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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.

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.

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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.”

Check the tweet.

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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.”

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.

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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

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

Subscribe to our newsletter if you want Cool Things in 3D to be delivered straight to your inbox (monthly or so).

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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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 (August 2026) appeared first on Creative Shrimp.