Adjusting the exposure in Blender can greatly enhance the overall look and feel of your renders. By correctly setting the exposure, you can achieve a more realistic and compelling image. Whether you want to create a moody, low-light scene or a bright and sunny one, learning how to adjust the exposure will give you more […]

Framing the camera in Blender can be a bit of a challenge when we're just working with the transformation and rotation tools. Blender comes with a much easier way of positioning our camera though, instead of manually positioning the camera we can instead just snap it to the viewport. So how do we snap the […]

No matter what you are making in 3D, environment textures in Blender are incredibly useful to get quick and easy lighting or even background images to make your work more detailed or even more realistic. And the best part? It hardly takes more than a minute to set up! To change the environment texture in […]

Lens flares can be a great way to spice up a render and give it a more realistic look. While we could add these effects in a separate program Blender comes with a built-in compositor that we can use to add these effects. So how do we do it? To create a lens flare in […]

Sometimes when we're modeling in Blender we may want to create a much more complex scene or object such as a castle. Modeling every individual element is very time consuming for such a large an intricate object. With kit bashing we can cut a lot of the modeling out and get straight to designing the […]

For many beginner Blender artists, normals can be hard to understand. What effect do they have on our 3D models? How do we control them and what kinds of normals are there that we need to worry about? A normal is a perpendicular vector of an object. In Blender, the object is usually a vertex […]

By far, the biggest difference between working with Eevee and Cycles is the lighting setup. When I got into Eevee, light probes were a foreign concept to me. Over time, I learned how they worked, but this is the guide I would have wanted back then. There are three kinds of light probes in Eevee. […]

For many beginners Blender artists lighting is postponed or neglected in favor of modeling and shading. Probably because it generally comes later in the 3D pipeline. But setting up a good base lighting for your project early on will help set the direction for your 3D project and art. Here are the best add-ons I […]

The light coming from the sky is often one of the primary light sources. In Blender terminology, we rarely hear the word skybox. Instead, we use phrases like world material or environment, but they are all the same thing. To set up a sky texture, go to the world material tab, expand the surface section […]

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 […]

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 […]

When talking about backgrounds in Blender, we may mean different things. But the most common is that we want to change the background for our finished render. To change the background in Blender we need to adjust the world material. This is a special material that is only applied to the world background. Let's continue […]

Ambient occlusion comes in many shapes and sizes and it can be hard to understand what it really is all about. Let's see how what and where ambient occlusion or AO as it is shortened is present in Blender and what we can do with it. Ambient occlusion is an effect that can be used […]

We can't use Bloom the same way we do in Eevee since Cycles does not have a bloom feature built into the render engine. Instead, we add the bloom effect in post-production. This is how we can do it. After your render has finished, go to the compositing workspace and check "use nodes". Between the […]

Let me break it to you: There is no shadow catcher for Eevee in Blender. However, we can fake a shadow catcher using the Shader to RGB node essentially making a shadowcatcher anyway. How to create a shadow catcher with Eevee in Blender? Add a plane below your object Add a material to the plane […]

The light path node in Blender has always been mysterious to me. While I have found it useful, many times I have not fully understood what it does or how it does it. To finally demystify it, I studied it a bit to learn how it works. Hopefully, this article can help you learn what […]

Many times when we create scenes we think a lot about the composition color and even light. But one thing that we often forget is the throw pattern of our lights. This is where IES comes in. IES lighting is essentially a text file that outlines how intense a light will be in any direction. […]

In this article, the goal is to outline the key points we need to consider when dealing with lighting and reflections in EEVEE for interior scenes. For cycles, we had the luxury of plug and play with an HDRI. Often that is enough to get a good base lighting for a scene. In Eevee, it […]