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Forgotten Metal Knowledge (Vray, Cycles, Arnold)

Lucas Piazzini rediscovers a long-forgotten technique of using multiple reflection lobes – or multiple roughnesses plus anisotropic reflection – to render metal that is actually physically accurate. I’ve never seen this trick before, it’s a genuinely new piece of information for me. Just brilliant.

“In this tutorial we will be going back to 2008 to rediscover a major aspect of 3D and expand on improving seemingly common and mastered materials to new-found fidelities.” – Lucas

Watch the Tutorial:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=r3bkGPobpTw

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EasyWaterscape for Unreal Engine – cinematic trailer

If you mainly use Blender – have a look at this Unreal Engine water demo anyway. The trailer has an impeccable cinematography.

“After many months of work, I’m happy to (finally) announce the release of EasyWaterscape for #unrealengine! With realtime ocean/water simulation, dynamic foam & shorelines, underwater transitions, buoyancy, and one-click presets” – William Faucher

https://x.com/WillFaucherVFX/status/2074473280203813110 – the trailer

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Physical Atmospheres²

I haven’t seen anything like that in Blender. A physical atmosphere sim (that works in EEVEE and lets you do eclipses and stuff) and lets you zoom out to space, basically?

It’s developed by Mārtiņš Upītis, a mastermind behind the water simulation and other effects in Flow, an oscar-winning Blender movie. Technically, the atmosphere and the clouds in this add-on are rendered neither in Cycles nor in EEVEE – but rather in a dedicated raymarching engine, then brought to Blender.

On testing it, I ended up creating a nuclear explosion. What can I say? It’s creative process.

p.s. Mārtiņš told me the plugin is in active development: bugs are being ironed out, performance improved etc. So if you notice anything weird – report it to the devs.

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Dynamic Grabber Add-on

This add-on allows you to grab (hence, Grabber!) and naturally move objects in your Blender scene, in realtime. What a time to be alive!

“Instead of manually placing every object one by one, you can select objects, press Ctrl + Shift + G, move them naturally inside your scene, and let them collide, react to gravity, and settle into place.” – Ilyasse L

Watch the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFbXuMHAue0

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Hotspot Texturing

To 3d artists: do you use hotspot texturing in your workflow aka “a method to quickly apply textures to geometry by matching faces to predefined rectangles”?

This #b3d texturing style / technique is goated

Links:

https://x.com/faizkyokaz/status/1950020159722172581

https://x.com/passivestar_/status/1841631774499049889

https://x.com/passivestar_/status/1714970104188875252

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Hotspot_texturing

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New scene project brush (Blender 5.2)

This new scene project brush looks really useful. Something I’d use to extract pieces of geometry and solidify them.

Farrukh Abdur: “Using here the new scene project sculpting brush added in Blender 5.2 It works similar like a shrinkwrap modifier with more refinements.”

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Making of 6088AD by Cornelius Dammrich (2016)

Simply must-watch if you’re into 3D professionally or as a hobbyist: Making of 6088AD by Cornelius Dammrich.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om2C1zkqSkA

From time to time, I rewatch this video as a timeline cleanser. Such a weird feeling: everything was created by hand, from scratch. No generative AI in sight.

Even a grey material shot looks like an art form.

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Jungle environment and highly detailled breakdown by Lucas Piazzini

Not only the environment is ultra detailed and just bonkers, but Lucas also shared a 40-page breakdown on Artstation. 3DS Max/Houdini/Vray/Nuke.

“I had a ton of fun making this, exploring so many workflows and sharing so many tips!” – Lucas

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Industria 2 – texturing research

Still an extremely impressive texturing style / technique. Simple surfaces, clean texturing style, hand-painted masks, roughness and normal maps (and the indirect lighting) doing all the heavy lifting.

“For Industria 2 we try to keep geometry simple and let textures and lighting do the heavy lifting”.

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Material Layering via particle scattered on surfaces

Great for closeups/ macro renders.

Lucas Piazzini in this tweet:
“Theory is cool, how about actually seeing it?”

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Best of Term – Lighting & Rendering (Winter 2026)

Gnomon BFA student Miles Quigley created this 1970s lab scene where a scientist discovers alien life in our Lighting and Rendering 1 course. Congrats Miles!

p.s. Great lighting. Very deliberate.

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Probably the best illustration to the inertia animation principle I’ve seen

“Just move the cube” – 3D人-3dnchu- CG情報ブログ

Click this tweet above. You have to see it in motion.

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New Quad Auto Remesher for Blender (free)

Have you tested this quad remeshing tool, folks?

3D人-3dnchu- CG情報ブログ: “An open-source tool that can remesh with high-quality quad polygons at ultra-high speed! Released under the MIT license with the official version now available!”

https://3dnchu.com/archives/autoremesher-1-0/ – by Jeremy HU

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

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Vector Displacement in Blender

I asked on Twitter/X: Vector displacement mapping in Blender – aside from the VDM brushes – isn’t it a thing yet?

(The image from the Maxon Zbrush online documentation)

“Vector displacement has been in blender for a few years in both shader and geometry nodes editors. A lot of the nodevember creations use vector displacements with adaptive subdiv to get the results.” – check this tweet by RC12 @MossCubed:

https://x.com/MossCubed/status/2074174242510495907

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Ghosting Effect

The ghosting effect as it’s presented here by Bao-Thinh Dinh is really tasteful.

https://x.com/Bipowpow/status/2074507976422105103

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Growing Synthetic Muscles

Cartesian Caramel is a known #b3d madman. He’s growing synthetic muscles now, in Geometry Nodes.

https://x.com/Cartesian_C/status/2074165057173205232 – check it in motion

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New cloth dynamics in Blender 5.2 (Geometry Nodes)

New cloth dynamics in Geometry Nodes look awesome and open up a whole new workflow in Blender.

https://x.com/cgman/status/2055558769124491271 – see it in motion (the fern is fully interactive).

“Just tried the new Cloth Dynamics solver in Blender 5.2 Alpha #geometrynodes with interactive fern foliage! (Still missing self-collision for now)” – Kevin Lim Wanasili

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Fan Ho

Fan Ho’s photography is impeccable if you want to study some upstage / reverse key lighting among other things. The man was the best. Just check his work with reverse key in mind.

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Announcing OVERGROWN: Blender Studios’ feature film project!

Blender Studio is about to kick off something HUGE. Overgrown – Blender first feature film! It’ll be absolutely tremendous for the open-source community. I know we can make it happen. We’ve done it before, let’s do it again!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hwMHF1rXvU – take part – and share the message further.

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Gleb

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