Mark B. Tomlinson

A technology and computer graphics blog, content provided without warranty.

First Post of the Year

I started the new year playing with some image textures for my models, in particular metal and rust: Example maps used above As an example of some of the textures I made here is a Steel and Rust one used on the shader ball I made. If you wish you can right-click and download them and use them on your own work as you please: Base Diffuse Colour Roughness Metallic Height Comments are off on this site, if you wish to say something you are invited to do so via Mastodon

5 January 2025 · 1 min · Mark

Xmas Gnome 2024

This year I went with a dark grey suit and hat, with the addition of a little colour in the form of the Christmas tree badge. Here is a copy of the Christmas tree in the SVG format, feel free to copy and use as you wish. Almost certainly this will be the last post of the year and so I wish you a peaceful Yuletide.

15 December 2024 · 1 min · Mark

Nearly missed November

I haven’t posted at all this month, I have been busy though so to make it before December here is a little model I made at the end of last month: I don’t think next month will be any better, we will see…

30 November 2024 · 1 min · Mark

Blender Volume Shader

Blender has nice newish shader node for doing Volumetric renders i.e. foggy, misty environments, called Principled Volume. The way I have been doing it recently is to add a mesh cube around the object in the scene, see the image below. Tip: it helps to set the Cube Mesh Viewport Display to Display as Bounds. The Shader connections are shown below, note the Surface input is empty, the only connection is to the Volume....

1 October 2024 · 1 min · Mark
Blender Bevel

Blender Bevel Miter Outer

Blender Bevels come with a few options that are worth checking out before applying them. The interesting one for most use cases is the Miter Outer to change the spread pattern of the bevel on the outer edge. The default one is Sharp and is shown below: The second one is an Arc: And finally the Patch: Personally I like the Arc as it gives nicely spread out geometry around the sides and results in less shading issues....

31 August 2024 · 1 min · Mark

August a Hairy Month

Almost the end of the month of August and I haven’t posted anything at all. So I managed to get one post in before I missed the deadline, a hair month indeed. I have, as you may have guessed, been looking at the hair system. I started with the old Particle system and them moved on to the new Geometry Nodes version that comes with Blender 4.2 and in my case the 4....

30 August 2024 · 1 min · Mark