Blender Archives

Free 3D Content Creation tool. It can do everything. It costs you nothing.

How to make wheels turn in Blender 2.8

by

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.

Read more

How to replace an object with another mesh in Blender

by

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 …

Read more

How to orbit around selections in Blender

by

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 …

Read more

How to enable thicker outlines in Blender

by

With any software demo (or with failing eyesight as we get older), it’s important to have some visual aides so that your audience knows what you’re talking about. I’ve been streaming some Blender sessions recently, and I usually have my excellent little cursor highlighter tool called PointerFocus active. That’s good for viewers to follow the …

Read more

How to enable the 3D Manipulator Gizmo in Blender

by

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?

Read more

How to scale image textures in Blender

by

When I import regular OBJ files into Blender, they come in with a basic diffuse shader applied, with the texture file in the right place. Sadly, that texture is often scaled incorrectly. While it is possible to edit the UVs to make it all look handsome, there is an easier way for us to scale …

Read more

How to render a movie file as texture in Blender

by

I’ve been playing with a new title sequence for shiny new gaming channel, and I thought it would be fun to have a movie file playing on a plane object that’s seen as a screen in a cinema. I knew this was possible in Blender, but I didn’t quite know how to achieve it. After some tinkering I found out. Let me share my findings with you.

It’s very simple actually: setup a material, including a Texture Node, but instead of an image file, we pick a movie file (or image sequence). That’s really all there’s to it. The difficult part is understanding the settings in the Texture File though.

In the fourth drop-down, Movie was selected automatically when I added my movie file. This can be changed to Image or Image Sequence though, just in case yours is not set correctly. For the record, I’m using an MP4 file with H264 encoding, at 60 frames per second. The three following options are interesting (and important).

Read more

How to use the Blender Cloud Add-On

by

I’ve been a member of the Blender Cloud since 2016, and one of the benefits you get is that your local copy of Blender can interact with… well the Blender Cloud. You can access texture files, HDRIs, save your files, upload your renders and work in progress – all without leaving Blender. That’s cool! What …

Read more

Working with a Full Screen Viewport in Blender

by

In this quick tip I’ll show you how to go full screen AND immersive with Blenders viewport. I’ll explain how to remove the grey bar at the top and remove all tool shelves temporarily with a single click (or two). Enjoy! https://www.versluis.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Blender-Immersive-Viewport.mp3 Podcast: Download (Duration: 2:07 — 1.9MB)

Trying out Chocofur Asset Management for Blender 2.8 – 3D Shenanigans #24

by

In this episode I’ll try to install the Chocofur Asset Management add-on for Blender. It’s recently been updated to Blender 2.8, but right now not so easy to find on their website. Chocofur have lots of free assets to try out, perhaps we can work out how this works together. I was unable to get …

Read more

Duplicating an object along a path in Blender 2.8

by

The other day I tried to create a simple necklace in Blender 2.8, only to find out that the way I’ve once learnt from Blender 2.79 and below using DupliFaces no longer works. This feature has been removed from Blender 2.8. Thankfully there’s an easier way to do this, using the Array and Curve Modifiers.

For this example I’ll create a circle for our path, and an object I want to duplicate on it. Perhaps a UV Sphere. Make sure to apply all transformations after any scaling operations with CTRL + A.

Read more

How to bring back Selection Toggling in Blender 2.8

by

I’m so used to pressing A to select or de-select everything in Blender. It’s been so ingrained in my brain that I cannot easily get used to the new default behaviour in Blender 2.8. Thankfully there’s a simple tick box in the Preferences that will bring this option back, so there’s no need for my …

Read more

Rendering with Blender from the Command Line

by

I wanted to put some of my (old) computers to good use by helping them render animations. Everyone is stronger when we work together as a team, no matter if we’re built on carbon or silicone. Sadly though, Blender doesn’t start its GUI via RDP, which means it’s not so easy to speak to the application – unless you employ clunky workarounds.

That’s where the command line interface comes in handy. We can issue a text command to Blender, telling it which file we’d like to render, where to render to, and which frames of an animation to render.

Before I forget how this works, I thought I’d best write it down.

Read more