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Installation

Requirements
Blender 4.2 or newer — verified against 5.0.1 and 5.2.0 LTS
Sollumz installed, enabled, with its dependencies

Sollumz's dependencies matter: the shader definitions live there, and every material Void Tools builds is a real Sollumz shader material. Without them the tab draws a "Sollumz not available" notice instead of its buttons.

Install — from the extension repository

The shorter way, and the one that keeps itself up to date. Blender 4.2 and newer can take a repository URL and handle everything from there.

  1. Edit → Preferences → Get Extensions
  2. In the top-right dropdown: Repositories → + → Add Remote Repository

  3. Paste this URL, tick Check for Updates on Start, and press Create:

    https://seto3d.github.io/void-tools/repo/index.json

  4. Back in Get Extensions, search for Void Tools and press Install.

That is the whole thing. Blender lists the version, tells you when a new one is out and installs it — no zip, no folder, and nothing to remember. It also shows what the add-on is allowed to reach before you install it: Void Tools declares network, for the one thing it uses it for — asking github.com whether there is a newer release.

Install — from a zip

Unchanged, and still supported. Every release ships both artifacts.

  1. Download void-tools.zip from the latest release. Do not unzip it.
  2. In Blender: Edit → Preferences → Add-ons → Install from Disk
  3. Pick the zip, then tick the add-on to enable it.
  4. Restart Blender.

The tools appear in the 3D viewport's N-panel, under a Void Tools tab, whichever way you installed.

Why two files

void-tools.zip is a classic add-on: it carries its own folder and Blender copies it into scripts/addons/. void_tools-<version>.zip is an extension: its manifest sits at the archive root and Blender names the folder itself. One archive cannot be both, so both ship.

Do not install both. They register the same panels and operators, and two copies of that in one Blender is the crash this add-on warns about below. Pick one; if you are switching, remove the other first.

Coming from the three separate add-ons

Void Tools used to ship as seto_fake_ao, seto_fake_dmg and seto_decal_tool. If any of them is still installed, disable and remove it first — they register the same operators and panels as this one, and Blender will not tell you which copy answered.

Updating

Installed from the repository? Blender does it. Get Extensions → Check for Updates, and the Updates panel in the tab stands aside and says so — two updaters for one add-on can disagree, and this one could leave a second copy behind.

Installed from a zip? The Updates panel at the top of the tab does it from inside Blender: when a new release exists, its version shows on the panel header and Install Update brings it in with your settings intact.

See Updating for what the version check sends, and how to turn it off.

Where your settings live

Two kinds, and the difference matters when you open a new file:

Add-on preferences — remembered across files, restarts and updates. The decal library folder and the Surface Painter library folder are both here, along with the Sollumz override and the update-check switch. Reach them at Edit → Preferences → Add-ons → Void Tools.

Scene settings — saved in the .blend, per file. Everything in a tool's create panel is one of these: it is the starting point for the next thing you create, and nothing more.

Per-object settings — saved on the generated object itself. Everything in a Selected … panel is one of these, and every one of them is live.

Building the zip yourself

If you are working from a clone rather than a release:

python scripts/build_extension.py --blender "/path/to/blender"

That produces the same void-tools.zip in dist/, plus the repository listing. Blender does the packing, which is deliberate — do not build it with PowerShell's Compress-Archive, which writes Windows path separators into the entry names. Blender's installer splits on / only, so on macOS and Linux the add-on extracts as a handful of files with backslashes in their names and the tab never appears. The script checks its own output for exactly that before it reports success.