CG

That time again: End of the month once again and as usual I have been lapse in my blog posting. A combination of external distractions and a general lack of interest in everything at the moment. So, forcing myself, I have managed to do a last minute post, the image fits my lack of energy and I had fun making it, so all good. I don’t suppose next month will be any different as I seem to be in somewhat of a rut. Having said that I do like September and the end of the school holidays, which is a welcome change. ...

Some virtual fruit brought back to life Some years ago, back when I still using Modo as my daily driver, what a stupid term, as my main modelling tool, that’s better, I made some fruit models. I have been making a few icons for my stuff over the last years and thought it would be nice to bring the old fruit models over and freshen them up for use in Blender. ...

A brief recap of the week thus far: I have been busy experimenting with Blender again, this time on cosmetics and such as way to try out some different rendering environments. Normally I use a basic three point lighting set up with an HDR image as the fill light. Usually something fairly flat like a cloudy sky to give a balanced background light. ...

I had some fun recently modelling some diverse computer components. It started when I spotted a Ryzen CPU online and thought it would be interesting to recreate it in 3D. Initially I created an SVG plan of the chip from which to model. After the CPU I decided to have a go at a little Solid State Drive. I have this on in my machine so that seemed apt. ...

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. The settings I used in this demo are as shown and are a good start. The main tweaks are Density and Anisotropy, play with both to see the effect on the scene. ...

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 4.2.1 LTS version. After watching a short video or two, I managed to get some quite decent results. I will link to the videos at the end. ...

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. The pen was nice in its youth, but now old and drying out. It is too faint to be of much use other than light outlining and model reference. ...

I recently posted a quick video of a very basic and yet useful Node Group setup in Blender. I think it was a little esoteric and perhaps people didn’t think it a serious post. It was serious and for me very useful. So I decided to explain the Group here and perhaps others may find it useful too. The Node Group As you see there are no nodes inside the Node Group this is intentional as none are actually needed. The magic is done by the input connector, labelled Toggle above. See the settings for this below. ...

Some Moi3d and Blender models, in no particular order: ...