Here’s a look at some of the coolest things happening in 3D this month – from Gaussian splats in Blender 5.3 and panoramic cameras in EEVEE to dispersion in Cycles, the most realistic Blender short film, and the GPUs the Blender community is actually using.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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) 😀
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Crazy Cloth Sim in Houdini
Now that’s cloth sim (watch it in motion)! By Ruye.
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Topology Cheat Sheet by Eman Vallejos
I thought I’d bookmark this tweet by Eman.
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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).
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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
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Quick Tip
How to feed the geonodes proximity data into a shader in Blender.
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Dominic Hailstone old showreel (2004 – 2014)
“All work is practical, puppets, actors, composited digitally. No CG. No ai.”
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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.”
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Gleb
