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. Ambientcg.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 we cover adding textures in Blender. Let’s do the quick way first and then we will go into more depth. Quick Start Guide: Adding Textures in Blender For the quickest way to add a texture to an object in Blender, follow these steps: Or watch the video for the same explanation. Essential […]

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) […]

Sometimes we need to open old Blend files and if the textures are not packed and we moved the textures from their original location, we may find out that our scene will display in pink when we try to render it. In this article we will explore how we can solve this problem. Pink surfaces […]

Making cloth in Blender using the cloth simulator is easy when working with flat objects. Making flags wave in the air and thin blankets fall on to couches is quick. But once you need thickness, everything suddenly becomes much harder. In this article, I want to go over a way to simulate the wavy feel […]

In the last post, physically based rendering and Blender materials, we looked at how the principled shader really works. We lay the foundation for our future material creation in Cycles and for Eevee when Blender 2.8 finally arrives. Here, we will take a close look at how this is all implemented in the node editor using image textures […]

With 2.79 the principled shader was introduced, now, much later with version 3.1 it is still the primary shader we use to create materials in Blender. Physically based rendering or PBR for short is a way for render engines such as Cycles to accurately describe a material. It lets the artist focus on the artistic […]