There are no demogorgons there, just pokemons (if EEVEE is one of them).

—

Lighting objects is often relatively simple: push the light from the directions not aligned with the camera – that’s how you avoid flatness. The light wraps around the sphere, making it look rounded.

(There’s nothing wrong with the flat, camera-aligned lights – breezeh maxxed out this style lighting in his otherworldly walks – and who’ll say the works of Parajanov aren’t magnificent).

—

Object/Character vs Environment

Then, interiors are a different thing.

You can’t wrap the light around the room. It’s the room that wraps around the camera. It has openings in every direction, depth that recedes past the frame and it has lots of negative space. Let’s call it a sphere Inside Out.

Often, there is no single terminator to soften and no one silhouette to rim. Instead there are planes in every direction, and the job is not to round a form but to round a space (to emphasize its 3d nature).

—

Inside Out

It’s absolutely possible that the first time I really felt Inside Out was actually when photoscanning this corridor in Brest, Belarus – or some other place – because the photoscanning pattern for capturing an environment is much more unintuitive than the one for capturing an object. As you have to mentally unwrap it, for the lack of the better term.

It doesn’t help that often the places that you’d photoscan are lowkey engrossing: abandoned mental asylums in the woods and such.

Capturing regular objects is a breeze compared to that. Almost no mental energy spent. I find certain parallels in it.

—

Lighting The Monastery Dungeon Tutorial (Theory + Practice)

This is the Monastery Dungeon chapter from Cinematic Lighting in Blender. You’ll learn how to light it in EEVEE, with the techniques tailored for its inside-out nature.

If you want to follow along, we shared the photoscanned dungeon model on Patreon. Don’t bother with subscribing to a paid tier if you don’t want to, though – just watching the video(s) alone should be enough to grasp the concepts.

Here are two themes we’ll cover:

• The four methods of lighting a Space (or an inside-out sphere)
• And how to apply cinematography to it

Two videos for you to watch.

Part 1 – Interior Lighting: Theory (21 min). The formal stuff. Falloff, direction, composition, front-vs-back lighting and how to organize environment space with light so it doesn’t feel flat.

Part 2 – Interior Lighting: Cinematic Setup (49 min). The practice. A complete, motivated lighting scheme for the corridor, built layer by layer in Eevee.

—

Eevee is not the compromise

I chose Eevee for this chapter deliberately, and not only because it renders quickly.

In recent versions of Blender, Eevee can be genuinely realistic AND tweakable. It’s a crazy combo, and so useful for experimenting with custom light falloffs and fake global illumination.

Realistic in this context also means just a physical realism of the light transport simulation. Eevee’s GI (global illumination) is good enough nowadays to pass the photorealism test. But, hell, it was already good enough many years ago if you knew what you were doing on the ‘cinematic realism’ front (See the SSGI demo from 2020). I have much earlier demos from the 3ds Max and Mental Ray era, which I won’t share now.

A disclaimer: this is not a deep technical dive into Eevee sliders. We have a companion course for that. Here, the engine is a means, not the subject.

—

PART I. The four traits

Across the tutorial – just like we do in our courses – I test lighting against four words.

• Non-flat. It has gradients, softness and a sense of volume.
• With a composition idea. It gives the eye somewhere to go (the light leaks).
• Moody. It carries a thick atmosphere or a vibe.
• Realistic. It feels motivated – even when the setup is full of cheats.

—

1. Light Falloff – Spherical and Directional

Arguably, falloff matters so much more in an environment than it does in an object shot.

• A point light gives you a spherical pool of influence that kind of bakes the depth into everything it touches (we see what’s far and what’s close – to that light! – based on the receding influence).
• An area light gives you a long, directional gradient.
• In Eevee, custom light distance turns those falloffs into something you can tune by taste. It is the interior equivalent of moving the key light around a sphere.

The Quake school of lighting

Some lighting styles, like the one found in Quake and early FPS games, rely almost entirely on light falloff. You can drop point lights into a corridor with no motivation whatsoever – lights out of nowhere, literally – and the space will still read as three-dimensional and moody.

It will not be cinematic in the motivated sense, and it is not trying to be. But as an exercise in form, and a hommage to an art style: try it out.

—

2. Light as 2D masses

Once the form reads, the next stop is thinking of the composition (aka 2d masses). A hard beam or a bright patch is a two-dimensional shape laid over the camera view. The eye is handed from one accent to the next – light leaks usually look cool.

Squint until you see the 2d light masses, then ask whether the arrangement feels balanced and pleasant. It shouldn’t look realistic at this point – we’re still experimenting with the form and the composition. The realism will come later, both the physical and the cinematic dimensions.

—

Front light, back light, and what each one is really showing

Now, the light direction.

As we’ve mentioned, it’s much easier to talk about light direction in case of objects. Back light gives that wrappy effect that makes the object look rounded and brings out shadows. Front light flattens it out a bit – and brings out color.

For environments, these things still hold true, but their application isn’t as intuitive.

There’s no object to wrap the light around, and often no clear separation between the foreground and the background, so it’s… confusing.

Still, there are the truths to hold on to:

• Back light throws shadows toward the camera. Every crack, every stone, every tiny crevice catches definition. It also creates specular reflections and drains color (specular highlights are neutral, so the more shape you reveal, the less color you keep).
• Front light does the opposite. It flattens the form, but it hands you the diffuse color intact.

And the falloff is still kind of baked into everything.

I keep coming back to a useful way of thinking about this. Back light organizes a space a bit like a mist pass or a Z-depth pass – a hierarchy built from distance.

Front light reads more like a diffuse-color pass – you know, the shadeless one. Weirdly, it also has some distance baked in – depending on the light falloff.

Neither is cinematic on its own. They’re two different instruments. That said, back light gives you more depth and geometric detail, if that’s what you’re after. I explored the object version of this idea in One Simple Technique to Improve Your Lighting in Blender (Upstage Lighting). To be honest, I’m yet to fully apply it to environments.

—

PART II. Cinematic realism = motivation

Here is the turn that Part I is built toward.

You can stack every formal trick in this article – falloff, accents, back light – and still end up with an image that doesn’t feel real. It can feel moody, three-dimensional, game-like, surreal. Just not real (as in the cinematic definition of realism). Let’s not get tangled in definitions – here I describe the brand of cinematic realism that appeals to me and is broad enough for our 3d work.

To make a lighting scheme feel real, every layer of light should be motivated by something already in the scene.

So, in Part II, I’ll focus on the Four Traits once again.

Only this time, making sure we hide them extremely well.

—

Motivation: The chain

A cinematic lighting setup is not a collection of lamps. If anything, it is a chain or hierarchy of causes.

1. The broken roof motivates the daylight (environment).
2. The daylight motivates a broad skylight (area lights).
3. The skylight and the sun motivate the bright patches and the hard beams (the sun lamp).
4. Those patches motivate subtle bounced light on the nearby walls (fake point light GI; and real screen-traced GI).

That is the hierarchy of motivation, and it is the difference between a cheat that disappears and a cheat that feels lit (when cinematographers say something feels lit, it’s bad – like there’s apparently a lamp somewhere or your trick got exposed).

—

Light layers: the chain

Reduce the world light first, then decide which openings are actually part of the story. In a ruined building there are holes everywhere, so there’s a certain artistic freedom.

1. Environment. First, set the environment light exposure – this is going to be our Level 1 motivation. Block the door frames that you don’t want to contribute.
2. Area lights for skylight – tune their strength, temperature and placement so it feels like it’s the environment light seeping in. These are our falloffs, secretly.
   
   Single versus multiple light directions is an interesting choice. I think it’s usually safer to go with one key light direction, but feel free to experiment.
3. Spotlights for the harder sun patches that carry the composition (it’s good that we went with the single key light direction!). This is our Level 2 motivation.
4. Fake secondary bounces using point lights. Look how our little cheat disappears, because of the Level 2 motivation.

—

Screen-traced GI

Eevee’s screen-traced global illumination adds a secondary layer of bounce and ambient occlusion on top of the hand-built (fake) lights. It is fast, too, and surprisingly capable.

For anyone who missed the Indirect Intensity feature – there’s now a dedicated GI Intensity slider that gives you even more control over the strength of the indirect lighting. I imagine cinematographers would sell their own mothers for this kind of control. I wrote more about it in New Blender 5.1 EEVEE Feature – GI Intensity.

For the rest of the Eevee render settings, check out the videos.

Conceptually, what matters is that the GI is yet another falloff, and one that’s inherently motivated too, since it comes straight from the physical light transport algorithm itself.

—

Light Probes

A bit of EEVEE technical trivia: screen-space GI alone is unstable, so the next layer is a baked light probe volume. It’s a grid of irradiance samples spread across the corridor, storing the indirect light for the whole space.

In other words, where the screen-space indirect light can’t reach, the probes will carry.

And guess what? The probes intensity and the falloff biases can all be tweaked too.

—

Atmosphere

Haze is usually filed under effects, but it’s also one of the easiest ways to encode depth into a space.

Think of it as something that enhances all other light falloffs.

Not to mention it makes the light shafts legible – which is to be expected in a dusty environment like that (call it realism or common sense).

Atmospheric haze is something unique to environments. You don’t use it in case of objects in quite the same way. It interfaces directly with space.

—

Conclusion

In conclusion, here’s the flythrough animation from 2021 (I have the much ealier demos if needed, too). Cinematic realism in lighting environments is something that doesn’t require a perfect light transport simulation. It works in a higher register of realism – which has a technical aspect to it, sure – but mostly it is good old suspension of disbelief.

TLDR: how do you light the environments/spaces?

The sphere is still there, only flipped inside out.

With an object, you use light to describe a form. With an environment, you use it to describe a space.

Use falloffs – spherical and directional – compositional accents and the front/back light to describe the space.

If you want it to look cinematic, make sure each lighting element is grounded in something else in the scene (it’s useful to think of the causal chain, too).

If the whole scene doesn’t look lit – and all individual lights kind of disappear – you’re on the right track.

You’re allowed to cheat but don’t get caught.

Check it against the Four Traits: Non-flat, With a composition idea, Moody and Realistic.

Not everything has to feel cinematic (and the definitions of ‘cinematic’ vary).

—

Why this place

The corridor is a photoscan of the Bernardine monastery in Brest – an 18th-century cloister later rebuilt as a military hospital, captured on one of the coldest days we have ever shot in, while we were documenting abandoned places.

A real scanned place like that arrives with its own texture, its own irregularity, its own history of damage and repair (and war, in this case). For a lighting study, that is just great. It feels like being there – playing with lights. I hope it inspired you as well!

—

Links

Eevee Realistic Lighting and Rendering

Creative Shrimp Complete Lighting Bundle brings the lighting courses together into one workflow.

The Blender project files for this tutorial are on Creative Shrimp’s Patreon

The scan itself comes from the Photoreal 3D with Blender and RealityScan course

Outdoor Lighting in 3D – Is there a magic formula? (apropos the definition of ‘cinematic’)

How to Light 3D Portraits in Blender (Photographic Lighting Techniques)

The Lighting Book that I have never finished – but I can’t shake the feeling I need to get it done

The post Cinematic Lighting for 3D Environments: The Monastery Dungeon appeared first on Creative Shrimp.

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Gaussian splats in Blender 5.3 Alpha

Blender brings gaussian splats native support in the core, in 5.3. PLY and SPZ v4 files, working in both EEVEE and Cycles (and Workbench!). Now you can capture and display things like explosions, clouds, real-world photoscanned or 3d rendered environments with glossy reflections and transparency as splats. The performance isn’t perfect just yet it’s a huge step forward.

Check this explosion turntable by Jason Key.

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Panoramic camera view in EEVEE

Oh my god, we have the panoramic camera in EEVEE now, in Blender 5.3 alpha. A huge feature.

Nahuel Belich: “It still has some limitations like screen space but ITS HERE!”

By Le Gia Bao – Clément Foucault.

—

The most realistic Blender short film ever made?

LONGING HOME, a CG short film, created in Blender looks incredible – it might just be the most big-budget-looking Blender production to date. What a time to be alive (and creating!).

Check the full movie in this tweet by Alex Saytiev.

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Dispersion in Principled BSDF

Well, the day has come. We have chromatic dispersion in Principled BSDF, natively, in 5.3. No need for the third-party add-ons anymore.

Render by IlyasseL_.

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GPUs of the Blender Community

Which GPUs are 3d artists using, based on the replies to my tweet. 148 artists and 208 mentions are coded here, out of about 315 replies. Big thanks to Jason Key for arranging the infographics.

Guess which one is the most common? RTX 5090. Do what you want with this info.

—

Froxel

Today was the day when I first heard the term Froxel.

“A froxel is a frustum voxel, a 3D data cell used in computer graphics to manage lighting and volumetric effects like fog or smoke.”

—

The Creative Shrimp Lab

Currently, the Creative Shrimp space where things are happening is a lab. Experiments are being run, retorts are steaming, reagents are being blended – some explode, leaving burn marks on the walls, some produce a misty liquid with particles inside. Some develop a luminescence.

We don’t rush this process, yet we’re already getting some promising results. Once the solution settles, we’ll let out more info. Interesting things in the works.

p.s. The blender has been cleaned from the remainings of the last experiment, the tentacles thrown into the trash.

A lot of research happening as for pbr texturing, feature detection and decals for the ‘texturing’ module of the new Blender course in production. The goal is to have a complete reference for anyone moving past the beginner stuff.

We might just call it Blender-Beyond-Beginner or something. What do you think?

Here’s our Discord, if you can do better (you surely can)

—

Crazy Cloth Sim in Houdini

Now that’s cloth sim (watch it in motion)! By Ruye.

—

Topology Cheat Sheet by Eman Vallejos

I thought I’d bookmark this tweet by Eman.

—

Koola does feel lighting

Light falloff, zoning and vignette goodness. My inspiration folder is going to be made of Koola’s renders soon. What an amazing artist, one of the best, I dare say, when it comes to lighting (it’s Unreal Engine, e.g. realtime, too).

—

Hard-surface modeling process by Mert İskenderoglu

A really nice 1-min video, explaining a particular hard-surface modeling process really cleanly.

Mert: “New tutorial, in this one I tried to show how you can model or design tricky shapes without overcomplicating the process, the video is in the comments.”

And a full tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1kn-5ulohw

—

Quick Tip

How to feed the geonodes proximity data into a shader in Blender.

–

Dominic Hailstone old showreel (2004 – 2014)

“All work is practical, puppets, actors, composited digitally. No CG. No ai.”

Check the tweet.

—

Agentic AI Building 3D Scenes in Blender via MCP

Basically, Blender sees a surge of new users communicating with it via MCP, becoming a hub for assembling and rendering 3d content as such.

Lou: “We use GLM-5.3-Flash build a dream kitchen. A 3D world built in Blender. This is not a generated video.”

Check the tweet.

I wonder to what extend did actual 3d artists nudged and polished this scene.

Here’s a video of Andrew Price testing the viral AI products, too.

—

A basic HDRI dome projection node setup (beta)

Feel free to download the HDRI dome projection setup for free, from our Gumroad. It adds a floor to HDRI environments and works in Cycles and EEVEE.

—

Caustica – an Add-on for Simulating Photon-traced caustics in Cycles

I haven’t tested this new paid add-on yet, but it looks like it delivers! If you have a specific need for this type of caustics, for a commercial or whatever, then here we go.

—

The Pope on AI and the Human Spark

I never thought I’d see and have to comment on something like that, but here we are. Leo Papa XIV draws the line (almost makes me consider a conversion to Catholicism or something).

I’ll just repost it here.

“In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.”

Amen.

P.S. It sounds even more badass in Latin.

—

If you want to receive these rundowns of Cool Things in 3D to your inbox, we can very well arrange it. https://www.creativeshrimp.com/subscribe-shrimp – subscribe to our newsletter.

Gleb

The post Cool Things in 3D (September 2026) appeared first on Creative Shrimp.

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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

—

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

—

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.

—

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

—

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

—

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.”

—

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.

—

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

—

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”.

—

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?”

—

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.

—

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.

—

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

https://x.com/jeremyhu2016

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

—

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

—

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

—

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.

—

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

The post Cool Things in 3D (August 2026) appeared first on Creative Shrimp.

Reading time: 15 minutes
Video length: 24 minutes

Introduction

This lighting tutorial is split into two sections:

1. The YouTube video – a free chapter of the EEVEE course. A blend between EEVEE techniques and applied lighting foundations
2. A written article: general photographic lighting tips and tricks for 3D portraits

Huge thanks to Yaw Onyina for the permission to use his astonishing Tribal Character 3D model (more precisely, .blend file) for this lighting tutorial.

Yaw is a medical doctor, 3D artist and data scientist crafting stunning portraits in Blender.

Download Project Files

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Character Lighting in Blender | EEVEE (4 Difficulty Levels)

—

Lighting Tips and Tricks for 3D Portraits

A theory extract

No matter the render engine – EEVEE or Cycles – here are the character lighting tips that will help you create cinematic-looking portrait shots.

Front light is flat

As a rule of thumb, If the light sits between the camera and the face – directly in line with the camera – the face goes flat. No nose shadow, no cheekbone. Think passport photo, but in the worst possible way. Of course, frontal isn’t always bad – Breezeh built an entire liminal world around the on-camera flash (even though not exactly for portraits).

Usually though, it’s worth moving the key light off-axis. Even a few degrees. Suddenly there’s shape.

Actually, the original light placement in that .blend by Yaw featured exactly that type of light direction. A bit fronty, yet slightly off-axis.

–

Focal length changes the face

It’s a camera decision, not a lighting one, yet focal length (and the distance to the subject) shapes the portrait just as much as where you put the light.

Short focal lengths (12-35mm) usually also means that you pushed the camera closer to the subject. And close cameras distort – the nose gets bigger, the forehead pushes forward and so on. When extreme, you get the potato face.

Long focal lengths (85mm and above) – aka the camera is far away – compress everything. It flattens the spatial relationship between the nose and the ears. It can make faces look more like faces. Arguably, it can look more appealing.

In 3D it’s worth trying different focal lengths, because the same light at 24mm vs 120mm reads completely differently on the face. The shadows and reflections land in different places and so on.

Quick tip: the lens compression effect really clicks when you see it animated. Search for “focal length compression comparison” on YouTube – watching it move can be the aha moment.

—

Big light = soft shadow. Small light = hard shadow

Large area light close to the subject: soft, gradual, flattering shadows. Small or distant light: harsh, crisp, contrasted shadows. For portraits, you almost always want soft. You can always pull back, but start soft.

—

Falloff

When a light is really close to the subject, brightness drops dramatically from face to chest. When it’s far away, everything gets lit uniformly. Neither is wrong! But pushing the light(s) too far away can flatten it out. And we usually try to avoid flat.

A bit of falloff adds life to a render.

—

Skin subsurface scattering

Skin isn’t opaque. Light enters the surface, bounces around under it, exits slightly tinted – warm, red. That’s what makes a face look like a face. Without SSS dialed in, no lighting setup in the world will save you. With SSS, even a single-light setup can look gorgeous.

Quick tip: In EEVEE, realtime subsurface scattering work wonders not only for skin, but also for… alien skin.

Or simulating translucency in plants.

—

Try single-light setup

Before lightmaxxing, try nailing a single area light. If anything, it’s a great exercise. Multiple lights can muddy the waters and even fight each other.

Just one light, placed slightly above and to the side, can produce a portrait that blows people away. The shadows – especially the soft shadows – are doing the sculpting.

Despair – Portrait by Yaw Onyina

Quick tip: The subtle secondary light bounces created by Raytracing, and SSS add nuance to the single-light schemes. So it’s never truly one-light.

Quick tip #2: not all lights are the same: a gridded studio lights with half-frost diffusion are way different from… some other types of lights. In 3D too. The ‘Single-light’ setups are about light qualities.

There are add-ons for Blender which imitate real-world photographic lamps with different modifiers: grids, various softboxes and so on. Light Wrangler for instance.

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Choose HDRi with a strong key

When using 360° HDRi environments for lighting your characters, find a strong key light within the HDRI. It can be anything. A big and bright opening in this Hangar HDRi, for instance.

E.g. Choosing this HDRi, I don’t care about airplanes. I care about big bright areas.

That’s your key light. Treat it exactly like positioning a studio light. Spin the panorama until the light sculpts the face from an interesting angle – off-axis, with shape to it. And don’t limit yourself to Z rotation only. Tilting on X or Y can throw up light directions that feel genuinely cinematic.

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Decouple background and light exposure

Physical accuracy and ‘looking cinematic’ are not the same thing. A physically correct HDRI result often gives you a blown-out backdrop or an underlit face. So decouple them (using the Light Path node) – control the background brightness separately from the light hitting your character.

Slightly muted backdrop, well-lit subject. That’s often the sweet spot. Just don’t push it so far that the shot starts to look lit (as cinematographers say).

It’s a common practice, in cinematography, to expose for the background – to make sure it isn’t blown out, and then push more light onto the talent.

Quick tip: Patrick O’Sullivan channel – Wandering DP has many great lighting breakdowns. “Exposing for the sky” is a recurring topic there.

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The double HDRI trick

Use one HDRI for the backdrop – the story, the location, the mood. Use a completely different one to actually light the character. They don’t need to perfectly match visually (however, it’s good if they’re in the same ballpark as for their colors). What matters is that the lighting HDRI has good light quality and direction (read: the well-defined key light). A hangar door. An overcast sky. Whatever casts the right shape on the face.

Pick the backdrop for atmosphere. Pick the lighting HDRI for how it sculpts.

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Match your lights to the environment

When you go Full Cinematic Setup and layer studio lights (all these Blender lights) on top of an HDRI, color match them. Cool environment? Cool lights. Greenish scene? Your fill can be quite green and it’ll sit naturally – the HDRI will motivate it. Sample colours from the HDRI. Use them as your palette.

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Eye light / Catch light

Add an eye light. Eyes without a catch light can look glassy. A small area light, placed far enough to register as a glint is enough.

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Add a kicker

A kicker – or backlight, or rim light – is a strong light placed behind and to the side of the character. It traces the edge of the head, the shoulder, the jaw. It helps to separate the character from the background. With it, the subject pops.

It’s not that you always need backlight. But it can be super effective. The trick is motivation. The kicker needs to feel like it could exist in the scene – a window behind the character or just a bright spot on the backdrop.

You can even start with the backlight – making it a Reverse Key Light setup. And then wrap the light around the back of the head, onto the face, using a bounce card or an area light.

The trick is motivation. The kicker needs to feel like it could exist in the scene – a window behind the character, or just a light blob in the background plate.

Quick tip: It works beautifully in real-world cinematography, outside CG, when you have just one lamp, but still want to have both the kicker and the key light.

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Haze

A thin layer of volume scatter gives the scene depth in a way that’s immediately cinematic. My outie is a cinematographer and he’s very generous with using haze machines on set. Haze helps to pop the character out of the background.

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Shallow Depth of Field

Adding depth of field can help make a portrait feel more photographic and dreamy.

A very shallow depth of field (low f-stop, say f/1.4–f/2 or in Blender, or even crazy low values like f/0.1) puts almost – everything except the tiny sliver of depth – out of focus. It can look truly cinematic.

Experiment with the bokeh ratio for vintage lens weirdness or an anamorphic squeeze.

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Post-pro and Color Management

Not a part of lighting per se, post-pro and color management settings are not to be neglected.

View Transform in the Color Management settings: AgX or Filmic are solid defaults. ACES 2.0 has more punch and contrast. Avoid anything that oversaturates highlights if you’re going for photorealism – Khronos PBR works well for product shots where you need to preserve brand colors, but tends to make skin look like it’s been Instagrammed.

Film grain / sensor noise: a small amount grounds the image. Like It’s the silver halide reacting to light thing. Chromatic aberration: Tiny amounts only – just enough to push that ‘analog photography feel’ further.

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Start with one light. Get it right first.

Everything above is additive. A single well-placed light with decent SSS settings – or a single HDRi rotated the right way – will beat a messy ten-light rig every time. Learning the fundamentals – direction, size, falloff, skin response is still what makes a portrait work.

Once that foundation is nailed, adding extra lights becomes a creative choice rather than trying to fix a flat-looking image.

Actually the light setups in Yaw Onyina’s character portraits are usually quite simple – yet they work beautifully. Not least because the models themselves are exceptionally well made – but tsss… that’s another story.

Desheveled Sailor by Yaw Onyina – 3d Generalist and Medical Doctor

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Bonus EEVEE tips

Turn off denoising and Fast GI for portrait work

Two Eevee render settings that quietly ruin HDRI portrait quality: denoising and Fast GI approximation. Denoising smooths things out, but it also smears fine detail – skin pores, hair strands, contact shadows. Switch it off and the image gets crispier in a good way.

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Environment Shadow Threshold

Fine tuning the Shadow Threshold in the Environment settings can have an interesting effect. Higher threshold means softer, more ambient lighting. And lower threshold means harsher shadows.

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Shadow jitter: the microshadows

When you use a soft area light, turn on shadow jitter – both in the light settings and in the global render settings. Without it, you lose the tiny shadows under the nose, along the eyelids, beneath the chin and so on. Those microshadows are what make a face look… more photographic.

For sharp, small light sources like a sun lamp, jitter doesn’t matter as much – it’s the big soft lights where you really feel the difference.

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Links and Resources

HDRIs and Textures

Polyhaven – HDRIs

Free CC0 HDRIs up to 16K. One of the best sources for lighting environments (used throughout the video – South Africa outdoor, workshop interior, hangar).

Blender

Official Blender download

EEVEE

EEVEE Realistic Lighting and Rendering course

Post-processing and Color Grading

Free minimal post-processing setup for Blender’s compositor

Courses

CreativeShrimp.com/courses – Deep-dive Blender courses on Eevee, photoreal lighting, and rendering. That’s us

Cinematography

Wandering DP – cinematography lighting breakdowns

Lighting Techniques

Reverse Key Lighting – Creative Shrimp tutorial

Light Falloff – Creative Shrimp short

Photography Inspiration

Breezeh – flash photography aesthetic (liminal walks)

Steve McCurry

Richard Avedon

Joey L.

Dan Winters

Edward Weston

Hyperrealist Art Inspiration

Alyssa Monks

Gottfried Helnwein

Books

Direction and Quality of Light – Neil Van Niekerk

Commercial Photographer’s Master Lighting Guide – Robert Morrissey

Light Science and Magic – an Introduction to Photographic Lighting – Fil Hunter

Master Lighting Guide for Portrait Photographers – Cristopher Grey

Credits

Yaw Onyina – the author of the Tribal Character model

Photontown Studio – Omar Hewady and Ahmed Naguib’s studio. Facial animation specialists. They made the animation in this video and honestly, they nailed it.

The post How to Light 3D Portraits in Blender (Photographic Lighting Techniques) appeared first on Creative Shrimp.

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As it turns out, we’ve been using photogrammetry quite a lot in our Creative Shrimp projects. We’ve been using it to digitize historical artifacts; for capturing details that would be a pain in the neck to model in any other way. We’ve built some miniature movie sets, like this Millennium Falcon, then photo-scanned it for fun.

Most importantly though, we’ve been using photoscanning to create life-like 3d environments. Mostly abandoned hallways and such, made of the shards of Brest (Belarus), Warsaw, Vilnius and other places we’ve been to.

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A GENERIC PHOTOSCANNING WORKFLOW

There are a few really interesting things that we can do with photogrammetry as 3d artists and as environment artists…

But first, here’s a quick refresher of what a typical photogrammetry workflow entails.

• capture a bunch of photos of an object or an interior space from different angles;
  using the best capturing device you have; making sure there’s enough overlap between the photos and everything’s sharp and clear;
• load these photos into your photogrammetry software of choice;
  eg Meshroom, Colmap, Metashape, Reality Capture, etc
• let the software calculate similarities between the source photos and spit out a point cloud that can then be used to deliver a high density 3d surface;
• optionally, with texture;

That’s how it works. That’s the generic workflow anyway.

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CAPTURING EQUIPMENT

What equipment do you need to start photo-scanning?

We often hear that you just need a device with a sensor and you can start doing photogrammetry. And that is true. But as a 3d artist, I find it somewhat frustrating how much photographic equipment has accumulated over time, in addition to my DSLR camera (I use a Sony A7iii with a Tamron 24-75mm f/2.8 lens or some of my primes because primes are generally sharper, but there was a time when we were using a Canon 80D with a Sigma 17-55 f/2.8 or pretty much any DSLR or mirrorless camera available).

Then you start thinking about getting a tripod. It is a must-have for keeping shots steady.

A ruler and a color checker come next.

And then: “Should we get a drone?”

It escalates quickly.

Let’s put it like this: a low or medium-range DSLR or mirrorless camera is probably all you need if you have just started.

But what camera is best for photoscanning? This video is as close as it gets to answering the question “What camera is best for photoscanning?”. There, we talk about the 3 parameters of any capturing device that make all the difference in photoscanning quality.

And in this one we talk about what are the optimal camera settings for capturing the highest quality photos for 3d reconstruction.

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PHOTOSCANNING SOFTWARE

As for the software, there are many options to choose from.

What we’ve been using mostly is Reality Capture and Agisoft Metashape. Fantastic tools, really fast and good quality. And commercial as well. Reality Capture has an interesting pricing option called PPI or Pay-per-Input (here’s our video with some advice as for optimizing the cost).

Meshroom and Colmap are the open-source alternatives. Which are also quite capable, in fact fantastic considering the price, just not as obscenely fast as Reality Capture and Metashape just yet.

Somewhat counter-intuitively, the open-source tools are arguably *more* demanding about the quality of the photos (for now). In other words, you may need slightly more expensive equipment and a more powerful computer to get the reconstruction results that are on par with the aforementioned commercial software options.

Still, we should absolutely support open-source, because we know what happens to commercial enterprises.

It’s also worth noting there are also mobile apps like Luma AI and Polycam.

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5 PHOTOGRAMMETRY WORKFLOWS FOR ENVIRONMENT ARTISTS

When it comes to environmental design and photogrammetry, there are different ways to use the toolset offered by 3d reconstruction software. Here are 5 workflows (not the exhaustive list!) that are distinct in their goals and the type of data that you gather.

Distinct enough so we can write about each of them separately.

1. THE WHOLE SEAMLESS ENVIRONMENTS

2. MODULAR ASSETS

3. CHARACTERS

4. PBR MATERIALS AND MAPS

5. LIGHTING

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WORKFLOW 1a: (CAPTURING) THE WHOLE SEAMLESS ENVIRONMENTS

The first workflow on our list is capturing the whole seamless environments. This might seem silly, what would you do with such a model anyway? But it’s the one that has given us some amazing location snapshots.

When we arrived at the abandoned warehouse near Brest (Belarus), our goal was to digitize the Volga car that has been standing there for half a century, collecting dust and bird excrement.

And that’s what we did.

But then, before leaving the place, Nik proposed to bring a drone next time to capture an isometric view basically.

And when I saw it reconstructed in Reality Capture, I thought, damn! I can totally imagine this as a game level in some indie RPG that uses the isometric view.

Especially if you pepper it up with dramatic lighting.

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Double so if you throw in a playable character (this is a quick demo put together in Godot by Aidy).

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If you’re lucky enough to have some amazing historical locations nearby, like this 18th century Bernardine monastery in Brest, rebuilt into a military hospital, a gem in our collection of abandoned places, photographed some 15 years ago, you can totally get some nice environments captured almost in one piece. Given you have enough time to spend there.

Even though it’s not a super flexible workflow, capturing the entire space like that, walking with a wide angle lens and an on-camera flash through the dark and cold corridors, you can’t argue with the photorealistic output it produces.

It just looks… real. Which it is.

Even with a cinematic lighting treatment in Blender it still looks arguably better than many games. It’s hard to beat that kind of photorealism, which comes unfortunately at the cost of flexibility.

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THE CONS

Aside from that, a notable downside of such approach is that as every polygon and texel in such model is unique, the meshes and textures end up pretty heavy.

• The good locations are hard to find
• The lack of versatility
• Performance

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That being said, even the lower res environment scans found on Sketchfab like this funerary monument by Morbase | Museu Virtual can work really well as a base for your next Blender animation.

Once you start throwing in lights, effects and particles.

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WORKFLOW 1b: (CAPTURING) THE WHOLE ENVIRONMENTS – RADIANCE FIELDS

When it comes to creating the complete snapshots of environments, the neural radiance fields (or NERFs) seem to do an even better job.

Unlike the traditional techniques, these novel view-synthesis methods can actually capture a lot of extra data: the wispy details like vegetation, or hair, but amazingly also the dynamic material properties like reflection and refraction.

The stuff that was unthinkable using more traditional photogrammetry tools now comes to life thanks to Gaussian Splatting and other NERF algorithms.

The demo below was created in the Inria’s open source Gaussian Splatting Github app. The beginner tutorial by The NeRF Guru, without which it would be impossible for me to make sense of it, is linked here.

A caveat: it requires a powerful GPU (I have RTX 2080ti, but NVIDIA GPU with 24GB VRAM or more is recommended).

Speaking about reflections, here’s a quick demo of the highly glossy scenery that we built and scanned just before going to Blender Conference 2023.

Honestly it’s pretty mind-boggling to see it captured by the means of photogrammetry at all.

I wonder what happens when the animation part of the puzzle falls into place. Will it be a photogrammetry bingo card completed?

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This tech is becoming mainstream really quickly, too. We can already try gaussian splatting in the Luma AI and Polycam apps (for our smartphones).

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THE CONS

• tricky to edit
• non-versatile

The problem with radiance fields is that it isn’t super clear how to edit this stuff just yet. The tools for editing gaussian splats and NERFs are still in their infancy, in other words.

But this tech is developing fast. We should watch this space.

P.S. Here you can see a demo testing the thin-structures capabilities of gaussian splatting in Luma AI.

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WORKFLOW 2. (EXTRACTING) MODULAR ASSETS

A far more versatile workflow of course would be a modular one.

Meaning, finding a cool location and dissecting it for props. With the goal of creating the asset library that captures the essence of this environment. So we can make *any* kind of environment like the one we’ve just scanned.

Incidentally, that’s the industry standard.

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Going back to our warehouse environment, we could have scanned:

• The hero assets like this Volga
  
• The medium and small-scale props
  
• Surface textures
  
• Decals

Whatever can be salvaged there. The goal is cohesiveness. Scanning such library around the same environment is like a locked-in art direction. Everything in this warehouse was equally dusty, forsaken and coming roughly from the same historical slice. Imagine fine-tuning such a look across dozens of models. Using this workflow, you get it for free.

Have a look at any of the Scans Factory packs to see how realistic an environment composed of such modular props can look.

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Of course, then each asset would have had to be optimized; meaning, polycount reduced and the geometry details transferred from the high to the low res meshes (as normal maps for example);

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Sometimes this process is a breeze.

Say, when you can take a prop back home or back to studio and scan it on a turntable, and maybe flip it during the scanning process, so the software reconstructs a full 360 degrees watertight mesh.

Then it requires almost no post-processing, maybe aside from some polycount reduction (and that can be done automatically) and texture baking (and that can be automatized as well, to a certain extent).

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But it isn’t always like that. In fact, it’s almost never like that!

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THE CONS

• Planning
• Post-pro and clean-up

More often than not, raw scans are pretty messy and require an enormous amount of post-pro to make them useable.

Like, imagine cleaning-up something like that.

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But anyway, nothing is more satisfying than scattering the photoscanned assets that have been prepared in advance. Gathered in the same location. Carefully optimized. The resulting environments can look just as cohesive as the full location scans.

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WORKFLOW 3. CHARACTERS

Speaking about modular props, characters also fall into this category and can be made with the help of photogrammetry. Let’s say, the background NPCs for your environments like those seen in Ian Hubert’s videos.

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As a quick reminder, it goes like this. First you make a quick scan, add a few bones in Blender, then animate these bones to rotate the torso and the head a little bit while recording the motion. And you get a nice background character doing the background character stuff.

The advantage of this workflow is that we don’t have to use a proper A or T-pose for scanning, we can just scan the characters in the poses they’re supposed to be, like sitting or riding a bicycle.

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A more advanced variation of this workflow would be to apply the real motion capture data to such quick character scans using one of the markerless motion tracking apps like Mixamo or Rokoko Vision. You can even record your own motion and transfer it to the skeleton with these apps, like Aidy is doing here.

Still, it’s way simpler if the character doesn’t need to move.

People tend to fidget and make the scanning process more complicated than it needs to be. It’s my motionless body you see in this scan by the way.

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THE CONS

• people are tricky to scan

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WORKFLOW 4. PBR MATERIALS AND MAPS

Yet another application for photogrammetry in environment creation is, of course, capturing the PBR materials.

The process is no different from capturing props (or characters for that matter!): first we take a bunch of photos of whatever surface we want to scan, hovering over the muddy ground like a fairy; then reconstruct a high-definition mesh in photogrammetry software.

But then, we bake the detail from that mesh onto a flat plane to derive such maps as:

• the diffuse color (or albedo)
• ambient occlusion,
• normals,
• and most importantly the height data that contains the detail about the surface displacement

Then, these maps can be made seamless in Gimp by offsetting and painting across them all at once using the clone brush. This is a fairly new functionality that imitates the Affinity Photo approach to multi-layer editing, and we’re proud to have influenced this feature developed for Gimp with the help of ZeMarmot.

And voila! We’ve got the ingredients for a seamless PBR material.

The shaders like that work extremely well with displacement. No surprise, because in the end we feed it the real heightmap derived from the real surface. The result looks extremely realistic (and runs in realtime thanks to Eevee Next).

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Additionally, we can use the extracted heightmaps for blending between different materials to create a much-needed variation. In Blender via nodes or alternatively, in Quixel Mixer.

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THE CONS

• less flexible than procedural workflows (in Substance Designer and so on)

Aside from that, variation isn’t the biggest pro of this technique. The photoscanned materials are quite limited by the source footage. By its resolution and other properties. And simply by the physical availability, unlike their procedural counterparts.

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WORKLOW 5. LIGHTING

The last type of data that can be extracted from a real-world location, that we will have a look in this article, is lighting. Lighting can be extracted and thrown away or extracted and… cherished.

Let’s talk about removing it first.

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Typically, the shadows, at least the indirect ones, are removed from textures as soon as possible with the help of Agisoft Texture De-Lighter or other de-lighting tools.

So we can set our own lighting in Blender.

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Alternatively, the lighting can be flattened during the capturing phase, by using an on-camera flash. This also gives the supernatural ability to shoot in the dark.

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Or we can go as far as removing both shadows and reflections using the flash AND the polarizing filters. In the process called cross-polarization.

We don’t have time to go into that. But cross-polarization happens when you put a polarizing filter on both the lens and the light.

Like in this video by James Candy.

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THE CONS

If you were capturing for a virtual movie set though, the lighting data would become precious. Definitely worth retaining!

To capture a full range of light, each shot can be taken multiple times using different exposure settings, then merged into a singular HDR image in the process called exposure bracketing. In Darktable for example.

And then, the photoscan can be made from such high dynamic range images. And as a result, such environment would emit a proper amount of light. So that the 3d objects put into such scene would receive a proper amount of light. And integrate seamlessly.

Imagine a better HDRI panorama that is fully three-dimensional – this is it.

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THE CONS

• Processing for HDR takes time
• Versatility!

Unfortunately, preparing the HDR images can be time-consuming and the use-cases for such a workflow are truly specific.

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CONCLUSION

Alright! These are just some of the things we can do with photogrammetry, as 3d artists.

Despite producing a non-versatile output sometimes, the tech itself is actually pretty versatile nevertheless. There is something for everyone.

So no matter whether you’re a 3d artist, a director, a cinematographer or a level designer; or maybe you work as a scientist or archaeologist, photogrammetry gives us some powerful tools and workflows to bridge the gap between our physical world and the digital realms we create.

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Before we wrap it up, I’d like to say thanks to everyone who helped us on the ground to gather the content: Eugeny, Nik, Pawel, Kaciaryna, Ryncuk, Aidy, Lena – thank you so much indeed!

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Feel free to check our Photogrammetry Course. Thank you!

The post Photoreal Environments and Photogrammetry: 5 Workflows For 3D Artists and Environment Artists appeared first on Creative Shrimp.

In this tutorial we’ll take an in-depth look at the problems with ngons to raise our 3d modeling game.

Blender 2.8 beta has been used for all demos.

What is an Ngon?

An ngon is simply a face with more than 4 edges.

There are modeling methods like boolean operations or software like computer-aided design (or CAD) that tend to output ngons in large numbers.

Ngons seem to have a bad reputation among 3d modelers. Well, that is a divisive topic and people feel strongly about the issue, some for it and some against it:

“Quad only is a stupid myth that serves no one.”

“NGons should never be present in a final model.”

“It is better to avoid Ngons altogether since quads and tris will always subdivide properly.”

“…This hatred and phobia of Ngons needs to stop.”

“Ngons as intelligent modeling strategy? No.”

In my opinion there is a certain bias towards the no-ngons modeling strategy. Let’s take a look at what is considered to be the disadvantages of using ngons in 3d modeling, then try to defend the opposite point of view.

Ngons Problems

1. Rendering (shading) issues

Ngons are associated with degraded surfaces that are supposed to be flat, but the shading or the curvature suggests that they aren’t. If all vertices of an ngon don’t lie in the same plane it can look really weird because it isn’t clear how to display such shape before it gets passed to render engine.

Ngons can be the cause of shading issues that ruin otherwise great boolean operations for aspiring 3d modelers.

It’s not easy to get over the initial frustration of seeing an after-boolean mesh. Why does it look so strange? What’s wrong with it? It must be ngons.

In addition to that, shading issues associated with ngons tarnish the boolean ops based workflow and we become suspicious of the entire workflow for that matter.

2. Limited use of subdivision surfaces

Ngons are claimed to not only look glitchy, but also result in all sorts of mesh editing problems. They disrupt the edge flow of your model and make standard modeling operations like extrusion less effective because we can’t use subdivision surfaces.

Unlike quads or triangles, ngons subdivide poorly in many cases, so it’s a potential showstopper for workflows that need subdivision surfaces for whatever purposes, car creation for example.

3. Awful looking wireframe

Chaotic-looking topology is another reason why ngons are frowned upon.

4. Deformation

Ngons often lead to animation (or more precisely, deformation) problems. Topology for animation relies on proper edge flow, and thus ngons are a big no-no if the mesh is supposed to be bent or deformed in any other way.

5. Interoperability

Ultimately, ngons behave in an unpredictable way when the mesh is imported/exported to game engines or to other modeling and sculpting applications (because some applications do not handle ngons well and there are always no guarantees about how exactly ngons will be interpreted, because there are no standards).

But all things considered, are ngons really that evil as we might have thought about it?

Before moving on let’s get down to basics and talk about triangulation.

3D Modeling Basics: Triangulation

On rendering, every ngon is subdivided into triangles or triangulated.

And so are quads. Quads are also split into triangles.

That’s how most render engines work, because triangles form the simplest closed area and thus are easy to rasterize and raytrace.

Under the hood, all shading and rendering calculations use triangles as basic units, even though it may seem that we, 3d modelers, work with quads or ngons.

So, every ngon gets split into triangles, but how exactly? For example there are five possibilities to split a pentagon into triangles and it gets even more complicated in case of higher ordered ngons. So ngon is always an implicit surface and different types of triangulation produce different looking results, some better than others.

That’s a crucial thing to understand, because what we perceive as the inherent problem of ngons (bad shading) can partly be attributed to non optimal triangulation among other things.

Now let’s go ahead and take a closer look at the disadvantages of using ngons.

Disadantages of Using Ngons – Closer Look

1. Rendering (shading) issues: Triangulation

So what do we actually mean when we say “a non optimal triangulation” and what is an optimal triangulation then?

There are different methods of triangulation. In Blender, we have the clip and beauty methods. Beauty arranges the new triangles evenly, while clip splits the polygons with so called ear clipping algorithm, that generally performs a bit faster but produces a noticeably worse set of triangles.

So just by changing the triangulation method we can get a more optimal triangulation and as a result, much better shading.

2. Rendering (shading) issues: non-planar surfaces

If a surface should be perfectly flat by design, let’s just make sure it is flat (for example, by using the flatten command in the Loop Tools Addon amongst other methods). By the way, perfectly flat surfaces with sharp hard-surface connections are an ideal case for using ngons, as they always shade in a proper way. Curved surfaces are a different story, we will talk about it shortly.

3. Rendering (shading) issues: smoothing

As for smooth shading errors in relation to ngons, controlling smooth shading by marking edges sharp often does the trick. Marking edges sharp means telling 3d modeling application to stop trying to smooth out the connection between two surfaces based on their normals.

Taking control of smoothing, e.g. marking edges sharp manually or paying attention to auto smooth angle turns out to be liberating in terms of what modeling styles can be used. Together with the bevel modifier it opens up boolean operations because now we can sharpen some edges and still get a gradual transition from one surface to the other (with the help of the bevel modifier). This workaround unleashes enormous creative potential.

4. Shading issues: bad topology

The source of rendering glitches can be sloppy topology in general (like, not having enough polygons to support some mesh editing operations or having an uneven distribution of polygons).

Another defining characteristic of all kinds of bad topology issues is poles. To explain that, let’s revisit topology basics once again.

3D Modeling Basics: N-Poles

A pole is when 3 or more edges converge at a single vertex.

Sometimes 3 and 5 poles are called N or E poles respectively, though we prefer using the number in the name as it’s easier to remember since the number of edges coming to a point defines the pole. 3 edges come to a point for the 3 pole, 5 edges for the 5 pole, 6 edges for a 6 pole etc.

So why do we have those poles in a quad filled mesh? Because without those poles we can’t effectively have the topology flow to match the 3d shape of whatever it is that we’re trying to create. So we just try our best to place those poles in sensible places.

So why are poles noteworthy?

• This is where our edge loop selection or creation gets terminated
• No matter how much we subdivide the mesh our poles won’t change
• These areas can shade not as smoothly and predictably as a uniformly grid like mesh with no poles

If like in Scooby Doo we were to unmask the real villain we would finally locate and unmask the ngon and find a 3 pole or 5 pole or more underneath complaining they would have ruined the shading on our mesh and would have gotten away with it too (if it wasn’t for those meddling kids).

5. Displacement

The other case in which we may want to work with quadrilaterals and avoid poles is displacement.

So why do ngons and triangles get so much criticism? It’s because that’s where we are guaranteeing the creation of a pole and therefore issues of shading under certain deformation and where the selection of an edge loop or creation of an edge loop will terminate.

6. Limited use of subdivision surfaces.

Because subdivision algorithms like Catmull-Clark used in Blender, 3ds max, Zbrush and other 3d modeling apps requires strict rules for mesh topology (that means having good edge flow and using mostly quads and having no poles), ngons don’t work well with subdivision. I would say, mainly because of long thin triangles and also poles which lead to pinching and other modeling issues from hell.

That’s a shame, because subdivision surfaces are great for approximating curved meshes, so not being able to use from start to end it makes it a lot harder to model smooth flowing surfaces.

In practice, that means that after we start carving boolean shapes and all that stuff, the only way to reestablish good edge flow would be retopology. I think it’s a decent tradeoff for using boolean ops which are amazing for mechanical design though.

On the other hand, some shapes are easier modeled without subdivision and without all-quads for that matter.

7. Beveled edges

The curved or beveled edges that we lose by waiving the subsurf modifier can be created with the bevel modifier instead. It works perfectly fine with ngons and helps us to achieve these sexy bevels with proper smooth shading.

In that sense ngons are much more appropriate for hard-surface modeling rather than automotive, organic or, god forbid, character modeling. Conversely, quadrilateral geometry could be better suited for organic, automotive and character modeling.

8. Awful looking wireframe

That’s… arguable. In fact, in many cases ngons make for much more elegant wireframe (especially if we don’t show a triangulated version). By collapsing the edges that don’t follow the contours of the surface we make it more, not less, readable in my opinion.

In addition to that, one notable advantage of using ngons is having less polygons overall. As a rule of thumb, boolean meshes and other kinds of meshes with ngons require less polygons to describe the surface area than the meshes, originated from subdivision surfaces.

9. Deformation

Deformation is a pretty serious problem of ngons.

Although, with enough geometry and more or less uniform polygonal density meshes with ngons can bend reasonably well, but not perfect by any means. So if you know that the mesh isn’t going to be deformed, then it’s ok. If it is going to be deformed, proceed with caution.

Again, following good modeling practices like having enough polygons is always helpful, no matter whether it’s 4-sided polygons or n-sided polygons.

10. Interoperability

Unfortunately there are no guarantees that ngons will import/export as expected because often times 3d applications make arbitrary decisions on how ngons should be triangulated. Once ready to export, it’s worth double-checking what triangulation algorithm you’d like to use.

Conclusion

The key takeaway is that ngons are neither universally good or bad, it depends on what modeling goal you want to achieve.

In conclusion, there are numerous disadvantages of using ngons, but some of their disadvantages are continuation of their merits and can be ignored in favor of 3d modeling possibilities you get in exchange. And they do have pros such as:

• Less polygons overall
• Elegant wireframe (arguably)
• Boolean operations unlocked
• Bevel modifier
• Quick concepting

I would say, the real arguments against ngons are bad deformation and interoperability, these are just bad things.

Also I’ve heard that ngons make it really tough to get good uv maps. And probably, physics engine operations on ngons could be problematic.

In my opinion, the other issues discussed in this video can be mitigated or even framed positively.

A Few Practical Takeaways:

Curved and going to be deformed = quads. Flat and not going to be deformed = ngons.

Pay attention to smooth shading settings, what surfaces should be marked as sharp, what’s the auto smooth angle and so on.

If it’s going to be exported to game engine or to application that doesn’t handle ngons well, triangulate it first to reduce the chances of incorrect triangulation.

Watch out for poles!

Ngons or quads, having enough polygons to allow deformation (and an even distribution of polygons for that matter) is always a good practice.

Lastly, when working with ngons, retopology may be required. 

On a side note, there are numerous ways of masking the shading artifacts with the help of the data transfer modifier, shrinkwrap modifier and so on.

Links:

Blender

Hard-surface Modeling in Blender (Blender Market)

Hard-surface Modeling in Blender (Gumroad)

Master Car Creation in Blender

masterxeon1001 on Youtube

Vitaly Bulgarov – Artstation

Khan Academy Pixar SubD Explained

Aidy Burrows on Twitter

Gleb Alexandrov on Twitter

Over to You

Embracing polygons with more than four edges will open up a wonderful world of boolean operations for you, especially if you’re interested in hard-surface modeling. If not for production, then at least for concepting. Let us know in the comments below, do you use ngons in your modeling?

The post Are Ngons Really That Evil in 3D Modeling? appeared first on Creative Shrimp.

Hi, Aidy Burrows here, bump map creation can itself be a bumpy ride and as for normal maps? Who can say what normal really is anyway?!

Well, actually in this context probably a mathematician could easily tell us BUT! The point is from an artist’s point of view there are some bumps to navigate so the process can be smoother (gotta love a 3D pun to get us started!)

BEWARE! Before we let our guard down after some slick puns let’s not forget why we’re here! The dangers of bump/normal maps are that we don’t directly see them like we would a color map, instead we see more how the light bouncing off the surface has changed because of them.

That means it isn’t always immediately obvious what the problem with the bump/normal map might be, where the problem stems from or how to fix it. So to immunise ourselves to all of this we’re going to hold these problems betwixt tweezers for inspection!

CONTENTS

Problem 1 – Default image settings

Problem 2 – Color Spaces in multiple menus

Problem 3 – File types

Problem 4 – Oversharp bump artifacts

Problem 5a – Baking from a shader

Problem 5b – Baking from an object

PROBLEM 1: The default image settings i.e. 8 bit images aren’t optimal for normal/bump images.

Here are our default new image settings below, notice the unchecked 32 bit float checkbox meaning our new image will be 8 bit.

If we leave everything as is and bake with this default lower bit depth, we can get problems such as these…

Notice the strange swirly mosaic tiled look to the middle cube. Those artifacts aren’t there without the normal map (on the left) or on the high resolution mesh that was used to bake the normals from (on the right).

Here’s another example using an 8 bit bump map on a simple plane…

On the left is the texture we’re using as a bump map for the plane in the viewport on the right. Again we can see the ‘banding’ artifacts.

We are asking a lot of our textures here though seeing how the object is so clean, smooth, defined and shiny. If on the other hand your material is actually quite rough and/or grungy often we can hide these banding artifacts on the normal map…

Above is that same central cube from before but instead of a very low roughness setting of just 0.05 here we’re hiding a lot of the artifacts in the 8 bit image with a roughness value of 0.4

So in conclusion for proper versatility make sure we have that 32 bit float checkbox enabled for bump/normal maps!

Now we have the bit depth out of the way let’s move on to…

PROBLEM 2: There are different ‘color spaces’ which can be set in different editors that we need to make sure we get right (again the default settings don’t help us here).

Here in this next image you’ll see 2 editors on top of each other. On top we have the image node selected in the shader editor and below the normal map texture being used in the image editor. This is what the cube was using earlier to show the 8 bit texture problem.

Notice in each of those editors we have the properties panel open (toggled with the ‘N’ shortcut key) and highlighted is where we can set the ‘color-space’ of the image.

Let’s ask ourselves, will this be plugged into any color sockets on our shader? The answer is – NO! So we need to remember this is ‘non-color’ data.

8 BIT

For an 8 bit image, Blender will probably default the color space here to ‘sRGB’. Which means that the image is not being treated as just data, so we need to counteract that. Luckily that’s pretty easy to do because in the image editor we have a pulldown menu that we can set to ‘non-color’.

The thing to bare in mind there is that in order for this normal map to shade properly we need to explicitly tell Blender in the shader editor that this image should NOT be treated as a typical color image. That whatever values are stored in the red, green and blue channels have been altered (by the sRGB profile) to something we don’t want.

You might be wondering WHY are they altered? Well, very basically this is because it makes the texture more useable for the monitor and more pleasing and intuitive to the human eye.

As we know though this texture isn’t to be directly seen by the human eye, this is for altering normals, so we want to reverse the changes of that color space. That’s what the ‘non-color’ option on the image node is doing!

PRO TIP!

If we want to control this manually ourselves we can simply add a gamma node set to 0.454 (linear to sRGB) or 2.2 (sRGB to linear) instead of switching that non-color setting.

One final note on this (which may change down the line if this is a bug!) if you switch the color space in the image editor from sRGB to ‘non-color’ there. Then you may find that switching the color/non-color toggle on the image node in the shader editor actually has no effect at all. (If this isn’t a bug perhaps greying out that option to indicate it isn’t relevant in that case could help clarify things)

32 BIT

Here it’s probably worth mentioning that there may be a couple of things that end up being changed by the developers or potentially (and understandably) there are some bugs in the current 2.80 beta ointment. Whatever the case, what follows here should be the most robust and consistent way of working with 32 bit images to get what we need.

For a 32 bit float image, blender will probably default the color space to ‘linear’ instead of ‘sRGB’.

It is fine to use linear color space but as I mentioned there are some bugs lurking, i’ve had it sometimes flip on me where instead of setting the image node to ‘color’ i’ve needed to set it to ‘non-color’. Spooky! So I think seeing how non-color space is intended for textures like normal/bump maps anyway let’s just stick with that!

Note: If we change the color space in one editor it’ll reflect that change in the other editor.

So use non-color space for 32 bit, but you may find (for now anyway) that the non-color/color toggle of the image node might then not do anything.

Here’s how a baked normal map will show up in 32 bit non-color space.

Remember as mentioned before if we want to control this manually ourselves we can simply add a gamma node set to 2.2 (sRGB to linear) or 0.454 (linear to sRGB) instead of switching the image node from ‘color’ to ‘non-color’. In fact, the color/non-color pulldown on the image node actually doesn’t currently do anything now that we’ve set the color space in the image editor to ‘non-color’. Again I suspect this bug may well be sorted any moment.

One interesting thing to note is that the 32 bit normal map looks a bit pale and lighter than we’re used to. It would be useful to be able to view it in the more typical darker shades like we had with the 8 bit image and I wouldn’t be surprised if that option returns soon too.

So in conclusion, this is fairly simple to remember as we’re setting the image itself to non-color and the image node that goes into the normal map in the shader editor to ‘non-color’. The only exception i’ve found is that when about to bake and generate the normal map itself, the image node that you have selected to tell Blender to bake to that image can be left at its default ‘color’ setting.

After we’ve created our working normal/bump maps, we’ll probably want to save them so that leads us to…

PROBLEM 3: Which file format/settings are best to use to save the bump/normal maps externally?

As we know, for an ideal texture we need the full bit depth. But what images can we save to and still expect to keep all that data in good shape?

After we’ve generated our normal map, from the image editor we’ll want to go Image > Save a copy… (don’t use ‘save as’ because if you choose the wrong filetype there’s no going back!)

That will show us all our potential filetypes…

Note we’re only using ‘RGB’ so we’ll be saving using that, ‘RGBA’ would be required if we also want to save out the alpha channel which we’re not doing in these examples.

In the below comparison, let’s take a look at using the same normal map that was baked for the cube above (the unsaved generated 32 bit version) compared to the results of saving that out as 8 bit and 16 bit PNGs….

(note : if the gif image above seems to be skipped over, this may be a Firefox issue)

As we can see the 8 bit PNG image shows those artifacts we’ve spotted before, but the 16 bit PNG seems to be almost identical to the full 32 bit generated bake.

I did some further tests and noted some filesizes below. It seems pointless to upload the images and display them here as all 16 bit or above tests looked identical to the generated 32 bit bake too!

(all examples are for a 1024 x 1024 texture size)

8 bit png = 117 KB

16 bit png (default 15% compression) = 1,080 KB

16 bit png (0% compression) = 6,156 KB

16 bit png (100% compression) = 792 KB

32 bit (Full float) OpenEXR (no codec) = 12,305 KB (Largest!)

32 bit (Full float) OpenEXR (Zip lossless codec) = 4,350 KB (Smallest lossless option)

32 bit (Full float) OpenEXR (Pxr24 lossy codec) = 637 KB (Smallest lossy option! Not including 8 bit)

Note for OpenEXR there are even more codecs to try in the pulldown menu, so if space is a concern you may find different codecs squeeze that image file down even smaller and with no noticeable loss of what you need that image to do. Go hunt the best of both worlds!

For the PNG 16 bit file compression can be useful here. The same results but differing filesizes, low compression generates a faster file but at a larger size (nearly 10 times larger!), and vice versa for high compression, something useful to bare in mind if generating lots and lots of frames in an animation as that compressing time can add up!

If for some reason we need the texture in the highest possible fidelity we can possibly save out to, then this is where OpenEXR comes in for full 32 bit juicy potential. Again there is a cost to balance as the filesize is double the size of the uncompressed PNG.

For the codec option we can have ‘none’ for the raw info but that will be the largest filesize available. I’d recommend trying Pxr24 to see if you can get away with a much smaller filesize. I’ve tried this previously and had indistinguishable results from the raw version at a fraction of the size. In fact in this case that ends up being the smallest filesize of them all! (Not including the 8 bit image of course!)

PROBLEM 4: An undesirable sparkly/jagged overly sharp animation

Sometimes the bump node has a kind of look to the shading in Eevee that can be problematic in animations. So we may need to know in those occasions how to swap those bump/height textures out for a normal map instead.

On the left of the comparison there you should be able to make out that sparkly overly sharp look when compared to the right side, especially in the last few seconds. The best bet is to watch in full screen and make sure it’s set to playback at the highest resolution. Otherwise compression might be obscuring the truths!!!

So as shown a height map used for a bump node and that same height map converted to a normal map and then plugged in a normal map node will shade differently. That is something we may need to bare in mind, to the point where we may want to tweak the shader settings, the specularity of lamps and the bump strength to make them look more similar to each other.

So in conclusion, despite the extra care sometimes needed to alter settings and have the normal map give a closer overall result to what we were already getting with the bump node, it’s still worth it for the especially helpful way it can eliminate that overly sparkly/jagged/sharp look.

PROBLEM 5: How to even bake a normal or a bump map anyway?

There are 2 methods I’d like to go over for baking some simple normal or bump maps.

METHOD 1 – BAKING FROM THE SHADER

First let’s take a look at what is probably the simplest. Here I’ve got a simple 2D plane, on that plane is a whole network of procedural textures such as noise texture nodes working together to create the height map going into the bump node for this shader.

Instead of all those nodes (which create that texture on the right) I want to bake all that bump information down into just 1 single texture.

1. UV Unwrap

We may have some UV’s already which you can check in the UV image editor. However, assuming we don’t for some reason, or they need to be changed let’s head over to the 3d view. While in edit mode, press A to make sure everything is selected and then press ‘U’ for the unwrap menu (see below), for a simple plane several of these options will give us what we need.

For 3D geometry the ‘Smart UV project’ option is a good one (again which also would work fine for the 2D plane), so if unsure give that a try.

Here notice i’m in the UV Editing workspace and in the uv editor on the left we can see the orange selected outline of the uv’s filling the entire grid space. A simple plane clearly won’t waste any texture space!

2. Create an image to bake to

There are several ways to create images in Blender, let’s do it this time from within the shader editor. I’ll switch the workspace (from UV editing) back again (as the previous workspace had the shader editor on the left) and then I’ll zoom in to get a better look at the nodes and go Shift A > Texture adding in a new ‘Image Texture’ node.

Click ‘New’ on the image node…

and from there we can name it, set the resolution and choose ‘32 bit Float’.

Once the new image is created, open up the properties sidebar with ‘N’ and find the ‘properties’ section, here we can change the color space from ‘linear’ to ‘non-color’. Note we can confirm this is 32 bit by looking at the checkbox next to ‘Float Buffer’.

The image node doesn’t need to be hooked up to anything it simply just needs to be present in the shader editor so that we can select it and let Blender know this is the image we want to overwrite when we hit the bake button (in a moment!).

3. Bake

Ok, we’re ready to bake! Eevee doesn’t have options to bake as I write this so in our main properties window on the render settings tab we’ll make sure our render engine is set to ‘Cycles’.

Also on the render tab at the bottom we’ll find the bake settings themselves.

Note also the samples in the sampling section are only set to ‘1’, that’ll be useful in a moment but not relevant while baking our normals.

NORMAL

If I want to bake the bump information of the shader into a normal map, I can keep the shader setup as it is. In the bake settings simply select ‘Normal’ as the bake type.

Then with a quick glance that the correct image node is still selected in the shader editor (the one i’ve called ‘bake to me’ 2 images ago) we hit the bake button.

That’s it!

All’s that’s left is to save the result somewhere. (See Problem 3!)

BUMP

If instead we want to bake the bump information, then we create an emission shader and hook what is going into the bump node up to that emission shader and that would need to hook into the main material output.

In the bake settings we can then select ‘Emit’ as our bake type and then as before we’re ready to hit the bake button!

Note: Something to keep in mind is that the rendering process for the Emit pass (and several other passes for that matter (but not the normal pass!)) will take the render samples into account. So since we only need one sample for the emit shader to give us everything we need, to save needlessly wasting baking time we can set that down to just 1 pass in our render sampling settings.

METHOD 2 – BAKING FROM ANOTHER OBJECT

The first 2 steps are the same as baking from the shader. So see above for more details.

1. UV Unwrap

2. Create an image to bake to

3. Bake

Here’s where things start to diverge a little, to bake from another object we’ll need to enable ‘selected to active’ in the baking panel and set the ray distance. In this example about 0.2 seems to work just fine. Though if after baking it doesn’t look quite right, try changing this ray distance setting to a higher value.

To actually perform the bake we need to select the object we want to bake from (typically some higher resolution mesh) and then shift select the object we’ll be baking to (so that it becomes the active object and therefore our target mesh).

Then as before make sure we have the correct image node selected in the shader editor and then hit that bake button!

• 8 bit (i.e. the default option) needs to be changed if we’re to get normal/bump maps that are useable in the majority of cases (i.e. shiny and clean and not grungy and rough surfaces)
• When generating your 32 bit float textures for your bump/normal maps, set them to non-color in the image or node editor
• When set to non-color in the image editor color space, the color space setting of the image node in the shader editor can be ignored. This maybe a little buggy though so keep an eye on this.
• If you want the most data of all saving into your image texture then use an openEXR format (Float Full) – Sometimes you can save a lot of space if you try a lossy codec such as Pxr24.
• If relying heavily on bump nodes in Eevee and find there is a lot of undesirable sparkly/jaggedness to the animation then try swapping the bump map out for a normal map.
• Reference for a couple of easy ways to bake out normal/bump maps.

See you out there on the open road to endless 3D possibilities!

Aidy on Twitter – game development veteran and overenthusiastic tutorial maker using a whole lot of Blender and UE4.

The post 5 Must Know Tips With Bump/Normal Maps (Blender 2.8) appeared first on Creative Shrimp.

[video_embed maxwidth=”800″][/video_embed]

NEW – PAINT APPS

MyPaint – a nimble, distraction-free tool for digital painters. Supports innovative features like spectral paint and linear color mixing.

NEW – INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Two Minute Papers – bite-sized science videos by Karoly Zsolnai every week.

NEW – MEDIA PLAYERS

VLC – a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player that plays almost everything.

NEW – LIFESTYLE

The Puttytribe – a vibrant community of multipotentialites (people who have a dozen projects or jump from passion to passion).

NEW – DESIGN

Zimri Mayfield – graphic design inspiration, logo redesigns and charming personality of Zimri.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Peter McKinnon – photography and cinematography tips by a vlogging coffee adept.

3D SOFTWARE

Gaea – advanced toolset for procedural terrain design and world building. Has a free version.

BLENDER ADDONS

D-Noise – a free ai-accelerated denoising add-on for Blender, based on Nvidia Opti-X technology. Only supports Nvidia GPUs.

Theory Studios Blender build – a branch of Blender that includes Intel Denoiser, Embree, Scramble Distance and Dithered Sobol features.

PRODUCTIVITY

Google Docs – online editing, sharing, and collaborating on documents.

COLLABORATION TOOLS

Perforce – collaboration tools that are compatible with Unreal Engine among other things.

PRINT SERVICES

Redbubble – printing and shipping services. T-shirts, device cases, posters, stickers, you name it.

Zazzle – an online marketplace that allows designers to create customized products like clothing and accessories.

Teespring – a platform for custom merchandise with no upfront cost.

GAMEDEV

Mathew Wadstein – Unreal Engine 4 and the Blueprint tutorials, lots of them. 

Matthew Palaje – helping out the game development community by sharing awesome indie devlogs.  

Game maker’s toolkit – Does Half-Life teach without tutorials? How games get balanced? And other game development theory gems by Mark Brown.

COLOR

Color Hunt – trendy color palettes for designers and artists.

VIDEO EDITING

Shotcut – a free, open source, cross-platform video editor.

Kdenlive – free non-linear video editor aimed at GNU/Linux, but also works on BSD and MacOS.

Cinelerra GG Infinity – a resource-saving 8k video editing software for Linux.

Davinci Resolve – cross-platform professional 8K editing, color correction, visual effects, audio editing and more. Has a free version.

TEXTURES

CC0 Textures – public domain PBR textures by StruffelProductions (Lennart Demes).

Texture Ninja – public domain textures by Joost Vanhoutte.

NEW: MATERIALS

Materialize – a stand alone tool for creating materials for use in games from images.

PixaFlux – PBR texture composer, visual scripting of image operations.

ArmorPaint – a stand-alone software designed for physically-based texture painting.

ASSET MANAGEMENT

Connecter – free visual asset manager for 3d artists.

PHOTOGRAMMETRY

fSpy – open source still image camera matching.

BLENDER COMMUNITY

Blender Community – an independent community agregator.

AUDIO EDITING

Reaper – digital audio workstation with a free trial.

OVER TO YOU

Did we miss anything? Don’t hesitate to tell us if we forgot to mention some amazing resource, we’ll make sure to add it in the next round of updates.

Want to see even more useful links? Check the Resources mega collection.

And feel free to subscribe to the newsletter to get ahead in computer graphics.

Let's get better at digital graphics and art! Join 3000+ members in the Creative Shrimp community. Subscribe to list

The post 30+ Useful Tools for 3D Artists and Designers appeared first on Creative Shrimp.

Download a daily build of Blender 2.8.

Blender Eevee Demos (April, 2019)

Baroque Executive office (Blender eevee interior) by 1D_Inc

NOARA – Teaser by Pierrick PICAUT

Porsche 917 Blender 2.8 EEVEE Demo by HEAVYPOLY

Procedural PBR in Blender – Showcase by Simon Thommes

Tiger – Blender 2.8 Eevee development test by Daniel Bystedt

Blender EEVEE motion reel 2019 by Metapoint

F1 Racer Eevee Demo by katarn66

Heroes of Bronze “Before the Storm” Teaser by Martin Klekner

Blender Eevee Demo 2019 by Lorenzo Zitta

Test EEVEE render blender 2.8 timelapse (My concept planetary buggy) by Alex Pi

Eevee blender 2.80 demo VR dream by Damien Monteillard

Cosmic Drift – Blender 2.8 EEVEE Demo by Curtis Holt

Komikaze Demo (Blender 2.8 EEVEE) by Rahul Parihar

Blender 2.8 | Demo testing Eevee by Jason Cumbers

cargo360 – Blender 2.8 Eevee demo by Minge Yeung

LEGO® EEVEE Demo by Renderbricks

Blender EEVEE – Taryn Hangar by HEAVYPOLY

Laserscan Demo French Fries Blender 3D Eevee by Dee van Hoven

T-cell : Houdini and Blender Eevee by NaotoFukui

Concept demo | Eevee in Blender 2.8 by William Davis

concept demo 2 – Eevee viewport | Blender 2.8 by William Davis

Blender 2.8 EEVEE alembic test by Patrick Noland

bloodcells by Oliver Zangenberg

Blender 2.80 eevee demo Orange tip Butterfly by Damien Monteillard

Real Time Character Rendering in Blender 2.8 (EEVEE) by Juras

“First snow” Blender 2.80 Archiviz DEMO by PLANE

cueva demo 1 hecho con eevee blender by Leonardo Angulo

Landing | Cinematic footage with Blender 2.8 Eevee by victorvdr9

Oblivion Environment art (Parte 1) by Jose Javier Carceles Marmol

Oblivion Environment Art Animation Reel (part 2) by Jose Javier Carceles Marmol

SF71H Ferrari F1 car presentation with Blender 2.80 Eevee real-time render engine by Azzurro-Design

Blender 2.80 (EEVEE) First Person Camera by 3D Vision

Sci-Fi Helmet – Blender 2.8 Eevee by DanGry

Strawberry cake cutting system by boolean – Blender 2.8 Eevee procedural texture by Sakura Rtd

Reaction Diffusion #1 – Blender 2.8 EEVEE Render by Mario Hawat

Under The Dome – Blender 2.8 EEVEE particle path simulation with compositor by Mario Hawat

Crystal Madness – Blender 2.8 EEVEE with Tissue addon by Mario Hawat

Blender 2.8 Eevee Gem test by Dmitry Beley

Blender 2.8, eeVee test, dancing crowd, VJ Loop by Ramzesmeister

Skin ZShader for Blender/EEVEE preview 2 by Zen Shaders

Red Ship (Oculus Quill – Blender Eevee 2.80) by Sebastián Sanabria

Dancing tumor – Blender 2.8 by Twinmiaou

Google Indie Showcase – Animating in Blender by Louis du Mont

Sphere Bot Animation — Matcap / Cycles / Eevee by Louis du Mont

Blender Eevee test by Hirokazu Yokohara

2AM vibes – Blender Eevee environment by Nathan Timothy Anderson

Blender 2.8 R/C Buggy rigging display with Eevee viewport renderer by Sobschack

The house – teaser by Jan Urschel

Angel (Oculus Medium / Blender Eevee) by Sebastian Sanabria

Breach in Sector HBY 22 Detected by Philipp Höhnel

SONY TPS-L2 by Max Mustermann

Drone concept design by Front

IV – teaser trailer by Tomasz Artur Bolek

721 Dark St. by Joni Mercado

Over to You

Do you have any cool Eevee demos to share? Drop me or Aidy a line on Twitter or in the comments down below!

The post 50+ Hand-picked Eevee Demos (Blender 2.8 Beta) appeared first on Creative Shrimp.

P.S. If you want to jump into that boat too, download a daily build of Blender 2.8.

And check out the previous Eevee demos collection.

Blender Eevee Demos (November, 2018)

Blender 2.8 EEVEE – ALIEN(1979) scene by ArtNix

Countryside Real Time by Vadim Ignatiev

SPACE SUIT REALTIME EEVEE by Albin MERLE

SSS in Blender Eevee by Monaime Zaim

Smoke test on eevee (blender 2.8) by Leandro Dreamer

Blender EEVEE short workflow and render by Neveselov

Test EEVEE blender 2.8 volumetric light by MFS.Junior 3D

Twisting Corridor | Blender 2.8 Eevee Realtime Viewport by Aidy Burrows

Elevator Dive  | Blender 2.8 Eevee Realtime Viewport by Aidy Burrows

Mandelbulb Fractals rendered test in 4k using Eevee by infango (original scene by Jonas Dichelle)

Blender 2.80 EEVEE Real Time Rendering [2.80.4 Alpha2 – Experimental build] Screen Space Reflections by WurmiSaft

Ink Drop (Smoke Simulation) with Eevee – Blender 2.8 by YafuLinux

Blender 2.8 Eevee – Alien facemocap by Emiliano Colantoni

Blender 2.8 EEVEE Hair – This is getting ridiculous by Da Paulus

Blender 2.8 Realistic Lighting Setup | How to use Irradiance Volumes in EEVEE by HEAVYPOLY

Procedural Cloud System for Eevee by Simon Thommes

Eevee smoke benchmark by LapisSea

Goodnight Claire – Blender 2.8 development test by Daniel Bystedt

Zbrush 2018 Mech – realtime render by Daniel Bystedt

Creating Foliage in Blender. Grease Pencil + Eevee by Jama Jurabaev

Space Suit in Blender by Jama Jurabaev

SPECTRAL – BLENDER 2.8 EEVEE by Emiliano Colantoni

Mandelbulb Fractals rendered in Eevee by Jonas Dichelle

ToyCar Eevee demo by BlenderBelich

Blender 2.8 EEVEE Volumetric – Disco Disco by Da Paulus

Blender Eevee – The showcase of Hermans by Leonardo Braz

Blender 2.8 EEVEE Autofocus Fun by Zacharias Reinhardt

Commodore Amiga CDTV rendered in Blender Eevee by Piotr Zgodziński

Cafe Racer Hoverbike 3D Printable Kit EEVEE Demo by HEAVYPOLY

Blender Eevee Viewport Test(GTX 1080 TI) by Uygar GÜRKAN

Blender Eevee Render Engine Test by Ilia Sibiryakov

Eevee Viewport test with Sphere Bot // Blender 3D Realtime Render by Louis du Mont

EEVEE Test by Олег Фрумсон

Catwoman Blender Eevee by katarn66

Demoreel 2018 Damien Monteillard 3D Modeler – 3dminfographie – Blender Cycles Eevee

Metaballs by Fin O’Riordan

Motion Graphics by Alex @meta.point

Your Turn!

Eevee is getting new features almost daily. How about grabbing the daily build of Blender 2.8?

If you know any other remarkable Eevee demos that we have missed, I would appreciate if you leave a comment and tell us about it.

The post 35+ Top-notch Eevee Demos (Blender 2.8 Alpha Builds) appeared first on Creative Shrimp.