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 […]

Blender is very good for creating photorealistic shaders and renders, but sometimes we may want to create a more stylized or cartoonish shader in Blender, this is usually achieved by using a CEL shader. A cel shader sometimes also called cell shader, is a non-photorealistic shader that uses simplified shading to convey form. It is […]

When creating an object in Blender we will often need to give our objects a material/texture/shader. Material and Shader are often used interchangeably as well as textures being mentioned very often. So what do these terms mean? In Blender materials contain node graphs that make up the bulk of a materials content as well as […]

Mixing materials and textures is essential for creating stunning shading results in Blender. There is rarely a single clean material that on its own can capture the essence of a surface and therefore mixing becomes a crucial part of the shading workflow. This is how we can mix materials in Blender: Setup a material for […]

You have probably heard of PBR. But what is it and how do we use it in Blender? PBR stands for Physically Based Rendering. It is a loosely defined framework for storing data that is needed to recreate real-world material in a digital 3D format. We use it to store different material properties in individual […]

When we learn about materials and texturing in Blender it is easy to get stuck on tasks that for senior artists have become obvious and even hard to cover. Scaling textures is one such task that often is done without thinking. But for beginner artists it can be a challenge to find the right place […]

Sometimes when we're working on a project in Blender, we may want to composite our shadows separately or isolate them from the object they're being cast onto such as when we're compositing a render over a background. So how do we do that? To make an object a shadow catcher in Blender follow these steps: […]

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 […]

When creating art in Blender there are many cases where we may need a glass shader. Glass can add a lot of realism to our scenes and getting a glass shader right can be key to lighting our scenes in a convincing way. We will explore glass shaders for both Cycles and Eevee. To create […]

When I first started out using Blender, empties were a completely foreign topic to me. I had no idea why they would be useful. Today, I can't remember when I last did a project that didn't involve empties. An empty object is often just called an empty in Blender or empties for multiple empty objects. […]

Emission Shaders in Blender are a great way to add more detail and realism to your projects and renders. This article would be helpful for those exploring emission shaders for the first time, and can also be very helpful for more experienced users to understand more about the emission shaders and different ways they could […]

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 […]

Vertex groups are a useful tool when we want to mask things in Blender. Many modifiers have an input slot for vertex group, allowing us to only affect portions of the object. Likewise, we can use vertex groups with particle systems, simulations, and with a little trick convert them so that we can even use […]

Soon after you start to dive into nodes, shaders, and compositing in Blender you will come across the color ramp node. This is one of the most used nodes and it is important to understand how it works. A color ramp in Blender is a node that we can use in either the shader editor […]

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: In this article I will start by […]

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. Let's continue […]

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 […]