Testing Blender 4.0 + Black Friday

For Curtis Holt’s art challenge, time wasn’t on my side. I wanted to keep my project manageable and story simple.

Here’s a final still image (watch the full five-second animation on YouTube):

Showcasing Blender

Some of the various Blender features highlighted in this render:

• This was rendered with the new AgX color space. For the extremely bright anomaly, having it naturally desaturate as it got brighter makes it look more natural.

• Nearly all the materials use the new Principled shader and index of refraction (IOR) workflow. In short, IOR affects specularity of objects to be true to real-life materials. To get the correct IOR, I searched for the measurements via search engine, e.g. “Index of refraction of steel” and plugged the number in.

• Geometry nodes were used to instance the trees. To keep them performant, I used tree images that interact with the lighting, based on a CG Boost tutorial.

I’ll reflect on this piece more once the contest is officially over.

Black Friday

With Black Friday coming up for the Blender Market, I updated nView with several bugfixes and a new operator: Generate visibility mesh. To optimize your scene with mesh booleans and geometry nodes, it’s a pain to do it by wiring the camera in and generating the mesh yourself (believe me, I’ve tried).

Now, you can quickly generate meshes representing what the camera can see. Plugging those into geometry nodes or a boolean modifier is now much quicker.

Go check out the Blender Market and find some good assets and products while the sale lasts! And happy holidays.