First get hold of a copy of the most recent version of Blender (2.69 at the time of writing) from http://www.blender.org and install it. If this is the first time you have used Blender open it and select the ‘File – User Preferences’ menu item. The settings window will appear and for now simply click the ‘Save User Settings’ button in the bottom left corner. This makes sure that the Blender configuration directory is created on your system.

On a Windows 7 PC this directory can be found at  C:\Users\your_username\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\blender_version

On a Mac it can be found at /Users/your_username/Library/Application Support/Blender/blender_version

And on an Arch Linux machine can be found at /home/your_username/.config/blender/blender_version

Other operating systems may vary but this directory should be created somewhere similar.

Within this folder create a directory called ‘scripts’ and within this a directory called ‘addons’.

For those comfortable with the command-line navigate to the ‘addons’ directory above and checkout, with Mercurial, the VI-Suite code from the Google Code repository with the command:

hg clone https://code.google.com/p/vi-suite/

This should place a ‘vi-suite’ directory within the addons directory.

Alternatively, a zip file containing the VI-Suite code can be downloaded from https://code.google.com/p/vi-suite/source/list by clicking the download zip button just above the list of code changes. The directory within the zip file should be renamed to ‘vi-suite’ and moved to the ‘addons’ directory.

Upon starting Blender the VI-Suite should be registered as an available add-on. The video below shows how to activate this add-on within Blender.

Activating the VI-Suite from Ryan Southall on Vimeo.