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: ...

Overview and Prerequisites This demonstration requires only one Add-On to be installed, it is one that ships with Blender by default, and it is called Loop Tools. 1. Create the Loop Cuts Add some loop cuts to create two vertices with at least four connected edges. In this example one vertical edge and two horizontal ones. 2. Select the Vertices Select two vertices top and bottom in this example. ...

I have been remiss in posting for a while and in April I posted nothing. The reason for this is the move I mentioned in the previous post. Well that and nothing really much of interest to say, apart from how much I hate cardboard now. May has had a slow start, still figuring out where to put stuff in the new place and how many curtains I need to hang, it is very bright here and I have four large windows, three full length with a door to open and a balcony, I know terrible. The problem is blocking the light from my screen in the daytime as it is very bright from behind. I have a solution for three of the windows and another pair of “blackouts” coming on the weekend, then I should be secure in my little dark man cave. ...

After nearly three years living here on the Elbe, we have finally found a new place back in town. Living out here has been a mixed bag of country calm, noisy garden machinery, and day tripper motorcycle madness. Post COVID has seen the later go from manageable to really annoying at times. The Elbe is not far from us, about 150m behind our house with the main shipping lane to Hamburg about 1.5km across the water, this means we often hear the deep drone of container ships coming and going, this is more noticeable in winter when the trees along the shore are bare. Worse than the sound though is the pollution from the ships. We never considered this, as we moved in here during the COVID lock down and so it was much less pronounced then. ...

A lot of stuff going on this month and almost none of it productive. February has been a month of waiting and hoping, details still under wraps as I don’t wish to jinx anything. The first half of the month was reasonably productive I managed to add a more features to the addon I am working on. It is almost complete and I will post when it is finished. I am still not sure if I will release it or just keep it for personal use. ...

Twenty Five days into the new year and I realised, I hadn’t posted on here yet. To remedy that, here is a short update post: Last year I was working on an Addon for Blender, more details when it is finished. Suffice to say I had the addon working and I’ve been using it for a while. I wanted to add some additional features and tidy up the UI and then perhaps release it. ...

It has been an interesting year, I have rekindled my interest in photography, which I had let slide for a long time. I even bought back into the Adobe software by renewing my Photography plan. I have been using Affinity apps for a few years now and thought they were all I needed, and for my renders etc. the tools were more than enough. However for RAW images and photo organising Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw are far superior. Despite the subscription nature of the tools I am more that happy with my decision. Lightroom has come a long way since I last used it and I am finding the results to be very pleasing. ...

In a previous post, one full of hopeless optimism and naive enthusiasm, I talked about re-launching my BlenderBits domain, see the About link above it you are interested in seeing the domain, for as long as it exists. Unfortunately reality has kicked in and I find, that in all honesty, I have neither the time, nor the interest in maintaining two discrete blogs, especially as they intersect on topics, Blender, so as this is the more generalised one, I have decided to use this one only. ...

This isn’t intended as a doctrine, just some food for thought For a while now, I have been using the gamma node in Blender as an alternative to the color ramp and the map range node. There are a few reasons why I like the node: It is light weight. It is a simple one slider does all node. The node inputs are easily exposed in a Group. I can use one Image texture easily to drive more than one input - see below. It isn’t a replacement for the other nodes, but for tweaking the levels it is great. I often use an RGB image texture and set the Color Space to Linear and then use a Gamma Node set to 2.4 to get a more realistic RGB output, 2.2 is the default but I think 2.4 is more colour accurate, or at least I read that somewhere. In any case it often looks better. Doing this allows for easy connection to Linear inputs for Roughness etc. ...