Here’s a rundown of cool things in 3D, that caught my eye this month. Forgotten metal rendering knowledge, Blender 5.2 updates, free quad remeshing, physical atmospheres and Blender Studio’s new feature film OVERGROWN.
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Forgotten Metal Knowledge (Vray, Cycles, Arnold)
Lucas Piazzini rediscovers a long-forgotten technique of using multiple reflection lobes – or multiple roughnesses plus anisotropic reflection – to render metal that is actually physically accurate. I’ve never seen this trick before, it’s a genuinely new piece of information for me. Just brilliant.
“In this tutorial we will be going back to 2008 to rediscover a major aspect of 3D and expand on improving seemingly common and mastered materials to new-found fidelities.” – Lucas
Watch the Tutorial:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=r3bkGPobpTw
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EasyWaterscape for Unreal Engine – cinematic trailer
If you mainly use Blender – have a look at this Unreal Engine water demo anyway. The trailer has an impeccable cinematography.
“After many months of work, I’m happy to (finally) announce the release of EasyWaterscape for #unrealengine! With realtime ocean/water simulation, dynamic foam & shorelines, underwater transitions, buoyancy, and one-click presets” – William Faucher
https://x.com/WillFaucherVFX/status/2074473280203813110 – the trailer
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Physical Atmospheres²
I haven’t seen anything like that in Blender. A physical atmosphere sim (that works in EEVEE and lets you do eclipses and stuff) and lets you zoom out to space, basically?
It’s developed by Mārtiņš Upītis, a mastermind behind the water simulation and other effects in Flow, an oscar-winning Blender movie. Technically, the atmosphere and the clouds in this add-on are rendered neither in Cycles nor in EEVEE – but rather in a dedicated raymarching engine, then brought to Blender.
On testing it, I ended up creating a nuclear explosion. What can I say? It’s creative process.
p.s. Mārtiņš told me the plugin is in active development: bugs are being ironed out, performance improved etc. So if you notice anything weird – report it to the devs.
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Dynamic Grabber Add-on
This add-on allows you to grab (hence, Grabber!) and naturally move objects in your Blender scene, in realtime. What a time to be alive!
“Instead of manually placing every object one by one, you can select objects, press Ctrl + Shift + G, move them naturally inside your scene, and let them collide, react to gravity, and settle into place.” – Ilyasse L
Watch the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFbXuMHAue0
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Hotspot Texturing
To 3d artists: do you use hotspot texturing in your workflow aka “a method to quickly apply textures to geometry by matching faces to predefined rectangles”?
This #b3d texturing style / technique is goated 🤯
Links:
https://x.com/faizkyokaz/status/1950020159722172581
https://x.com/passivestar_/status/1841631774499049889
https://x.com/passivestar_/status/1714970104188875252
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Hotspot_texturing
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New scene project brush (Blender 5.2)
This new scene project brush looks really useful. Something I’d use to extract pieces of geometry and solidify them.
Farrukh Abdur: “Using here the new scene project sculpting brush added in Blender 5.2 It works similar like a shrinkwrap modifier with more refinements.”
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Making of 6088AD by Cornelius Dammrich (2016)
Simply must-watch if you’re into 3D professionally or as a hobbyist: Making of 6088AD by Cornelius Dammrich.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om2C1zkqSkA
From time to time, I rewatch this video as a timeline cleanser. Such a weird feeling: everything was created by hand, from scratch. No generative AI in sight.
Even a grey material shot looks like an art form.
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Jungle environment and highly detailled breakdown by Lucas Piazzini
Not only the environment is ultra detailed and just bonkers, but Lucas also shared a 40-page breakdown on Artstation. 3DS Max/Houdini/Vray/Nuke.
“I had a ton of fun making this, exploring so many workflows and sharing so many tips!” – Lucas
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Industria 2 – texturing research
Still an extremely impressive texturing style / technique. Simple surfaces, clean texturing style, hand-painted masks, roughness and normal maps (and the indirect lighting) doing all the heavy lifting.
“For Industria 2 we try to keep geometry simple and let textures and lighting do the heavy lifting”.
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Material Layering via particle scattered on surfaces
Great for closeups/ macro renders.
Lucas Piazzini in this tweet:
“Theory is cool, how about actually seeing it?”
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🏆 Best of Term – Lighting & Rendering (Winter 2026)
Gnomon BFA student Miles Quigley created this 1970s lab scene where a scientist discovers alien life in our Lighting and Rendering 1 course. Congrats Miles!
p.s. Great lighting. Very deliberate.
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Probably the best illustration to the inertia animation principle I’ve seen
“Just move the cube” – 3D人-3dnchu- CG情報ブログ
Click this tweet above. You have to see it in motion.
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New Quad Auto Remesher for Blender (free)
Have you tested this quad remeshing tool, folks?
3D人-3dnchu- CG情報ブログ: “An open-source tool that can remesh with high-quality quad polygons at ultra-high speed! Released under the MIT license with the official version now available!”
https://3dnchu.com/archives/autoremesher-1-0/ – by Jeremy HU
Also, Adrien Rouquié coded a bridge for it.
“#AutoRemesher 1.0 came out and I couldn’t resist vibe-coding a tiny Blender bridge for it. Nothing fancy, but it lets me send the selected mesh to AutoRemesher and bring the result back into Blender.” – Adrien Rouquié
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Vector Displacement in Blender
I asked on Twitter/X: Vector displacement mapping in Blender – aside from the VDM brushes – isn’t it a thing yet?
(The image from the Maxon Zbrush online documentation)
“Vector displacement has been in blender for a few years in both shader and geometry nodes editors. A lot of the nodevember creations use vector displacements with adaptive subdiv to get the results.” – check this tweet by RC12 @MossCubed:
https://x.com/MossCubed/status/2074174242510495907
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Ghosting Effect
The ghosting effect as it’s presented here by Bao-Thinh Dinh is really tasteful.
https://x.com/Bipowpow/status/2074507976422105103
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Growing Synthetic Muscles
Cartesian Caramel is a known #b3d madman. He’s growing synthetic muscles now, in Geometry Nodes.
https://x.com/Cartesian_C/status/2074165057173205232 – check it in motion
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New cloth dynamics in Blender 5.2 (Geometry Nodes)
New cloth dynamics in Geometry Nodes look awesome and open up a whole new workflow in Blender.
https://x.com/cgman/status/2055558769124491271 – see it in motion (the fern is fully interactive).
“Just tried the new Cloth Dynamics solver in Blender 5.2 Alpha #geometrynodes with interactive fern foliage! (Still missing self-collision for now)” – Kevin Lim Wanasili
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Fan Ho
Fan Ho’s photography is impeccable if you want to study some upstage / reverse key lighting among other things. The man was the best. Just check his work with reverse key in mind.
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Announcing OVERGROWN: Blender Studios’ feature film project!
Blender Studio is about to kick off something HUGE. Overgrown – Blender first feature film! It’ll be absolutely tremendous for the open-source community. I know we can make it happen. We’ve done it before, let’s do it again!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hwMHF1rXvU – take part – and share the message further.
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Gleb
