Real-time collaboration for Blender

Blend Buddies
Documentation

Blend Buddies puts you and your collaborators inside the same scene at the same time. Transforms stream as you drag them, edits propagate as you make them, and anyone who joins later receives the whole scene automatically.

01Install the add-on

• In Blender, open Edit → Preferences → Get Extensions.
• Click the drop-down arrow at the top right, then Install from Disk…
• Select the blend-buddies-1.4.5.zip from your order.
• Blend Buddies installs and enables itself. Press N in the 3D Viewport and open the Blend Buddies tab.

Everything the add-on needs is bundled inside the zip — no pip install, no dependency step, nothing to configure on your router.

02Set yourself up, once

The first time you open the panel you’ll be asked to review the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Both open in-app, and you accept once per machine.

A short welcome dialog then asks for your display name — the name other people see next to your selections and in chat. That is the only thing it needs. There is no account to create and no key to paste. Re-open it any time from Help & Info → Re-run Setup Wizard.

03Create a room

Fill in the Connect box in the sidebar, then press Create New Room.

Field	What to put in it
Name	Your display name, plus a colour swatch and avatar that identify you to everyone else.
Room	3–50 characters: letters, numbers, _ and -. Room names are global, so pick something specific — ravine-shot04, not test.
Password	At least 8 characters, with an uppercase letter, a lowercase letter and a digit. Everyone who joins needs it.
Admin	A second, different password, required to create a room. Anyone who supplies it on join gets moderation and room settings. Keep it to yourself.
Remember Room	Saves the credentials locally so the room appears under Saved Rooms for one-click rejoin.
Blank scene	Tick to start the room empty. Leave it off to upload your current scene as the room’s starting point.

◆  Before you connect

Share the room name and room password with your collaborators — privately, over a DM rather than a public channel. Share the admin password only with someone you want to be able to kick, ban and rename.

04Join a room

Enter your display name, the room name and the password, then press Join Room. Leave Admin empty to join as a regular member. The room’s scene arrives progressively, with a progress bar, so Blender stays responsive even on heavy scenes.

Rooms you’ve saved appear as one-click buttons above the Connect form. Leaving is a single Leave Room press — the room and everything in it stays on the server, waiting for you.

What it feels like

Once you’re connected, you just use Blender. Syncing runs by itself — there is nothing to switch on.

Locking lives in the 3D Viewport right-click menu, under Blend Buddies: Lock for Me, Give to User, Request Access and Unlock.

What syncs

Geometry & object data

• ✦  Meshes — vertices, edges, faces, UVs, normals, vertex groups and per-vertex weights
• ✦  Curves, surfaces and text objects
• ✦  Armatures — the full rig (bone hierarchy, roll, IK, B-bones), pose, and live pose-bone dragging at streaming rate
• ✦  Metaballs, point clouds and hair curves
• ✦  Grease Pencil v3 — layers, frames, drawings, strokes and points
• ✦  Volumes — OpenVDB files are transferred and re-linked on the other side
• ✦  Image empties, including the reference image itself
• ✦  Cameras, lights and light probes with their data settings
• ✦  Speakers, including the sound file
• ✦  Empties, collections and parenting

Look & shading

• ✦  Materials and full shader node graphs
• ✦  Textures and image files, chunked for large transfers with a progress readout
• ✦  Per-face material slots and assignments
• ✦  Fonts used by text objects — the font file travels too
• ✦  Scene render settings

Motion & setup

• ✦  Keyframes, F-Curves, actions and timeline markers
• ✦  Timeline playback — frame changes and play/pause are shared
• ✦  Modifiers, constraints and object-level drivers
• ✦  Rigid bodies, rigid-body constraints and force fields
• ✦  Particle system settings
• ✦  Scene-level datablocks — texts, palettes, keying sets, line styles, brushes
• ✦  Annotation layers drawn with Blender’s Annotate tool

What doesn’t sync

Stated plainly, so there are no surprises mid-project.

• ×  Simulation caches and bakes. Physics, fluid, cloth and smoke settings transfer; the baked result does not — each person bakes locally, and sims set to replay will re-simulate on their machine.
• ×  Styled hair. Particle settings transfer; the combed result does not.
• ×  Legacy Grease Pencil datablocks from files made before Blender 4.3 (v3 syncs fully).
• ×  Drivers on object data — drivers on the object itself do sync.
• ×  Constraint target sub-collections on armature constraints.
• ×  Linked libraries — Blend Buddies syncs the objects in your scene, not links to external .blend files.
• ×  Your Blender preferences, keymaps, workspaces and add-ons.

Staying in sync

The main panel carries a live indicator: In sync with the room’s object count, or Out of sync with the names of exactly what differs and a Resync button that repairs it.

The check is deliberately conservative — it only reports drift once two consecutive readings agree, so objects still in flight never raise a false alarm. There’s also a manual Sync Scene button that pushes your current scene state to the room, handy after a bulk import.

The panels

Everything lives in the 3D Viewport sidebar (N) under the Blend Buddies tab. Chat, Assets, Backups, Admin, Update and Help are sub-panels — click a header to expand it.

Panel	What it’s for
Blend Buddies	Connect and disconnect, saved rooms, online users, locked objects, the sync-health indicator, the presence toggle, the scene switcher, and manual Sync Scene.
Chat	Room chat with mentions and history.
Assets	The room’s shared asset library — upload, preview, import, download.
Backups	Create, list, restore and delete room backups.
Admin	Admins only: kick, ban, unban, rename the room, change the room and admin passwords.
Update Available	Appears only when a newer version exists. Read the release notes, then install.
Help & Info	Re-run the setup wizard, report a bug, open the bundled docs, export diagnostics, view Terms and Privacy, delete all local data.

◆  Connected to a room

Scenes within a room

A room can hold several independent scenes — useful for you take the character, I’ll take the environment.

• Add Scene creates a named scene. Any member can do it, not just admins.
• Expand the switcher to move between scenes; the user list shows who is in which one.
• Data is fully isolated per scene — what you do in one is invisible in the others.
• Import Objects copies objects across from another scene in the same room, bringing the whole object with it: materials, modifiers and textures included.
• Admins can rename scenes inline from the switcher.

Room assets

The Assets panel is a shared library that lives with the room rather than with your file. Any member can upload; everyone sees the same list.

• Models and textures, uploaded from disk or straight from your selection with Save Selected.
• Every upload gets an automatic thumbnail, shown in a two-column grid.
• Import brings an asset into the current scene; Download saves it to disk.
• Large files transfer in chunks, with progress shown.

Backups & recovery

• The server takes an automatic backup whenever someone joins the room.
• Create Manual Backup makes a named checkpoint. Ten are kept per room.
• Restore rolls the room back to any listed backup, for everyone.
• If Blender closes uncleanly while you were in a room, Blend Buddies offers to take you straight back in when you restart.
• If the connection drops, the add-on reconnects on its own and resumes where it left off instead of re-downloading the scene.

Take a manual backup before anything drastic — a big restructure, a bulk import, or handing the file to someone new.

Moderation & room settings

Join with the admin password to unlock the Admin panel. Regular members never see these controls.

• Kick a user from the room.
• Ban a user or an IP address; list and lift bans.
• Rename the room.
• Change the room password or the admin password.

Requirements

Networking & firewalls

Blend Buddies connects outbound over an encrypted WebSocket. There is nothing to forward, open or configure on your router.

If your network blocks the add-on’s usual port — common on studio, school, office and VPN networks — it automatically falls back to the standard HTTPS port and remembers which route worked. In practice that means it connects on networks where a naive client simply fails. Help & Info → Test Connection checks each route separately and tells you plainly which ones your network allows. As long as one works, you’re fine.

The server is hosted in Germany. Expect the smoothest experience in Europe; transatlantic use works well, with slightly higher latency on live dragging.

Privacy & security

Rooms are isolated: scene data is shared only with people in your room, and getting in requires the room password. Help & Info → Delete All My Data removes every credential, salt and acceptance record stored locally, in one click. We don’t sell your data — the full detail is in the in-app Privacy Policy.

Two things worth being deliberate about: the room password is the only thing between your scene and anyone who guesses the room name, so use a real one; and anyone holding the admin password can kick, ban and rename.

Limits

Generous defaults, in place so that one room can’t degrade the service for everyone else. If you reach one, the add-on tells you which and why.

Updating

Blend Buddies checks for updates a few seconds after Blender starts. When one is available, an Update Available panel appears with the release notes — read what changed, then Download & Install fetches it and installs it through Blender’s own extension system. Restart when prompted.

Updates are free. There is no subscription and nothing to renew.

Troubleshooting