Pro lighting: Studio is one of those add-ons that has been around for quite a while. For me, it is an add-on that often gets used as part of my workflow, but in the community, it seems to live in the shadows of its slightly older brother, Pro lighting: Skies. Let's see if it doesn't […]
The gaming world has been thrown under the spotlight in recent years, with some becoming interested in exploring the alternate realities they have to offer, and others being drawn to the prospect of creating games themselves. While game development definitely takes skill and patience, the software chosen can have a massive impact on the process […]
I remember when I first started out in digital 3D art; I was really struggling to make anything look good in Blender. The pieces that I was neglecting were the lighting. Lighting is one of the most important pieces of any 3D scene. It can make or break any 3D project. The goal of lighting […]
There are many good add-ons for Blender making various tasks easier or at all possible. This is a list of the ones I have found to be the most useful as I work with Blender. F2 Node wrangler Power sequencer Animation nodes Bool tool Amaranth toolset UV Squares EasyFX Camera Manager MB-Labs Many of these […]
The most common use of a particle system in Blender is to scatter objects across a surface. Many times, this is vegetation or debris that we scatter in our scene using a hair particle system. Select the object that will emit your particles Go to the particle tab in the properties panel Press the plus […]
To use the 3D cursor effectively, the first thing we need to learn is how to position it correctly. There are a handful of tools at our disposal to position the 3D cursor either manually or precisely. We can position the 3D cursor precisely by using the snap menu accessed through Shift+S. Then use the […]
There is no official way or launcher that allow us to install and manage multiple versions of Blender at once. But since there are so many releases for different needs and with new features coming all the time, the need for a solution to install and manage multiple versions of Blender increase. To install multiple […]
The number of vegetation asset plug-ins for Blender has grown lately. Botaniq is one add-on among many today that battle for attention in this field. The question is if it is worth your time and money. I would say a definitive yes. I think this add-on and the assets are very well made and sit […]
Most Blender artists have had the issue where they cannot select an object. There can be many reasons for this, and most of them are simple once you understand them. Here are the reasons we will cover. You are in edit mode for a different object You marked the object as unselectable You marked the […]
Sometimes during our digital 3D art project we may find ourselves when we have stretching textures. A texture gets stretched to its limits when the corresponding UV map has no area. This may happen if we create new geometry on an already UV unwrapped and textured object. To solve it, UV unwrap the new geometry. […]
With the EasyFX add-on you can quickly add post-processing effects to your render in Blender without having to set up a compositing node graph manually. I used it for many of my quicker projects when I just need something to show, but it is also great for creating a starting point for further post-processing in […]
Sometimes a scene overflows with geometry thanks to poor use of the subdivision's surface modifier. It's hard to control and can become a performance hog as we work on an increasingly complex scene. Adaptive subdivision surface dynamically changes the subdivision level of objects based on the distance from the camera. We can use it in […]
During recent years, the number of marketplaces for 3D assets has increased and so has the number of artists that try to sell their 3D models online. Either through their own store or through one of these marketplaces. To get started selling your 3D models you need to have an account on at least one […]
The baking system in Blender takes a lot of critiques for being unintuitive, hard to understand and error prone. In this article, I aim to untangle the confusion about baking in Blender with Cycles. To bake from a material to an image texture in Blender, follow these steps: Choose Cycles as your render engine Add […]
Rendering is at the heart of what we do in Blender. When you are starting out it is good to understand how it works so that you can actually get some output to show and use. To render in Blender Press F12 for rendering a still image or Ctrl+F12 to render animation. You can also […]
For beginners or when using a tablet, the graphical gizmos or widgets can be a major help for making basic transformations in Blender. By default, the gizmo is hidden. You can activate it in the Gizmo menu found in the top right corner of the 3D viewport. Enable the checkboxes for move, rotate and scale […]
When it comes to rendering large and intensive scenes in Blender, memory optimization becomes critical. I have lost count of how many times Blender crashed for me thanks to using too much memory during rendering. Many times, the statement less is more, is something to really keep in mind. These are the primary ways in […]
A straightforward way to create a simple animation from your scene in Blender is to move the camera through it. This way we need only worry about animating a single object, the camera. To animate the camera in Blender, follow these steps: Set the play head in your timeline to the first frame Select your […]
As time passes many older 32-bit computers are being phased out. But there are some still out there and the most important question is of course if they can run Blender. The latest release of Blender does not run on a 32-bit computer. The latest release that had official support for 32-bit was version 2.80 […]
It is important that our objects get the right shading depending on the kind of surface and our artistic goals with the piece. By default, all mesh objects in Blender have flat shading. However, when we deal with round or organic shapes, we want the surface to be smooth, so that we don't get a […]