The Blend. One detailed technique for realism in Blender, in 5 minutes each week. By Samuel Sullins

I invented a cool insignia to use in the book I’m writing.

But just drawing it out wasn’t enough. I wanted to see it in action.

Solution: Blender, of course! After I got it working, I had to come here and write up a tutorial so you can make a battle banner too.

It’s been a long time since I’ve send one of these, so if you’re still reading, thanks for being here.

Read on to see how to hang any design up on a realistic, simulated battle banner.

*If you’re interested, follow me on Instagram where I post updates!

Today’s Technique

First, create the basic flag-shaped mesh. I started with a subdivided plane, then used the Proportional Editing and Extrude tools to shape it. The little bits hanging off add a lot of character to the flag.

Next, select a few pairs of vertices at the top of the mesh. Add them all to a single vertex group in the Mesh Properties panel. This defines where the cloth will hang from.

Now, in the Physics panel, add Cloth physics. Set your Pin Group to hang the banner from the vertices you chose.

In the Modifiers panel, add a Subdivide Simple before the Cloth, and a Solidify with a very low Thickness after the cloth to make it realistically thick. Add a Subdivision Surface after that to smooth everything out again.

Add one or more Wind force fields, and point them at the cloth. I had to turn mine up very high before I noticed any change in the simulation. You can also add a Turbulence field to make the wind force messier.

Now materials and texturing! Paint, draw, or otherwise create your insignia. In the UV Editor, unwrap the flag using Unwrap → Project From View, and position your texture. If you like, you can go to UV → Export Layout to export a template image to guide your texture creation.

Then, for more realism, you can download a free cloth texture (I used one from AmbientCG), and use a Color Multiply node to combine your insignia with the cloth. Also, mix a Translucent shader in for a semi-transparent cloth.

Now build the frame for the banner to hang from. You’ll need a tall cylinder for the pole, one for the crossbeam, some small supports, and a few cylinders or flattened cubes to make the “clips” that hold the banner on.

Then add basic materials to those parts, and you’re done.

If you want to get more advanced, you can use shape keys to animate the pin vertices moving closer together over the first few frames of the simulation, creating that nice rumpled effect at the top. But it’s not mandatory.

Then, get ready to render. Set up an HDRI and a Sun light. If you want to add more atmosphere, you can add a cube over the scene with a light volumetric shader for fog, and add in some sound on the final render (like I did here.)

Don’t forget to enable Motion Blur in the Render settings!

Featured Render

Today’s featured render is just my final result! Click to watch it on instagram. I even added a bit of sound which makes it cooler.

Instagram post

If you like it, hit follow so you can see what I make next, too.

Thanks for reading to the end!

— Samuel

For almost all tasks, Cycles is the best way to render in Blender.

But Cycles is really bad at one thing: realtime rendering. It has a lag, a delay before you see the final picture.

When you need to preview something you’re creating, when you need to work on materials and lighting, you turn to Eevee, where you can see changes as you make them.

They said it was “realtime,” right?

And it is. But as you switch it on, you realize that, for all its speed, it has turned your scene into the ugliest, most horrible, flattest render you’ve ever seen.

So you stop and give up.

Today we’ll fix that. I’ll walk you through the settings I use in Eevee to preview my scene with at least a small measure of realism, which is quite useful, especially when you’re working with an animated or simulated scene.

Here’s the settings I’m talking about:

First, the AO. AO stands for Ambient Occlusion, and it means “dark shadows in the corners.”

When you enable Eevee’s Ambient Occlusion, it makes your renders a whole lot less flat-looking. There’s also a Distance setting you can adjust, for more darkness or less darkness.

Next, turn on Bloom. This is like adding a Glare node in the compositor: it just overlays a nice blurry bright spot over anything really bright. There’s a Threshold value you can tweak if you want, to control what gets bloom.

Screen Space Reflection fixes the problem of no reflections. It doesn’t fix it all the way, though. All it does is render screen space reflections, which means generating mostly accurate reflections for shiny materials using what’s already been rendered onscreen. There is more you can do to get good reflections in Eevee, but don’t do it. It’ll get complicated and start slowing things down, and at that point you might as well use Cycles.

Last up is Motion Blur, which is enabled by default in Cycles, but not in Eevee. All it does is add motion blur to moving objects. I’ve had good and bad luck with this, ranging from “cool, realistic motion blur” to “Eevee just rendered my scene, flipped it upside-down, and pasted it somewhere else in the scene.”

So watch out for that kind of thing.

To conclude: use Eevee for previewing your Cycles-intended scene. Make it look nicer by enabling AO, Bloom, and Screen Space Reflections. If Eevee ends up slowing down, go back to Cycles, since it’s already slow and looks much, much nicer.

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about The Blend.

It’s been getting more difficult to create.

But I want to keep bringing you high quality content that helps you get better at creating realism in Blender.

That’s why I’m switching The Blend from weekly to monthly publishing.

You’ll get fewer Blends in your email…

But by moving to monthly, I’ll be able to put more work into each individual issue, and make sure it’s far more valuable for you.

Thank you for reading The Blend—I really appreciate you.

— Samuel

P.S. If you can, forward this to someone who’ll like The Blend!

P.P.S. If you’re not a subscriber, become one:

The Blend. One detailed technique for realism in Blender, in 5 minutes each week. By Samuel Sullins

When you jam together random bits of 3D metal to make something, it might seems slightly unrealistic:

That’s because you didn’t use any fasteners.

Bolts, rivets, or screws can make parts look much more realistically attached to each other.

Fortunately for you there’s an easy solution.

I wrote a book!

It’s called Low Poly 3D Modeling in Blender.

If you’re a beginner, you’ll find this book useful.

It introduces you to Blender, walks you through all the basic tools, and teaches you how to create your first final render.

Available for purchase now.

Today’s Technique

Before you start, you need to enable the Bolt Factory add-on.

Go to your Blender Preferences, find the add-ons section, and type in “Bolt Factory.”

Check the enable box to enable the add-on.

Now, let’s make a simple nut and bolt.

1. Press SHIFT + A, then add a Mesh → Bolt.

2. You’ll see a bolt appear. A bunch of other customization options will pop up in the operator menu. The default settings just make a normal bolt, so leave it as is.

3. Add another bolt. This time, change it from Bolt to Nut.

Arrange the bolt and the nut so you have this:

Then join both objects together. This is a super useful double-sided bolt now. You an arrange it in any mesh so one end sticks out, and it’ll look nice. Usually I want to see the side with the nut—but you might want the other side, for variation.

You can make a few additional bolts, if you want, and play with the Bolt settings to create some different variations.

I created a dome-type bolt and a Philips-head screw in addition to my first bolt. I deleted most of the bolt shaft for each of these, in Edit Mode, since we’ll never nee it—we just want the head.

Now apply a simple metal material to your new collection of bolts, and you’re on to the fun part: placing them. Scale them down to bolt-size, then position them carefully where you want them. Duplicate as needed:

Never get this close!

Up close, as you can see, they’re not great. But ideally you’re not going to be this close. In my case, I’ll probably never get closer than this ↓ to my bolts, so they don’t need to be any fancier:

They do what they’re supposed to do: add a tiny bit of extra realism to the model.

Featured Render

Today’s featured render is by SAuchterlonie.

It caught my eye because of the vibrant colors.

The actual modeling here is super simple—which is why this is so cool. It looks so bright and refreshing it actually makes you thirsty.

My favorite part is the glow of light from behind. It’s really well done.

↪ Reply to this email with your own render for a chance to get featured!

Extra Tip

If you’re going see one of your screws or bolts in a closer shot, texture it with an image texture. But keep it out of focus if you can.

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The Blend. One detailed technique for realism in Blender, in 5 minutes each week. By Samuel Sullins

In a basement…

On a spaceship…

In the back of an old van…

On the side of a building…

If you look for it, you can find foam insulation all over the place. Especially on more functional things (like spaceships.)

Next time you’re on a spaceship, look around. I bet you’ll see some insulation.

Spray foam is the most versatile insulation of all. It can be used to:

• Fill gaps and holes

• Cover seams between panels

• Seal around objects

Because it’s so useful in reality, it’s also useful in Blender—to add a whole new layer of realism to your scene.

In today’s Blend, you’ll learn how to create some nice useful spray foam.

I wrote a book…

It’s called Low Poly 3D Modeling in Blender.

If you’re a beginner, you’ll find this book useful.

It introduces you to Blender, walks you through all the basic tools, and teaches you how to create your first final render.

Available for purchase now.

Today’s Technique

We’ll create this in 3 phases: setup, Geometry Nodes, and material. It’ll go fast.

First, the setup.

1. Add a new Curve → Bézier curve. You’ll generate your spray foam along this curve.

That was all the setup. No idea why I made a whole phase for it.

Next, the Geometry Nodes.

1. Go to the Geometry Nodes tab.

2. Select the curve and press New. Name the new node group “spray foam.”

Since you know how to build nodes yourself, I’ll just show you a picture of the final result, then explain what it’s doing.

Explanation:

1. First is the Curve To Points node, which changes the curve to points. In Length mode, we choose how many new points to make as a multiple of the curve’s length.

2. Next we use a Set Position and a Random Value to mess up the points a little.

3. Next we use an Instance On Points to put an icosphere on each point. Two Random Value nodes make sure that there spheres all have a different rotation and scale.

4. Finally a Realize Instances turns the setup into a real mesh.

It’s looking like spray foam, but now we need to make it look smooth and blobby.

To do that, add a Remesh modifier with these settings:

Now the modeling is complete. On to materials.

Since we’re using a Remesh modifier, we can’t add a material to this object (it just doesn’t show up.) To solve this, we create our own “set material” modifier with Geometry Nodes.

1. Press Add Modifier > Geometry Nodes to add a new modifier, then click the New button on that modifier.

2. Name the new node group Set Material.

3. Add a Set Material node, like this:

Now that’s done. Go to the shading tab, add a new material, and name it Spray Foam. In your Set Material modifier, select this material.

Finally it’s time to set up the material nodes. It’s simple: we’ll use Noise Textures to create small bubbles in the foam and some color variation.

Here’s the nodes:

Now you have spray foam—but you can’t spray it yet.

Read on to get to the Extra Tip and see how you can spray this foam all over the place ↓

Featured Render

Today’s featured render is by Andrianiaina Toky.

..and it’s a realistic 3D snail made in Blender.

I’ve thought about trying to make a snail in Blender for a long time.

I’m glad somebody finally made one! It’s very realistic, too, with excellent materials. I also like the mushroom it’s on.

My favorite part of this render is the texture on the snail’s body. It looks very realistic.

↪ Reply to this email with your own render for a chance to get featured!

Extra Tip

To spray your foam on things:

1. Select your foam.

2. Tab into Edit Mode.

3. Press A then X to delete the entire curve.

4. Enable the Curve Draw tool in the sidebar, then select Surface to make it stick to surfaces when you draw:

This allows you to draw curves in your scene—which all get converted to spray foam. Now you can draw foam on anything!

Note that you are still in Edit Mode—when you go back to object mode, the foam will look better, since you’ll be able to see the Remesh modifier at work.

Pick next week’s topic.

The Blend. One detailed technique for realism in Blender, in 5 minutes each week. By Samuel Sullins

Every seen a bucket-wheel excavator?

It’s a stupendously cool mining machine that looks like this:

No, I didn’t Blend this. Sadly.

It looks like a big, complicated machine—and it is. But when you look at it long enough, you start to realize something.

It’s mostly made of one thing: those crisscross metal structures.

Turns out you can make all kinds of big, interesting creations, using those same metal structures.

In today’s Blend, I’ll show you how to start making your own huge metal structures.

I wrote a book…

Introducing Low Poly 3D Modeling in Blender.

If you’re a beginner, you’ll find this book useful.

It introduces you to Blender, walks you through all the basic tools, and teaches you how to create your first final render.

Available for preorder now. Releasing on February 2.

Today’s Technique

When you look up close at most metal structures, they’re not made of SOLID steel.

They’re always made of some kind of flat or hollow steel.

• Steel tubes (square or round)

• I-beams

• Angle iron (steel made in an L shape)

We’re going to use the last option, angle iron, because it’s really easy to create in Blender.

First, add a plane. Then scale it thin and extrude one long edge upward to make a shape like this:

Now you have angle iron. It’s paper-thin, though, so you need to upgrade it with a Solidify modifier. Make sure you turn on Even Thickness or it’ll look weird:

Now that you have angle iron, you can create just about anything metal. Give it a simple metal material (for extra realism, use a picture of some metal as an image texture.) You can duplicate, rotate, and scale this all over the place—but it’s difficult to imagine a whole structure that way.

I like to start with a building block I call “the Crate.” Once you have the Crate, you can build large structures quickly and easily.

This is the Crate. It’ll take you a few moments to build—simply duplicate, move, and rotate your piece of steel to make the shape. When you’re done, join it all into one piece by selecting all the parts and pressing Ctrl + J.

The reason we do it this way is so it looks fairly realistic—even if you get reasonably close, it still looks like metal welded together in a way that makes sense.

With the Crate, you can build all kinds of structures:

Once you have a structure mostly blocked out, it’s ideal to go back over it and add more specialized pieces of angle iron to hold things together where needed, or to make thinner, different-sized parts, like we see here:

Read on to get to the Extra Tip down there ↓

Featured Render

Today’s featured render is by Haewen:

I’m featuring this one because I’ve tried filling a glass container with particles before. It’s really, really difficult.

The way the ice cream and crushed Oreos are modeled inside the glass also looks realistic…and that’s even harder to achieve. So excellent work, Haewen!

↪ Reply to this email with your own render for a chance to get featured!

Extra Tip

Try making other units like the Crate—simple, re-useable chunks of steel structure that you can duplicate to create structures. A triangular version of the Crate is useful, as is a longer, flatter Crate.

Pick next week’s topic.

The Blend. Become a better Blender artist in 5 minutes each week. By Samuel Sullins

I’ve been putting this off for the longest time.

I really didn’t want to model an antennae.* It sounded like a lot of work.

Turns out it’s not that hard. Only took me an hour, and now I have an antennae to use in any project.

Before I started, I broke down my reference image and figured out what individual parts I would need, then created all of those.

Then all I had to do was assemble my antennae. In today’s Blend, you’ll follow the exact process I used. You’ll end up with one of these:

Cycles screenshot

A useful detail that you’ll have for any future renders. So it’s worth putting in the time now.

And if you need industrial or sci-fi windows for any project, here’s how to make them:

Don’t forget to vote for the next Blend! ↓

Today’s Technique

First, let’s break down the antennae. It’s made from repeating 7 different parts all over the place, and finally adding wires at the end.

I’ve labeled the parts “A” through “G” so we can avoid saying things like “select your quad-symmetric axial co-coupler.”

All of the parts are very low poly—this works because we’re never going to look at them up close.

First, make the easy parts.

• Part C: A long cylinder. You’ll use lots of C’s throughout this project; fat ones, thin ones, and thinner ones.

• Part G: Add a torus, then TAB into Edit Mode, select one whole half of it, and stretch it by moving it directly outward.

Now you need to make part B. This is the junction box for the wiring.

1. Add a cube.

2. In Edit Mode, make it a little taller.

3. Select all but the back face.

4. Press Control + B to bevel those faces and make rounded corners.

5. Select the center faces on each side and press Alt + E and choose “Extrude Along Normals” and extrude them inward.

6. Add a cylinder to the bottom.

7. Inset the back face, then extrude it outward.

8. Mash a cylinder into the back.

That’s it for part B. Now we’ll move on to parts E, D, and A.

These parts are all very similar. To make them, you use a combination of cylinders and distorted cubes. The cylinders are where they’ll connect to part C’s, and the cubes are there to connect the cylinders together.

Once you have your E, D, and A, you can make your F.

F is a very key part—it’s the tiny little holder that will attach the wires to the main part C’s. It’s just two flat cylinders with another connecting them. Don’t worry about its length. You’ll have to edit that later anyway.

Ok! All parts completed. Next, you’ll build the “main” antennae array. Here’s what it looks like:

This is very simple, really. One long part C, with a lot of part A’s attaching more, thinner, part C’s.

To make some bent pieces, tab into Edit Mode on a few of the part C’s, add an edge loop where you want it to bend, then select the end of the cylinder and move it a little in a random direction.

You’ll notice I also used a part D to make an interesting bit stick out of one end. This helps it seem random and realistic.

Once you have the main array, you’ll make a smaller array to go above it, and a central part C to attach them to:

After you have that, you need to add a second main part C. It’ll be connected using a part E and your part B. You may need to edit your part B here to make sure it all its cylinders line up nicely with the part C’s.

Now you need one last antennae array for the bottom. This one gets a part G on it:

Next, add two part C’s more legs. In Edit Mode, give them a loop cut in the middle so you can bend them slightly for a more supportive shape:

You’ve completed the antennae arrays!

Now all you need to do is add wires. These are simple Bézier Curve objects. Simply press Shift + A then choose Curve → Bezier.

Tab into Edit Mode on the new curve. Use the handles to position the curve like a wire. Select an end point and press E to extrude more points if needed.

To give the curve some thickness, click on the curve icon in the Properties Panel and open the Geometry subsection. Turn up the Bevel to add thickness to your curve, but don’t make it too thick.

I placed four wires on my antennae: two leading from the base to the junction box, and two leaving the junction box to hang in the air:

One you have all the wires placed, there’s only one step left: adding part F.

Duplicate part F’s all over the place, wherever your wires need support. Tab into Edit Mode on each one and adjust it so it fits the wire perfectly.

This is tedious but necessary.

Finally, after all those, you’re done! Join everything into one object, add a blackish material, and start sticking it on buildings.

Featured Render

Today’s featured render is by Shweta Sharma:

This render is very simple, which is why I liked it. Something about it feels very realistic, like it was shot on a cellphone or home camera.

The lighting also feels like accurate indoor lighting.

Extra Tip

Sky’s the limit with antennas like these. Just be sure you don’t stick too many of them on a building; there are never many of these on any building I’ve seen.

Pick next week’s topic.

*I have no idea how to spell “antenna.” Is it “antennae?” Or is that some kind of Latin plural? Is there a different way to spell it in the USA vs Europe? I can’t be bothered to look it up, so the spelling is inconsistent at best. Beware.

The Blend. Become a better Blender artist in 5 minutes each week. By Samuel Sullins

Recently I’ve been modeling some pretty strange bits and pieces.

I was modeling an operator’s cab for a vehicle, and I needed some pipes. The straight, non-curved kind that go on walls:

Do not ask why the pipe has holes along it.

That kind.

I used to try making these with curves (which is not fun.)

Instead, I found a great way to makes them with Geometry Nodes (and it only takes 4 nodes.)

That’s what today’s Blend is about.

Today’s Technique

I’ll break this into simple steps, then give you a picture of the nodes so you can skip over the steps and just look at the picture instead.

1. Add a plane. The edges of this plane will become pipe, so delete and extrude to taste. Small short sections and crazy angles don’t work well with this method. Try to make one long continuous line of edges (pretend it’s a pipe.)

2. Go to the Geometry Nodes tab. Click on New to make a new node group.

3. Add a Mesh To Curve node. Your mesh is now a “poly” type curve (this kind has hard straight edges and no curved parts.)

4. Add a Set Spline Type node. Set the type to Bezier. This will let us make rounded corners in the next step.

5. Add a Fillet Curve node. Adjust the Radius to taste.

6. Add a Curve To Mesh node to change it back into a mesh.

7. Plug a Curve Circle node into the Profile Object socket. Adjust the radius of the Curve Circle to change the thickness of the pipe.

8. Connect both Radius sockets to the Group Input node, so you can adjust them in the modifier.

9. Done!

Here’s the final nodes:

To texture the pipe, I apply the modifier so that it’s a real mesh, then add a UV seam down one edge of the pipe. You can line it up with your desired texture in the UV editor.

Also: pipes need little brackets to hold them to the wall. These are very simple: add a cylinder, delete the ends and part of one side to make a “C” shape, then extrude the ends to make little tabs. Add a solidify modifier for thickness, then duplicate and position it along the pipe (but not too many.)

If you really like details you can model a bolt and bolt it to the wall. I didn't.

Next up: the Blend has been rearranged! ↓

Featured Render

Today’s featured render is by Hrishikesh Bedre.

“Gold”

Not a ton to comment on other than “wow, that’s a lot of details, must have been tough to make.”

It’s really impressive.

Extra Tip

I did a post on big fat twisty pipes a couple weeks ago, might be useful.

New: pick next week’s topic.

The Blend. Become a better Blender artist in 5 minutes each week. By Samuel Sullins

My big project this week was a building implosion.

The goal was to

• Make a realistic final render

• Do it as easily as possible

My final render turned out pretty well. It’s a low-quality render though (I didn’t want to wait forever) and it has a major glitch halfway through.

Other than that it’s great.

As for doing it easily—it wasn’t. The final technique was easy enough, but it took a lot of tests to work that out. I learned a ton of new things in this project.

Animating the movement of the building was a big one.

(If you want to destroy your own building, here’s the tutorial ↓)

Today’s Technique

When something massive and heavy (like a building) starts falling, it doesn’t look the same as something smaller.

Since it’s huge, it looks almost like it’s falling in slow motion.

It starts moving so slowly, you can barely tell it’s moving…then it speeds up, faster and faster…then it’s gone.

In my original tests, I tried actually fracturing the building object and simulating the collapse with physics, but that became too difficult. It gave me the realistic motion for free, but was too hard to work with and didn’t look real enough.

Animating it by hand was far simpler.

The key is to have it start slow, really slow, and then speed up faster and faster. Don’t ever let it get too fast, though. Let it have that huge, slow-motion feel.

Extra Tip

Make sure you have a clear idea of what it is you want to create. If you don't you’ll have to try to fix major things halfway through, and that’s not fun.

Enjoy this email? Finally. Someone enjoys it!

Somebody forward this to you? If they die next week they won’t be able to forward the next one.

Sign up and you’ll get it anyway—no matter who dies. Seriously, I’ll send it even if you die.

The Blend. Become a better Blender artist in 5 minutes each week. By Samuel Sullins

Have you ever heard of JangaFX?

Probably not. They’re a random software company.

But the cool part is what they’re currently giving away for free: VDB files.

Let’s explain. In Blender, when you create a smoke or fire simulation, (which can be challenging) you’re working with volumes.

Volumes, in 3D, are used to represent smoke, and fire, and other simulations. A volume object stores data as a 3D grid of cubes called voxels.

If you have some smoke animated over multiple frames, you can save it (bake it) to a file. The file format you use will likely be .vdb, which stands for Volumetric Data Blocks.

Now back to JangaFX. They’ve created a selection of pre-made smoke and fire simulations (using their own software), which they’ve put on their website for free as VDB files.

And guess what? You can download these and use them in Blender quite easily.

Here’s how:

Today’s Technique

First, download a .vdb file from JangaFX.

These files are somewhat large, so make sure you have enough space before downloading (or choose a smaller file.)

Once you have the file downloaded, you need to import it into Blender.

1. Press Shift + A.

2. Choose Volume → Import OpenVDB.

3. Navigate to the folder with your VDB file in it. It will appear as a long list of files, one for each frame of the animation. Select all of them and import them.

Now you have your VDB object, and you need a material. The material for this will be simple: a Principled Volume node connected to the Volume output, with a Volume Info node connected to the Density.

(For simulations that include fire, connect the Temperature to the Temperature and turn up the Blackbody Intensity to make it glow.)

These will render best in Cycles, but do note that it will take forever.

As to what you should do with these…I really don’t know. I’m currently doing tests for a building collapse.

Really Random Render

Today’s random render is by littlenotlarge:

I don’t have a ton to say about this one.

I like it because it’s different and interesting. A tiny stylized castle is out of place on a realistic rock surface but, somehow, this one looks just fine.

And the lights in the castle are really quite cool.

I think some additional buildings or details (armies, villages, moat, drawbridge) might help ground it a little more

Score: 7 / 10

Can't think what to blend?

Make an alien monolith, but be creative. It can’t be a cube-shaped one.

Enjoy this email? Finally. Someone enjoys it!

Somebody forward this to you? If they die next week they won’t be able to forward the next one.

Sign up and you’ll get it anyway—no matter who dies. Seriously, I’ll send it even if you die.

Merry Christmas!

This has been quite an amazing year for The Blend.

I started late 2022 with exactly 0 readers. Today, we have nearly five hundred of you—loyal readers of The Blend.

Thank you all for reading. I really appreciate it.

Expect some interesting Blends in 2024.

I’m going to be starting some big new projects in Blender—and you’ll get to follow along, every step of the way.

I’ve got to go eat some Christmas cake now.

See you next week!

Merry Christmas & a happy New Year.

— Samuel

The Blend. Become a better Blender artist in 5 minutes each week. By Samuel Sullins

Recently I’ve been plugging away at my spaceship project. 

Right now, I’m creating an engine.

It’s a linked ion repulsor powered by electrically ionizing a xenon mixture (warning: this science is 100% made-up.)

I had trouble getting the level of detail I wanted until I discovered a cool trick. This new technique let me finish the engine quite rapidly with fairly low effort.

Here’s the trick:

Today’s Technique

There’s no quick fast way to get details. You really do have to sit there and spend time modeling them.

The trick is to only do this once.

You need to create a single useful piece of detail that can solve as many of your problems as possible. In my case, I needed to cover some skinny panel areas, so I decided to create a thin flat detail object.

It’s important to create a model that best solves the given problem. For example, this piece of detail won’t work everywhere on my spaceship. It’s only for solving the engine problem.

It took me around 20 minutes to create this shape, but saved me a ton of time in the end. To complete my engine I re-used this model all over the place, and it looks just fine.

Can you spot it?

In several places, I made slight changes. I had to bend one duplicate to fit around a curve, and I had to squash one duplicate to fit in a thinner spot.

All in all it was a massive timesaver. Instead of spending time creating a lot of different details, spend a bit more time to create a decent detail piece, then use that to its full potential.

Next we have a beautiful render:

Really Random Render

Today’s random render is by pompoko:

Based on a 2D work “Singing Doors” by Stefan Große Halbuer

I only have good things to say about this render.

Here’s a little list of them:

• The thick, clay-like styling.

• The simple-but-not-low-poly style.

• The limited color scheme.

And of course my top favorite bit: the plaster flaking off the brick wall.

Score: 10/10

Can't think what to blend?

Make an electrical outlet.

P.S. I just released a new short fiction story. Last week I promised it would include a 3D render, but the render flopped. So it got 2D art instead :)

Waterfall

At the end of Time, there was a waterfall.

voyagefiction.substack.com/p/waterfall

P.P.S. Huge thanks to everybody who’s already joined Voyage!

Enjoy this email? Finally. Someone enjoys it!

Somebody forward this to you? If they die next week they won’t be able to forward the next one.

Sign up and you’ll get it anyway—no matter who dies. Seriously, I’ll send it even if you die.

The Blend. Become a better Blender artist in 5 minutes each week. By Samuel Sullins

Remember my realistic lunar surface project from a few weeks ago?

Stop remembering it. I’m starting something better. (I’ll get back to that eventually.)

Spaceships.

I blocked out a gigantic spaceship, but it didn’t take me long to realize that I had no idea how you actually build a spaceship, after the blocking-out process.

Instead, I’m starting a smaller, more manageable ship. It’s a fuel-hauling ship, used for refueling bigger spacecraft. I’m learning a lot of new techniques as I try to create interesting details and intentional bits of spaceship structure.

One thing stands out, though: pipes.

Big pipes, bundled together with small ones, look very realistic for some reason.

Today I’m showing you a great way to make these giant bundles of pipes. “Great” because it’s easy.

Today’s Technique

First, add a new Bézier Curve to your scene. Tab into Edit mode and make it into an interesting pipe shape. This will become your interesting pipe.

Next, you need to create a curve profile. This is a shape, made of curves, that represents a cross section of your pipe bundle. To create it, add a Curve Circle to your scene.

A Curve Circle is just a circle made out of curves—exactly the same as the curve you added earlier. Press 7 to view your scene from above, then select the circle and tab into Edit mode.

In Edit mode, create an interesting pipe bundle cross section by duplicating and scaling the circle. Keep it asymmetrical, use at least 3 sizes of pipe, and make sure it’s generally circular as a whole (so it’s not too weird when we twist the pipe later.)

Here’s my profile curve. It’s best to keep it centered around its origin point (yellow dot) but I forgot.

Since you made it entirely in Edit mode, it’s still one single object. That’s important for the next step.

Select your other curve, open the Curve tab in the Properties Panel, and under Geometry, set the Bevel Mode to Object. Click the eyedropper and select your profile curve.

Now BOOM! You have an awesome pipe bundle. To make it thinner or thicker, just scale your profile curves (in Edit mode.)

The last step is to twist the pipes. Twisted pipes would be very hard to create in the real world (how would you twist them all together like that?) but a little bit of a twist looked more realistic to me.

Tab into Edit mode on your big pipe curve (not the profile / cross section curve) and select a vertex. Open the N sidebar, and adjust the Tilt.

Your pipe will twist as you adjust it. You can adjust each point on the curve. The less points your curve has, the better the twist looks, since it’s not segmented / broken.

Final result:

It may be too twisted in this example. They’re starting to look more like wires (which is fine, if you want wires.)

I didn’t want wires.

Really Random Render

Today’s random render is by Jose Gordaliza.

I like this render for two main reasons:

• It’s mechanical / manmade (which is always interesting, because it’ll be packed with details)

• It’s ancient and destroyed.

Old, destroyed bits of machinery generally always make for amazing renders. The realistic texturing in this render helps a ton (he explains how he did it here.) He also explains that the rotting moss / jungle effects were painted on after the render.

The machine details are very interesting here. This would be very cool as some kind of animation.

Score: 8/10 (Relies a bit too much on post-processing work. I like nearly-all-3D renders.)

Can't think what to blend?

Make something soft and kind of see-through. Cheese, apple slices, French fries, little bits of shredded furniture foam…

P.S. If you enjoy this newsletter at all, check out Voyage Fiction. Subscribe to get my new one this Friday (which will feature a cool render.)

Ivory Judgement

A young woman faces "justice."

voyagefiction.substack.com/p/ivory-judgement

P.P.S. Some of you have been reading Voyage already—supermassive thanks to you!

Enjoy this email? Glad it made you happy. I’m happy too. That’s 2 people you’ve just made happy. Why not forward this to someone and make another person happy?

Somebody forward this to you? Just think—what if they die next week, and can’t forward you the next one?

Sign up and you’ll get it anyway—no matter who dies. Seriously, I’ll send it even if you die.

The Blend. Become a better Blender artist in 5 minutes each week. By Samuel Sullins

Greetings!

Back to low poly today.

Every time I see a stunning low poly scene, it’s got a bunch of those “low poly masses” in it. Big huge jumbles of faces that somehow still look not-ugly. Usually it’s representing rocks or ice or dirt or something else large and messy.

I’d never worried about modeling messy masses like those. If I ever needed one I figured I’d just “throw some random displacement on a mesh.”

Well, I needed one yesterday. And “random displacement” didn’t work. Not right away. It took me about 30 minutes longer than expected to figure out a nice way to do it (the trick is the mesh you start with.)

It turned out nice after that, especially when I stretched it on the Z axis. See, I made icebergs (epic soundtrack included) ↓

(*note: this render was not wholly my idea. Credit goes to a random AI-generated concept I saw on LinkedIn.)

So: save your future self 30 minutes. Learn how to make a big massive mess of low poly goodness ↓

Today’s Technique

DON’T delete the default cube.

Select it, then go to the Geometry Nodes tab and hit New for a new node setup.

This is the system that gave me the best result:

1. Subdivide the cube.

2. Displace the cube horribly, using a noise texture.

3. Instance icospheres on each vertex of the cube, with random rotation and scale.

4. Realize those instances (turn them into a real, editable mesh.)

5. Displace that mesh with more noise.

If we only displace the cube, we get a result with a lot of unpleasant intersections due to it being only one face thick. The piled icospheres give us a lot more mesh to work with, and the triangular face shape ensures no impossible polygons get created, and even better, less displacement is required to make interesting shapes.

Here’s the setup so you can make it yourself:

I promise the nodes didn’t actually look that complicated until I crammed them all together to take this picture. Seriously, this will only take you 5-10 minutes to build & enjoy.

You could probably improve it with size and strength and random seed controls too.

Keep scrolling for a truly cool thing ↓

Really Random Render

Today’s random render is by Michael Obrycki. 

The Discovery

It’s really cool. It feels like a scene from a movie.

My favorite parts of this render:

• The hustle hints that this is a man (or alien)-made world: the sharp, straight edges of the cliffs / monoliths in the background. A subtle but awesome detail.

• The giant orange glowing ring. This is neat because it’s realistic but also feels stylized in a way.

• The human. Helps so much with scale and since he’s wearing a Sith outfit it makes the scene scary.

Score: 9/10 (because something about that tree looks a little fake to me. Maybe the way it’s growing out of solid rock.)

Can't think what to blend?

A “small pocket-sized weapon.” Invent something new that no one’s ever seen, like a…just kidding. Think of it yourself.

P.S. If you enjoy this newsletter at all, check out Voyage Fiction. I write short stories there. Here’s my latest one (there’ll be a new one soon):

Ivory Judgement

A young woman faces "justice."

voyagefiction.substack.com/p/ivory-judgement

P.P.S. Some of you have been reading Voyage already—supermassive thanks to you!

Enjoy this email? Glad it made you happy. I’m happy too. That’s 2 people you’ve just made happy. Why not forward this to someone and make another person happy?

Somebody forward this to you? Just think—what if they die next week, and can’t forward you the next one?

Sign up and you’ll get it anyway—no matter who dies. Seriously, I’ll send it even if you die.

The Blend. Become a better Blender artist in 5 minutes each week. By Samuel Sullins

If you think eating cheese (this stuff → 🧀) is about as fun as napping on the slopes of an active volcano amongst the clustered nests of freshly angered fire ants, stop reading. I’m going to be saying “cheese” a lot in this one, and it’ll probably give you a bad taste in your mouth or something.

Back when Blender came out with the Volume Cube node, people made lots of helpful tutorials.

My favorite tutorial was one showed how to make cheese using the new node.

It’s a very interesting setup, and it makes very accurate cheese. You can do a lot of other things with the Volume Cube node, too, like making 3D fractals (if you understand that kind of math. I don’t.)

The point of today’s newsletter is simple: you learn how to use the Volume Cube node to make cheese.* This knowledge will apply to other projects (I’m sure.)

*it’s going to be square cheese until I learn a lot more math

Today’s Technique

Let’s dive in. First thing you need is a new Geometry Nodes setup.

1. Select the default cube

2. Go to the Geometry Nodes tab

3. Press New to make a new Geometry Nodes setup.

Next you make the nodes. Here’s a picture of the whole node tree. Set up the nodes, then I’ll explain what they’re for. (If you don’t see the image, click here to read this online. You can right-click the image to open it in a new tab with more detail if you need.)

The whole Geometry Node setup.

Here’s what’s happening.

1. The Volume Cube node gives us a cube made of voxels, like a smoke simulation. You can think of voxels like 3D pixels. We get controls for the density and resolution (amount) of voxels.

2. We use a Voronoi Texture + Color Ramp to control the density. This creates spots of lower density in the volume cube (which will currently look like fog in the viewport.)

3. We convert the volume to a mesh with Volume To Mesh node. Next, we shade it smooth, and set a material.

See what the Volume Cube does? It gives us a very powerful tool—a way to work with an object that is essentially solid, instead of just a surface made of faces. View your cheese in wireframe mode to see the way the holes exist throughout the final mesh.

The cheese remains cube-shaped, of course. But it does really look like cheese. Because of the realistic way the bubbles exist throughout the whole mesh, it looks a lot better.

The cheese cube.

There are a few ways we could change the shape:

• Use math to generate the exact shape we want by controlling the density, like the Voronoi texture is right now

• Use a boolean cutter to gouge the shape we want out of the cube

If you do find a way to get a different shape, hit reply and let me know. I’m terribly interested.

And if you want my material, it’s just a simple Principled BSDF with subsurface turned up:

The cheese material

Next have a look at this awesome Geometry Nodes tool ↓

Really Random Render

Today’s random render is not really a render.

Not a video. But if you click on it you’ll go to one.

It’s an awesome tool, developed by a superb Blender artist called Jesse Miettinen. It automatically generates water stain textures for any object, which you can then use to add water stains to your model.

I don’t know how it works (yet.) It’s made with Geometry Nodes and some plain old Shader Nodes, too.

What I do know is that it’s very impressive in the demo video. And—amazingly—he’s giving it away free. Not sure how long that’ll last, so get it now.

I don’t have much else to say other than “this is cool and I’ll dissect it later to see how it works then probably make a much simpler version for my poor brain to understand. And don’t forget to get the latest version of Blender before you use it.”

Can't think what to blend?

Try to make macaroni & cheese (in Blender of course.) It’s harder than it sounds.

P.S. If you enjoy this newsletter at all, check out Voyage Fiction. I write short stories there. Here’s my latest one:

Ivory Judgement

A young woman faces "justice."

voyagefiction.substack.com/p/ivory-judgement

P.P.S. Some of you have been reading Voyage already—massive thanks to you!

Enjoy this email? Glad it made you happy. I’m happy too. That’s 2 people you’ve just made happy. Why not forward this to someone and make another person happy?

Somebody forward this to you? Just think—what if they die next week, and can’t forward you the next one?

Sign up and you’ll get it anyway—no matter who dies. Seriously, I’ll send it even if you die.

The Blend. Become a better Blender artist in 5 minutes each week. By Samuel Sullins

You didn’t get The Blend last week.

Must have been devastating. I know because I didn’t get one either.

I was sick.

It’s the first time I’ve missed a week in 49 weeks (unless I really missed a week and still don’t know about it.)

Today I was sitting around thinking how sad that was when I realized who’s supposed to be writing these.

So I dove into my desk and got typing.

When you sit down to start a new project in Blender (or anything) it can be somewhat daunting. It’s difficult to know how exactly to begin.

Today I’ll show you how I start a project. Maybe it’ll be helpful. If not, then ignore it.

Today’s Technique

The other day I decided I wanted to render the moon. Not the whole thing—just a surface view of the moon, like we see in Apollo pictures.

I did that once before, but it was very simplified and…lame. In that version, I used Geometry Nodes to make a simple surface plane, then I scattered some ecospheres. Nothing special.

This time, I wanted it to be totally realistic.

The first thing I did was reference images. I collected a few that looked like something I wanted to create. Since I’m going for a perfectly realistic look, I avoided computer generated or manmade reference photos.

Then I got started in Blender. My approach is usually just to jump in and mess around, with the goal of seeing how hard the project is going to be.

It was easy at first. I set up a quick ground, a quick material, and started playing around with space-y lighting. All the fun stuff.

After about an hour, I realized that this was much harder than it looked. That “the fun stuff” wasn’t going to make it work at all—it needed some serious work.

So I ditched the first try, and started again. Very detailed noise for the terrain this time, with several layers. A more carefully crafted material. A more interesting lighting setup. Everything was very high detail.

It’s going to work this time, I thought. Even though I’d only spent a couple of hours on it.

Of course it didn’t work. Didn’t look anything like my reference—which, I realized, was the problem. I decided to break my problem in to a lot of smaller problems. Lights. Materials. Moon rocks.

I decided to tackle the material first. I’m still doing that, now—the project’s not near done yet.

But I’m refining my process, I think. It’s important to jump in and start a project—but also to know when you’ve failed. I would have saved time by changing approaches earlier. I would have saved a lot of time if I’d tried breaking it down from the start, and paying really close attention to the reference images.

I’ll let you know how the project turns out. In the meantime, check out this miniature render:

Really Random Render

Today’s random render is by an artist called thinsoldier. I like this render because it’s not quite like any other style I’ve seen.

Some favorite things about this render:

• It’s pleasant to look at. When you see it on the page you really do have to stop and look at it.

• The tiny-ness of everything. That car. Those windows and buildings. It feels like a big place that’s really small—if you know what I mean.

• The water. The waves were done at a tiny scale, so that the island would feel big in comparison. Also, whatever is under the water is awesome, because it gives it depth. Seems extra deep, but also like it’s no deeper than my fingernail.

Miniatures are some of my favorite renders.

Can't think what to blend?

A flower. A flower farm or a garden with flowers, or maybe a dried flower.

P.S. If you enjoy this newsletter at all, check out Voyage Fiction. I write short stories there. Here’s the latest one:

Ivory Judgement

A young woman faces "justice."

voyagefiction.substack.com/p/ivory-judgement

P.P.S. Some of you have been reading Voyage already—massive thanks to you!

Enjoy this email? Glad it made you happy. I’m happy too. That’s 2 people you’ve just made happy. Why not forward this to someone and make another person happy?

Somebody forward this to you? Just think—what if they die next week, and can’t forward you the next one?

Sign up and you’ll get it anyway—no matter who dies. Seriously, I’ll send it even if you die.

The Blend. Become a better Blender artist in 5 minutes each week. By Samuel Sullins

Ever heard of Pelopoly?

He’s a professional low poly 3D artist, a guy called Evgeny.

He agreed to record an interview with me. We’re on opposite sides of the planet, so it was late at night for me and early in the morning for him.

On top of that, the call was a bit laggy.

But he had a ton of great things to share!

So new format today: I’ll go over some of the main points we covered in the interview. You can watch it here if you like:

Here’s some of the things Evgeny shared about his own process and how he does things.

Keep an idea notebook.

Evgeny writes ideas in a notebook whenever they come to him. Since he’s always recording ideas down right when he thinks of them, he never has to worry about not having enough ideas.

He also recommends drawing ideas instead of just writing them down. It’s easier to remember your original art idea when you can see what it looks like.

Constraints are useful.

Evgeny created a single new render every single day for 100 days. That’s a ton of work. To make it more manageable, he gave himself a constraint: he could only spend 1 hour on each artwork. This made him waste less time on things that didn’t matter.

Color-correct your render.

Color-correcting is simple editing you do when your render is complete. Simple changes, like contrast, exposure, saturation. Once you learn to do this you won’t be able to go back. It’s crucial for an even half-decent render.

“Low poly” is not always “low poly.”

People often refer to “low poly” models, or objects, or scenes. But often, they simple mean simple, optimized 3D objects.

Low poly has another meaning, though. It’s an art style where the complex is simplified. Where everything is simplified, but rendered in a realistic manner. You might even find a higher poly model in a a low poly scene (though very rarely.)

Knowing about photography can improve your renders.

If you know some photography basics—things like camera settings, basic lighting—you can apply this real-world knowledge to Blender. IF you are able to understand these kinds of principles in real life, Blender will make more sense and you’ll have a better understanding of how to achieve what you want.

Ok. Now you really need to watch the video for the rest. ↑

Can't think what to blend?

Anything with fire. Candles, missiles, forest fires, demolition fuses, solar flares

P.S. Finally released a new story! It’s an interesting new format. I think you’ll like it; I did.

Ivory Judgement

A young woman faces "justice."

voyagefiction.substack.com/p/ivory-judgement

Enjoy this email? Glad it made you happy. I’m happy too. That’s 2 people you’ve just made happy. Why not forward this to someone and make another person happy?

Somebody forward this to you? Just think—what if they die next week, and can’t forward you the next one.

Sign up and you’ll get it anyway—no matter who dies.

The Blend. Become a better Blender artist in 5 minutes each week. By Samuel Sullins

note: scroll down to get a video!

I mentioned this briefly last week, when I went over what’s new in Blender 4.0.

But today we’ll take a deeper look, because the biggest new feature in Blender 4.0 will be Node Tools.

Why?

Because it will let everybody—even people who don’t want to mess with nodes—take advantage of node-powered workflows.

Artists will start sharing and selling Node Tools as a simple way to add extremely powerful functionality to Blender, without have to worry about developing and add-on or writing any code.

Anybody can make a brand-new tool and share it.

So you’ll need to know how to:

• Create a Node Tool

• Use a Node Tool made by someone else

Today I’ll show you how you can do both of those.

Today’s Technique

First, here’s how you make a Node Tool. I’ll just give you some bullet points so you can read it as fast as possible, then go try it out.

• Open Blender 4.0 or greater.

• Go to the Geometry Nodes tab.

• Change the context dropdown in the upper left of the node editor from “Modifier” to “Tool.”

• Press New and name your new Node Tool.

• Build your tool. You have access to a few special nodes, if you need them: Set Selection, Selection, and 3D Cursor.

Now you can go into Edit Mode on any object and click this new button:

The new Node Tool button (only in Edit Mode, and only when you have available Node Tools)

You’ll see your tool in the menu. Click it to run it. Any inputs you’ve created will appear in the lower-left-corner Operator Menu, like they do for real tools.

Sharing Node Tools

To share your new tool, just go back to the Geometry Nodes tab, right-click on the name of your node tool (in the top of the node editor) and click Mark As Asset.

Now that it’s an asset, all you have to do is send the file to someone to share the tool with them.

Using Node Tools

Using a node tool is easy with Blender’s Asset Library feature.

Now all you have to do is drag the file with the node tool in it into your asset library folder.

After that, you have to do something magical—nothing. Nothing at all, and it’s ready to use.

In any Blender file you open, as long as your asset folder is imported in Preferences, your node tool will be ready to go, available in Edit Mode in the Node Tool menu.

Watch a video explaining it all

Now let’s see a cool render…

Really Random Render

Today’s random render is quite a change—a realistic environment by Piotr Krynski. Piotr is an expert environment artist, working in Blender. He often creates incredibly stunning shots to promote his products.

This one isn’t new, but it’s amazing.

I like this render for several reasons:

• It’s realistic. Nothing about this render screams “fake!”

• It’s detailed. Down to the hair-thin wires hanging from the robot and the puddles in the street.

• It shows motion. The character’s coat is blowing in the wind; the tarp over the robot is caught in the same breeze.

And, overall, it’s just really cool.

Can't think what to blend?

Do a snail. Some kind of snail, or something snail-related. Do a new spin on it.

P.S. If you enjoy this newsletter at all, check out Voyage Fiction. I write short stories there. We’ll be releasing 6 more brand-new stories this year; subscribe to get them all.

P.P.S. Some of you have been reading Voyage already—massive thanks to you!

A Fool Dies

Soldiers are caught plotting against the General...

voyagefiction.substack.com/p/a-fool-dies

Enjoy this email? Glad it made you happy. I’m happy too. That’s 2 people you’ve just made happy. Why not forward this to someone and make another person happy?

Somebody forward this to you? Just think—what if they die next week, and can’t forward you the next one.

Sign up and you’ll get it anyway—no matter who dies.

The Blend. Become a better Blender artist in 5 minutes each week. By Samuel Sullins

Blender 4.0 is coming out this November.

If you read last week’s Blend, you know how to get the beta version before it’s officially released.

That’s cool, of course.

But what can it actually do?

*note: this post include a VIDEO!

Today’s Technique

There’s a lot of tiny but useful features in Blender 4.

Here’s the highlights:

• Loops (repeat blocks) in Geometry Nodes

• When you press Shift + A to add something you can just start typing to search the menu

• They changed the font

• The Snapping menu gives “Align rotation to target” for all types of snapping

• The new color management, AgX, does bright emissive lights more realistically than the current setup (Filmic)

• You can navigate the viewport while moving, rotating, or scaling objects—as long as you hold down Alt

• The Voronoi texture has been granted 3 new controls for adding multiple layers of noise

• There’s a new “save incremental” you can use to save multiple versions of a project as you work on it

• Node tools lets you build your own Edit Mode tools with Geometry Nodes

• And my personal favorite: the Add Modifier menu has been organized like a normal menu.

I would write a huge detailed explanation of all this, but it’d take all night. If you’re curious for details, here’s a brand-new video where I show how to use all these features (and a few more cool ones).

I labeled the different sections so you can just skip to the parts you like.

Really Random Render

Today you get another Jona Dinges piece.

An entire creepy seer guy done in low poly. The most impressive part is that Jona actually made cloth.

The cloth alone is very impressive.

My favorite thing about this render is the detail. It’s all clearly low poly, but the raven, necklace, and stick add a lot of character while staying simple.

The red rim lighting is also a great touch. It reinforces our impression that this guy is up to no good.

Can't think what to blend?

That’s a bummer. You should think harder. See if there’s any inspiration in your garage or something. I don’t want to think of anything for you.

P.S. If you enjoy this newsletter at all, check out Voyage Fiction. I write short stories there. We’ll be releasing 6 more brand-new stories this year; subscribe to get them all.

P.P.S. Some of you have been reading Voyage already—massive thanks to you!

A Fool Dies

Soldiers are caught plotting against the General...

voyagefiction.substack.com/p/a-fool-dies

Enjoy this email? Glad it made you happy. I’m happy too. That’s 2 people you’ve just made happy. Why not forward this to someone and make another person happy?

Somebody forward this to you? Just think—what if they die next week, and can’t forward you the next one.

Sign up and you’ll get it anyway—no matter who dies.

The Blend. Become a better Blender artist in 5 minutes each week. By Samuel Sullins

Blender’s always getting updated.

The folks at Blender.org are constantly working on it. Adding new features, fixing bugs.

There’s a new release every 4-5 months.

But the beta version of that release comes out earlier.

Beta just means “still kinda buggy.” So you can get the latest version of Blender before they officially release, if you don’t mind the odd bug or crash here and there.

That’s what today’s Blend is about: how to get Blender betas, and how to see what’s included in new releases.

Today’s Technique

When they create a new Blender version, it goes through a few phases:

• Alpha: not full-featured, very buggy.

• Beta: all features, still buggy.

• Release: done.

You can download a version of Blender at any of these stages. Simply go to the builds page here, where you’ll find a big list of the latest daily builds. There’ll be alpha, beta, and release options (as available.)

You can even go to the patch page and see different builds being used to test specific features (though they will be very buggy, and you may have to do some research to figure out just what fixes or features they offer.)

It’s also hard to know what’s new in a new version of Blender. For that, you can go check out the release notes (which is a huge list of everything that got changed, and everything new.)

Go to the developer wiki at the release notes page, and you can see what’s done and what’s coming.

Now check out this bit of art I came across:

Really Random Render

Jonas Dinges made this incredible cinematic render.

This is low poly on a whole new level—and I have no idea how he did this.

This scene is almost entirely silhouette-based. The owl, the trees, the grass—everything is shown as a silhouette. Which makes me wonder: is it 3D or just 2D?

Still not sure.

My favorite part of this render is the lighting—I have no idea how he achieved the beautiful golden glow across everything. Maybe it was done in post, with compositing.

Also the smoke from the chimney is clever—it is incredibly simple but still obviously smoke.

Jonas does a lot of amazing work. I’ll definitely feature him here again soon…

Can't think what to blend?

Try something flat. A bowling alley or a boring desert.

P.S. Just released my latest (and possibly best) fiction, read it here. ↓

P.P.S. That’s a lie. I released it 3 weeks ago. But I still want you to read it.

A Fool Dies

Soldiers are caught plotting against the General...

voyagefiction.substack.com/p/a-fool-dies

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