender by following the instructions below.

  1. In the Blender menu bar across the top of the screen navigate to 'Edit -> Preferences -> Add-ons' and search for HEAT in the search bar.

  2. The plug-in will appear labeled as '3D View: HeatBlender'.

  3. Click the drop down arrow next to the add-on name to open all of the settings within the add-on.

  4. At the bottom of the window you will see the 'Updater Settings'. Here you can either click 'Check now for heat_blender update' to manually update the plug-in, or you can click the 'Auto-check for Update' box and have Blender automatically update the plug-in at a set regular interval.

HEAT Blender plug-in settings, including updating settings

Next we will go over how to use the HEAT plug-in within Blender.