There’s a fad of sorts that’s completely passed me by, had it not been for my friend Brian Cramer who experimented with it the other day: 360 panoramic videos. Apparently with the correct rendering format and resolution, and a bit of magic meta data, we can upload spherically rendered videos that the viewer can explore …
Vertex Colour information is great and all, but not if you have to be in Vertex Paint mode to actually see it. If only there was a way to display it in Blender’s Object Mode, ey? Thankfully there is! Head over to the Viewport Shading options (that little drop-down menu next to the Viewport Render …
It’s easy to setup rigid body physics in Blender, although far from obvious. I don’t do it often enough to remember by heart, so here are the basics: Physics Objects I’ll create a plane and an icosphere for this example, then move the sphere up above the plane by a few meters. Both objects need …
Alembic cache files play back automatically in Blender. At first it seems we have very little control over how this happens, but when we take a closer look at the Modifiers Tab, we’ll see that that’s the place where all the magic happens: We’ll see some path information and a Time section. Expand it to …
Let’s take a look at recovering badly saved or crashed files in Blender, and a quick setting that will improve the likelihood of recovery. It’s inspired by an incident at the coffee shop the other day, and I thought I’d share it with you and my future self. So while I was out at a …
You might have been as surprised to see Smart UV Project missing at first glance in Blender 4.3. If you’re used to the menu from 4.2 and before, you had expected to see something like this: Yet when you’re trying to use the same menu in 4.3 and above, all we see is this: What …
I had worked on the packed UV layout of a figure with the intention of using the resulting textures on the original model in Daz Studio. Trouble was, there was no way for me to import the new packed UV layout into the Genesis figure because I had modified the base model, so it didn’t …
Sometimes we may need to get rid of objects that clutter up our Blender scene. When it’s geometry that’s very easy to do: click on the object in the viewport or the outliner, the press X or delete and said object is gone. But what about unused textures, materials and material slots? Not so obvious …
Anytime I need to change the value of a slider in Blender, it works fine when I use my mouse and it doesn’t work when I use any of my tablet devices. Why is that, shockingly terrible design perhaps? Or a simple tick box nobody tells you about? Perhaps a bit of both! Thankfully I’ve …
I’ve just started watching An Introduction to Sculpting in Blender by Flipped Normals, which was available as part of a fantastic Humble Bundle this month. Henning has a lot of good tips, including tablet setup and frequently used brushes. Of course I forget these things every second of the day, and every time I open …
I’ve explained how to make your own HDRIs in Unreal Engine and Daz Studio before, but of course Blender can do this as well. I keep forgetting the settings though, so I thought a little article would be beneficial for both of us. Here’s how to do it: That’s it! The resulting HDRIs can be …
For modelling purposes, armatures can get in the way as you make changes to an object in Blender. Thankfully there’s an easy yet somewhat unintuitive way to remove them, let me show you how to do that. It helps to understand how armatures come into existence in the first place, and knowing that it’ll make …
Did you know that Blender has a handy way for us to navigate larger scenes just like in video games? The standard WASD navigation can be enabled with a single click, let me show you how. Head over to View – Navigation – Walk Navigation and start using the W, A S, and D keys …
Here’s something I didn’t know, until Grant Abbit explained it in this fabulous Rigging and Animation course on GameDev.tv: Blender has a way to show you exactly how much of a weight influence a vertex has if the object is parented to an armature. This can be important if you want to find out what …
I was wondering if we could bake normal detail into the 3D mesh, for either printing or further refinement during sculpting or whatnot. Turns out Blender has a relatively easy way to make it happen, although the process is not without flaws (after all, normal maps are rendering fake rather than an archival data storage …
Blender can hold various image files like textures and masks, making it easy to share a single file and include everything that’s necessary to render and work with it on another system. I wanted to work with a set of texture files that came with a character, but I didn’t want to manually export every …
Quixel Megascans assets are a pure marvel of detail and flexibility. I’m having great fun using 3D meshes and surfaces in Unreal Engine 5 thanks to the fully integrated bridge. What you may not know is that the Quixel Bridge was designed as a stand-alone asset library, with true one-click export options to other running …
Blender can combine images with its Compositor feature. Although I prefer to do use Photoshop for stills, the Compositor can be a great time saver for animations. Let’s see how we can combine a render with alpha channel and background image. I’ll use the cube with shadow catcher plane from my previous article, and the …
It used to be a major pain to setup a Shadow Catcher in older versions of Blender. Thankfully Cycles makes this a breeze today, but it’s still a little trickier in Eevee. Let’s take a look at both versions in this article. We’ll need two objects to illustrate this: a source object that casts a …
Scaling a HDRI requires the same node setup as rotating a HDRI in Blender: You can scale on both other axis as well to expand the HDRI horizontally and vertically, but overall scale is achieved just with the Y axis.
Blender has this helpful/annoying feature that any user interface customisations are stored with a file. This means that any window and workspace changes are saved with the .blend file, and this also means that if someone shares such a file with you, the UI may look completely different to what you’re used to. I’ve seen …
Blender has a neat way to transfer all vertex groups from one object to another. In this example I have a prepared pair of trousers on the left with vertex groups, and another pair without any groups. To transfer, I select the target object first (the one without groups), then SHIFT select the source object …
Blender has a nice feature that allows us to merge vertices automatically when we move them into the place of an existing one. As an example, if I grab an edge of my subdivided cube and press GG to edge slide it over to the nearest one, there would be two vertices in the same …
I’m notorious at forgetting shortcuts in Blender: just as I had remembered that any viewport can be switched into a quad view with CTRL+ALT+Q, I was stuck with another problem: the views I was seeing were locked, and I couldn’t change say a back view to a front view, or a top view into a …
Blender has a very powerful yet somewhat confusing re-timing feature. This comes in handy when you want to render animations at a different frame rate than they were designed to be in. As an example, you may have setup your scene with 24fps in mind, but want to render out a 60fps version, or vice …
Blender can do projection painting with textures that can be used as stencils. It’s super handy when it comes to transferring 2D images onto 3D objects. All we need to do is load in a texture, then rub it onto our objects in either Vertex or Texture Paint mode, as well as the new Sculpt …
A while ago I watched a nice video by CG Cookie about pouring some coffee into a cup in Blender. It’s a great starter video, even though I found it really tough to follow when I tried it for the first time. I thought I had made some notes on the process back then, but …
Blender has this habit of being a little different then perhaps any other 3D app. While it can deal with morph targets, they’re called something different and it’s entirely un-obvious how to bring them in (hint: it’s NOT the import option, nor in Edit Mode). I’ve just figured out how to do it and thought …
Many render engines have the concept of decals. Those are texture projections that can be thrown onto existing objects without having to amend the actual texture files. Footsteps and bullet holes in video games are examples of decals. I’m not sure if Cycles or Eevee have this concept natively, but there’s a relatively easy way …
Blender has a handy script built-in that lets us export multiple selected objects in our scene as separate objects. I remember mentioning this principle in a beefy article focussing on Unreal Engine workflow, but thought it would be neat to turn it into its own article. Here it is! Let’s assume we have several objects …