DCC addons
Dousen lives inside the tools you already use. Each supported application gets a Dousen panel or menu that lets you publish work, validate it, set up assets from your project's naming conventions, and see Perforce file status — all without leaving the app.
Supported applications
Seven DCCs are supported. Every one of them gains a Dousen panel or menu inside the application:
| DCC | What the Dousen addon does |
|---|---|
| Blender | A Dousen tab in the N-panel: auto-publish on save (opt-in), validated export, a validation panel, a Perforce file-status panel, and Set Up Asset driven by your naming conventions. |
| Maya | A Dousen shelf plus a dockable panel: a validation window with Fix buttons, Set Up Asset, FBX export using project presets, Perforce lock / checkout / sync / revert, and Send to Painter. |
| 3ds Max | A Dousen menu (2025+) or toolbar: a validation and export dialog, a New Asset dialog, auto-publish on save (opt-in), Perforce operations, and Send to Painter. |
| Houdini | A set of Dousen shelf tools: HDA / VAT / Alembic export, Send to Unreal, Send to Painter, validation, Perforce operations, and auto-publish on save. |
| Substance Painter | A dock panel: auto-publishes textures on export, Send to Unreal (bundles textures plus the source mesh), can receive a mesh from another DCC to start or re-bake a project, and validation. |
| Substance Designer | A dock panel: exports baked texture maps and .sbsar packages, Send to Unreal, validation, and can receive meshes from other DCCs. |
| Unreal Engine | A first-class participant on the Dousen bridge — see the Unreal Engine page. |
Installing and enabling the addons
There is normally no manual install. The old “install the addon by hand” flow no longer applies — DousenDesktop launches each application with the Dousen addon injected automatically.
To get the in-app panel, you only need to:
- Open Settings → DCC Apps and confirm the executable path for each application. Installed DCCs are auto-discovered, so this is usually already filled in.
- Launch the application from DousenDesktop's launcher. The Dousen panel appears inside it.
On Windows, the installer bundles the addons, so nothing extra is downloaded.
The addon only appears when the DCC is launched from DousenDesktop — a desktop shortcut starts the plain application. If the panel is missing even then, see Troubleshooting.
How the addons talk to Dousen
DousenDesktop runs a small local relay (the bridge) on your own machine at 127.0.0.1 port 8766. Addons publish events to the bridge and poll it for incoming events about twice a second. This is the channel that lets one application hand work to another — for example, sending a mesh from Maya to Substance Painter.
The bridge is plain HTTP on port 8766 only. There is no separate service port to open, and every request is authenticated with a per-session token, so other programs on your machine can't read or inject events.
Bridge event types
Almost everything the addons do maps to one of six event types:
| Event | Meaning |
|---|---|
| mesh.export | A published mesh / FBX. |
| texture.export | Published textures or a .sbsar package. |
| animation.export | A published animation clip. |
| scene.export | An auto-publish triggered when you save the scene. |
| dcc.open | A request to open a file in a specific DCC. |
| task.context | The active Jira task and changelist, pushed to running DCCs. |
Each running application announces itself to the bridge when it starts (register) and withdraws when it closes (deregister). That presence handshake is separate from the events above — it's how features like Send to Unreal know which DCCs are currently open.
Studio tools can join the bridge exactly like the built-in addons — the full protocol, payload shapes, and a Python example are on the Bridge API page.
Per-task context
When you select a task in DousenDesktop, the active Jira key and changelist are pushed to every running DCC as a task.context event. From then on, everything you publish is tagged with the right task and linked to the right Perforce changelist — you don't have to label exports by hand.
When DousenDesktop launches a DCC while a task is selected, the same context is also passed to the application as environment variables, so the addon picks it up immediately on startup.
Validation before export
The validated-export flow runs your project's validators before anything is published:
- Errors block the export until they're fixed.
- Warnings prompt you to continue or cancel.
- Dousen also checks that the source file isn't locked by someone else in Perforce.
Once the checks pass, the asset is published to the bridge and tagged with your active task. For the full list of checks and how admins configure them, see the Asset validation page.