Blender

Dark Days This year has not got off to a particularly good start, geopolitically at least, and do not worry this is not going to focus on that, it is only the basis for my current state of well-being. I am not one to get involved with online discussions that involve anything much beyond my interest in Computer Graphics and 3D modelling in particular. That is not to say I am happy with what is happening, it is just that, for the sake of sanity, I am avoiding it as much as possible right now. ...

And another year bites the dust: This has not been a particularly pleasant year for many. The world seems to be on the verge of some social implosion, it has become tiresome and depressing. Most, I think, hope that the next one will be better, personally however, I doubt it, and so don’t want to think too much about it. The global state of affairs has certainly affected my will and energy to post or comment, the later always a stressor due to others oft hostile reactions. So I spent most of the year doodling in Blender as a stress distractor and listened to a good number of books whilst modelling. ...

Lack Of Interest I haven’t posted in a while and missed June completely, I could come up with some esoteric reason but the truth is I just couldn’t be arsed. I have a lot of external things on my mind at the moment and writing a post for the web isn’t high on my list of things to do. That said I do hold with the idea of posting regularly even it isn’t anything of particular import. ...

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. ...