Draw strings of low-poly, game-ready fairy lights on any surface in Blender.
Sketch a line with Blender's Draw tool — right onto roofs, trees, fences, walls — and Auto Fairy Lights turns the stroke into a wire full of glowing bulbs. Built for game and VRChat workflows: tiny tri counts, clean material slots, and per-bulb shader data baked into UV2.
Part of the Auto family by Sketch494 — see also Auto Bake and Auto Standee.
Blender 4.2+ (extension): drag auto_fairy_lights-1.0.0-extension.zip into Blender, or Edit > Preferences > Get Extensions > Install from Disk.
Blender 3.6 – 4.1 (legacy add-on): Edit > Preferences > Add-ons > Install, pick auto_fairy_lights-1.0.0.zip, enable Auto Fairy Lights.
Panel lives in the 3D Viewport sidebar (N) → Fairy Lights tab.
- Click ✏ Draw Light String — you're dropped into the curve Draw tool with surface snapping on.
- Sketch your string. Multiple strokes are fine (each becomes its own strand in the same set).
- Click ✓ Finish & Generate. Done — wire + bulbs, ready to tweak.
- Change spacing / size / shape / colors and hit Regenerate anytime. The drawn curve stays editable.
- Make Export Ready, then export FBX (or glTF) for Unity / VRChat.
Also works on existing geometry: select any curve or Grease Pencil object and hit Generate on Selected (GPv2 and GPv3 both supported).
| Bulb shape | Tris per bulb |
|---|---|
| Octa | 8 |
| Round | 20 |
| Teardrop | 20 |
| Globe | 80 |
Optional sockets add 12 tris per bulb. Wire is a 3/4/6-sided tube with adjustable segment length. The panel shows a live bulb + triangle count so you always know your budget. A 10 m string of teardrops at default density lands around 2k tris.
The glow is its own material slot — separate from the wire — so you can recolor it or swap in any shader without touching the rest:
FairyLights_Wire— the cableFairyLights_Glow— single-color modeFairyLights_Glow_1 … _6— multi-color mode (one slot per color, alternating along the string)
Baked per-bulb data for custom shader effects:
- UV2.x — normalized position along the strand (0→1). Drive chase / marquee patterns.
- UV2.y — stable random per bulb. Drive twinkle / blink offsets.
- Vertex color (
BulbColor) — the bulb's color. Run rainbow strings on a single material if you prefer.
Example twinkle in shader-speak: emission *= 0.5 + 0.5 * sin(_Time.y * 4 + uv2.y * 6.2831)
Bulbs use plain Emission materials — enable Bloom (Eevee) or a Glare node (Cycles compositor) and they light up beautifully. Every preview image in this repo was generated with the add-on and rendered in Cycles.
Tested headless on Blender 3.6.23, 4.2.22, and 5.1.2 — 40/40 automated checks green on each, including FBX/glTF export and Grease Pencil conversion (GPv2 + GPv3).
MIT © Sketch494