I had an image sequence rendered on one of my nodes, and sadly my D-NOISE add-on did not kick in as expected. This was entirely my fault, and I thought I could perhaps just denoise the sequence rather than re-render it. Turns out it works, even though it does not match the results of a regular denoised render.

Be that as it may, let me show you how to use Blender’s mysterious Compositor to denoise a sequence of images automatically.

I’ve recently built a little animation during a live stream, and Rod’s suggestion was to add NASA’s Curiosity Rover into the scene. It’s a freely available blend file, and I thought it was a great idea. It added a lovely character to the otherwise deserted alien landscape, and I quickly animated it into position.

Trouble was, the little guy was essentially an afterthought, and when I was watching the animation back, it became obvious that its wheels needed to be turning as it was driving around. While I was keen to do this, I had no idea what mechanism I should use for such an Endeavor (har har), or what Blender had to offer in this regard.

My first thought was to simply animate the wheels with keyframes, but this would be a lot of work, and if the rover’s speed were to change I’d have to probably animate those wheels again. There being six and all, I discovered a better way to make the wheels turn, using something called a Driver.

A while ago I wrote an article about how to grow grass on a place in Blender 2.79 using the Particle Emitter system. This process has changed since Blender 2.80, and since it was never intuitive to begin with, we’re all a little confused as to how it works in the new version. While I still remember, let me jot down a note for everyone’s benefit.

I’ve been wondering if there was a way to replace dummy objects I’ve placed in Blender with other meshes. Say we do a particle simulation, and during rehearsal it’s all about speed – but for the real render, we need higher resolution meshes that might take a while to render in the viewport.

Thankfully it’s super easy to do this in Blender, here’s how. Let’s replace the default cube with Suzanne.

• select the object you’d like to replace
• head over to the Object Data Properties (green triangle icon)
• at the top of the tab, left of the name of your object, click the drop down and choose browse mesh data to be linked

This brings up a list of items in your scene. Pick the one you would like to use as a replacement – and that’s it.

Note that this will only link the geometry and materials, it will not take across any modifiers.

Thanks to Christina for this tip 🙂

While I was deep engrossed looking for a feature in the Blender Settings, I found something else I didn’t know about. It’s a way to always orbit around a selected object, rather than do that awkward thing where the viewport just goes off into oblivion when you least expected it.

I frequently use the NUMPAD + . (full stop) trick to focus on the selected object. This zooms in on the object, centres it on the screen, and as a result I can conveniently orbit around it. However, if an object is framed off centre, or even off screen Blender does something else when you move the camera… and I must admit that I’ve not been able to figure out what it is exactly. I probably never will. B

ut that’s OK, because there’s a simple tick box under Edit – Preferences – Interface that’ll make Blender orbit around whatever is selected, no matter where it is in relation to the screen. It’s called Orbit Around Selection.

When enabled, it behaves more like I would intuitively expect. Another Blender Mystery solved, and it makes me appreciate this amazing work of art even more.

The other day I’ve been happily using the 3D Manipulator Gizmo in Blender and the world was at peace. The next day, I guess a new version must have come along or some other bit in the matrix was dropped, causing my Blender scene to no longer show that manipulator. Where had it gone? Was I imagining things again?

A quick internet search suggested to enable this option at the top of the screen. However mine was already enabled, and my gizmo buddy still wasn’t showing up. What was going on?