Blender ships with a lot disabled and there is a large ecosystem beyond it. These are the ones that come up repeatedly in asset cleanup.
Built in, worth enabling
- 3D Print Toolbox. Despite the name, its mesh analysis is useful for any pipeline — finds non-manifold edges, intersecting faces, zero-area faces, and thin walls.
- Node Wrangler. Speeds up material node editing enormously. Ctrl+T to build texture setups, Ctrl+Shift+click to preview any node.
- Copy Attributes Menu. Transfers properties between objects.
- LoopTools. Circle, flatten, relax — small topology fixes that would otherwise be manual.
Categories of third-party add-on
- Retopology. Automatic quad remeshers that produce far better edge flow than the built-in Decimate. The main practical upgrade for anyone finishing generated meshes regularly.
- UV tools. Faster unwrapping, better packing, texel density management. Blender's built-in packer has improved but dedicated tools still pack tighter.
- Baking. More control over cage setup, multi-object baking, and channel packing than the native baker.
- Hard surface. Boolean workflow helpers, bevel management, and the various tools for keeping a hard-surface model editable.
- Asset management. Library organisation across projects, which becomes worth it once you have more assets than you can remember.
A caution
Add-ons break across Blender versions, sometimes silently. Anything load-bearing in a production pipeline is a dependency you have taken on — worth knowing which ones you would have to work around if an update broke them mid-project.
The honest baseline
For occasional cleanup of generated meshes, the built-ins plus Node Wrangler cover most of it. The retopology add-ons are the first purchase that genuinely changes throughput.