Mark B. Tomlinson

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....

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....

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....

I recently screwed up my Desktop Icons in Windows 11. I had been playing with the scaling factor and that had messed up the icon space scaling. The icons ended up with a massive hit size as shown above. To reset the icon sizes all you need to do is edit the WindowMetrics in the Windows Registry. Using the Registry Editor search for IconSpacing or follow the path in the image bellow....

This is for my reference I recently needed to revert the Kernel on my iMac/Linux machine. I had updated to the latest version, which caused a problem with the Brightness not working anymore. On an iMac that meant I had no way to adjust the screen, as it doesn’t have any physical buttons. I attempted to edit the grub file from the boot loader, but that didn’t work as there doesn’t seem to be an editor in the boot shell....

I had some fun recently with some pens and pencils, not real but rather virtual. Although the models are for the most part simple enough it was still a nice learning experience. I tried a few methods to model the pencils tip and in the end went with a Boolean cutter, which kind of fits with the real world. Basically a 3D pencil sharpener. Next, I decided to model a Stabilo pen, as I happened to have one laying around on my desk....