This month has been an unadulterated mess, geopolitically, but I am not here to post about that, politics are one thing I try to keep off line there is more than enough Troll fodder out there already. It has however been very nerving and frankly bewildering. So much of a distraction in fact I ended the month with little more than a pot, that’s it a pot. Perhaps because the whole month has been so damned potty. ...

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. ...

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: ...

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.

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…

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 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. The default seems to be -1125 and if you see a massive negative number then that is the problem. ...

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. So after booting up a very bright UI I edited from the main UI. ...