Urban Exile

Anyone trying to learn Blender 3D through YouTube has probably run across the donut tutorial from Andrew “Blender Guru” Price. It is a multipart introduction to Blender where you model, texture, sculpt, light, animate, and render a donut in the open-source content creation software. It is a fantastic way to learn the basics of many parts of the software, because along the way you learn about modeling, shading, texture maps, sculpting, texture painting, particle systems, modifiers, lights, simple animation steps, and probably a bunch of other concepts and tools I’m leaving out.

Over a year ago, Andrew Price made a request through his YouTube channel for the final blend files from anyone that has completed the donut tutorial, for a project he was putting together. Well, he finally announced the result of that project: a mosaic of a donut built from renders of all the 17,731 submitted donuts.

He released a short video explaining the process for rendering all the submissions and creating the mosaic, which uses some interesting techniques; especially the custom Python add-on for Blender to automatically render most of the submissions.

The full image is available as an interactive, zoomable mosaic on his website. Anyone that submitted a donut that ended up in the final image is also listed in the website through the searchable donut database (I’m in there!).

Also, he is going to auction off a NFT for the mosaic on April 21, and all of the money will go towards the Blender foundation to help fund continued development of the software. I’ll take credit for 1/17,731 of those funds, thank you very much!

I have been playing with Blender at least a little each night, although I haven’t dedicated as much time to it as I would like. However, I am happy that I am building a nightly habit of opening and using Blender.

During my sessions, I created a few procedural planets/moons. Then I created a still scene using the linked objects and rendered a 4K image:

As I mentioned, all of the planets were procedural, which means I didn’t use any external textures in the scene.

The main planet uses a combination of Gradient, Wave, and Noise textures to achieve the banding. The rings are a very simple UV map combined with a Noise and Color Ramp.

The other two objects are also procedural. The closer one I modeled as a simple moon, with some Noise nodes to add variation to the surface. The further object is modeled as a habitable (aka “Class M“) planet, again using Noise textures to drive the different land/sea/cloud areas.

And finally, the background stars use a simple technique I’ve seen in multiple Blender tutorials, connecting a Noise texture to a Color Ramp in the World Shader.

Now time to decide on some new subjects to work on in Blender!

Check out this short two-minute overview video from the Royal Skies YouTube channel, which describes his pipeline for creating dynamic anime-style shaded characters in Blender.

His end goal is video games (real-time rendering), which means that the models need to work from nearly any angle with simple lighting requirements. In theory, the same pipeline could be used to simplify low-budget animations.

His channel also has dedicated videos for all of the steps listed in this video, if you want more details about any part of the process. Most of his videos are only a few minutes long, but he packs a ton of useful information into that short time!

When version 2.92 of Blender was released, it included a new feature: Geometry Nodes. It is the first feature of the “everything nodes” initiative for the software, and it allows manipulation and creation of geometry through a node graph attached to a mesh. Version 2.93 added more geometry nodes, and I presume that subsequent versions will continue to expand this feature.

I decided to learn the basics of Geometry Nodes by creating a simple animation. Of course, the “simple scene” became more complicated than I expected, but I am very happy with the result.

Here is the final video. Note: you can right-click on the video and select “Loop” to view it continuously.

I have been doing some more small experiments in Blender and I thought I’d share one of them. My goal was to create a conveyor belt in Blender, where I could animate the moving belt.

The final solution is extremely easy to animate and also very easy to create on your own! Follow along below to create your very own conveyor belt.

First, we create a single piece of the belt, which we will eventually repeat for the final result. Make a single plane, add two loop cuts (along the Y-axis) to split the single polygon into three, and then extruded the middle polygon upwards. Note that the single piece will be repeated along the X-axis (the red line in the screenshot).