I was sitting with an empty scene open in Blender, and I was thinking about my next project. Then it struck me how vast the area of 3D modeling has become and most people don’t even know how much 3D content they see every day. There are many types of 3D modeling today. Everything from […]

Creating trees is often a very much-needed part of creating realistic renders in Blender. Especially when working with architecture visualization. Nature in your scene is essential and even if you are creating interior scenes you will often need some kind of greenery. After you enabled the sapling add-on press Shift+A and add a "curve->Sapling tree […]

Blender has many modifiers that can help us with many things. But there is a handful of modifiers that keep coming back, and we use them over and over. In this article I want to give you a starter kit of modifiers. The ones that will be the most useful and probably the ones you […]

Modifiers is the key to getting a lot of modeling done in a very short amount of time in Blender. When you have grasped the basics of modeling in edit mode, it is time to learn about them. Modifiers are calculations that procedurally change your object in Blender. You can manage them in the modifier […]

Sometimes the scenes we work with in Blender are so large that they don’t even fit into memory. In those cases, we get an “out of memory” error when we render in Blender. There are multiple ways to deal with this, but one way that does not have us trade away quality is view layers. […]

So far there is no equivalent for pointiness in Eevee. Instead, we will have to work around this problem to get this effect. How to use pointiness in Eevee? To use pointiness we have to bake it from cycles and use it in our Eevee material. In this article I will walk you through the […]

For this how-to guide, I will use Blender 2.81. We will go over the basic features of how to use the layer system known as collections in the outliner. We will also look at how we can work with some related features to organize our work better. Related article: 10 New or hidden features in […]

Saving files isn’t particularly hard. But sometimes knowing what you save can be a hassle. What is the difference between saving and exporting? Is that render really saved? How about that video I just rendered, where did it go? How to save in Blender? We save through the file menu or by using “Ctrl+S”. This […]

If you are starting to get your feet wet with Blender and you are now looking towards materials and how to use Blender nodes, you have come to the right place. For the seasonal Blender user there can also be gems here. After all, as we progress and become better artists we understand that the […]

Blender-OSM let's you import map data from the OpenStreetMap service directly into Blender. Are you a cartographer or Blender artist? I think both groups can enjoy Blender-OSM. I hope I qualify for the artist group, but really, I just want a 3D representation of my hometown in a couple of clicks. The goal of this […]

When I started out with Blender I often find myself making mistakes. There were many times in a row where I had to go back by using Blenders undo and history. Yet I often found myself stuck with too few undo steps. Much later I dove into this problem and much later still, I decided […]

In Blender 2.81 the outliner had a face lift with a range of improvements so that we can work faster with it. We will go over some of these changes as well as some older features that you may not know about.If you didn't know, the outliner is the list of objects and everything that […]

Blenders node editor, or shader editor as it is now called is a powerful tool to create any kind of material. Sometimes when we are working with materials we would like to save a set of nodes that we can reuse over and over again. This is where node groups  come into play. How to […]

Sometimes a particle system is just to much for a simple scattering of objects. In these cases the scatter objects add-on is a neat package that give us just enough control for scattering of objects on a surface. How to use the scatter objects add-on in Blender? Enable the Scatter Objects add-on. Select objects to […]

In this article we will take a look at how we can utilize Blender as Sketchup modelers and export/import textured models between the two programs. We will use Blender version 2.80 and Sketchup maker 2017. To export and import Sketchup files into Blender we will also look at a way to bring .skp files into […]

I needed a reliable way to render wireframes and came across freestyle rendering. I realized that freestyle was a lot of fun and had multiple uses. Everything from cartoons, to blueprints and wireframe rendering, can be made with freestyle. What is freestyle rendering and How to use it in Blender? Freestyle rendering is an NPR(non-photo-realistic) […]

Snapping is really one of those tools that you can't 3D model without. It is a good idea to get a solid understanding of what it is and how it works early on when you start modeling. Blender has several uses for snapping and different levels it can operate at. How to use snapping? The […]

Blender is first and foremost a software targeted at artists but sometimes you just want to build your house or some home DIY project and that is when measuring is important. Blender has multiple tools to accurately measure distances and support for multiple units. Another huge topic that needs accurate measuring is architectural visualization and […]

In earlier versions of Blender there was a system for setting up backgrounds in your 3D from the right side properties panel in the 3D view. However, in 2.80 and beyond this system has been removed. Instead, we use objects in our scene to act as the background reference image. How to set up a […]

Shape keys, or previously called Relative Vertex Keys (RVK) in Blender is a simple and effective tool to set up basic animations or different versions of the same object. In other applications shape keys can also be called morph targets. How to use a shape key in Blender?  Select your object. Go to the object […]