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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. In the […]
We have several types of assets to manage in Blender. Everything from textures to 3D models, hdri images and reference material just to name the most common. In this article I will show you how you can manage all this on a local or shared hard drive without add-ons in Blender. We can do asset […]
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 […]
I recently started to take deeper note about what options are available for the 3D viewport in Blender. I was accustomed to some features but I didn't know really how much choice I had and how an informative and good-looking viewport could help me make better art. To change the viewport shading mode, find the […]
When I first came across a situation when I needed a transparent image in Blender, I didn’t have any idea how to make that happen. But when I learned about shaders and the node editor, I found the answer. To use an image textures alpha channel in Blender we need to set up a material […]
There are so many sources for materials and textures available for Blender artists that it is starting to become ridiculous. The problem is no longer to find materials, but to find the best ones. Here I list the top 10 sites that gladly provide you with materials. Most of them even for free. Cc0Textures.com BlenderKit.com […]
There are many ways to create grass in Blender. That is probably because there are over 12.000 different species in the Poaceae family according to Wikipedia. Poaceae being just another fancy word for grass. Apart from that grass looks complex and is everywhere. We just need a good way to recreate it for many of our […]
In this article we will take a look at what displacement is and how to use it in Blender. Since Blender 2.8 we have two methods of adding displacement, and we will cover them here. How to use displacement in Blender? Select your object, add a displacement modifier. Press new and go to the texture […]
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 […]
In this article I explain how to use textures in Blender in the simplest way I can. I also want to expand on just adding a texture so that you can do simple adjustments when needed. How to add a texture in Blender? Go to the shading tab, drag and drop an image texture into […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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) […]
Not too long ago, I was revisiting one of my older Blend files. I browsed the archive and finally found it, opened it up and had a look. I quickly realized that something was wrong. The scene was a splash of pink shades, lighting up the room intensively. Any passersby outside my window would surely […]