I love Blender…

…and it’s main shader, the Principled BSDF is really good at creating any base look, from metal to ceramics and glass then all the way to mud.

But bad lighting makes for bad looking renders. The best way to make your renders look good is to get as close to real world lighting as possible. It’s a fact. It’s why HDRI maps are so popular for lighting a scene. They’re already real. But, even though there are studio environment HDRI’s sometimes you want to simulate the lighting in a studio with what you have in Blender.

To do this you need to have a good idea about how a studio lights it’s scenes. So I thought I would show you the simple and efficient way to use Blender’s area lights to simulate a realistic lighting setup.

Studio lighting can start with a single light, which can be all you need for a beautiful portrait, to something huge and elaborate for a car shoot. A product shot, particularly of something like, say, a lamp or a food mixer, can be achieved with as little as three well placed and correctly powered lights.

Take a look at the video below to find out more. Better still, subscribe to the channel and you’ll see a new one of these every week. Sometimes a “One by One” where we talk about what each part of blender does – at the moment we are concentrating on modifiers – other times tutorials on specific things or quick tips to make your life easier.

You want to see something not here? Then let me know in the comments. I’m always keen to help out where I can.

Take care and stay safe.

I love Blender…

Turns out a lot of you love it to! Which is ace! And one of you lovely people, who has a channel called “Spittin’ Game” about a making a computer game from scratch, had a question about multiresolution putting multires information back onto a low res model.

Something normally done with texture maps and then they are animated in conjunction with shape keys so the shape change drives a wrinkle or a pore stretch etc.

Spittin’ – if I can call you that – said it might be easier to see what I meant. How perfect a push was that! So here is the tutorial on driving displacement maps in shaders using driven keys – I found a quick method for making these too! – from shape key controls. As usual, this is about method, not looks. I am not a character modeler, and any skills I had have been lost through the lack of using the muscle, so please forgive the model and appreciate the method.

Laters!

Take a look at the video below to find out more. Better still, subscribe to the channel and you’ll see a new one of these every week. Sometimes a “One by One” where we talk about what each part of blender does – at the moment we are concentrating on modifiers – other times tutorials on specific things or quick tips to make your life easier.

You want to see something not here? Then let me know in the comments. I’m always keen to help out where I can.

Take care and stay safe.

I love Blender…

And before I loved blender I loved Maya. I still love Maya (shh, don’t tell anyone!)

But I hated it’s camera. So I made a better camera. And in order to teach you a little about drivers and properties, I’ve made you one in Blender. Here, I teach you here to do it for yourself, of course, and show some of the pitfalls, but I am also giving away the final camera FOR FREE here on gumroad:

https://gumroad.com/js/gumroad.js Buy my product

Please go get it and do some animation with it. Then do a playblast, eevee render or a cycles render and send it to me. I’d love to put it up here on the channel.

Laters!

Take a look at the video below to find out more. Better still, subscribe to the channel and you’ll see a new one of these every week. Sometimes a “One by One” where we talk about what each part of blender does – at the moment we are concentrating on modifiers – other times tutorials on specific things or quick tips to make your life easier.

You want to see something not here? Then let me know in the comments. I’m always keen to help out where I can.

Take care and stay safe.