Blender

Learn about the real-life scientific applications of GeoNodes in Cosmology research.

The game, for the curious.

I deleted almost everything from a project, and it still crashes. I rendered an older project again to see if it's a problem with a new driver or Blender version, but everything worked fine.

So my hardware appears to be OK, Blender is OK, and the driver is OK. But something inside the project file is causing trouble.

The project had over 1.6 million faces and more than 1,000 objects. Now 14 objects and only 4,300 faces. It's still crashing. No matter which render engine I use. Tested with Cycles, EEVEE, Hydra Storm.

And it doesn't crash at the first frame. It renders a random number of frames correctly and then crashes.

Multiple rigid body objects don't always start from a simple position. Occasionally, you need to “throw them together.” The “Apply Transformation” operator helps you with that.

I am currently creating some meshes that are then exported as OBJs. I am really only interested in the vertex positions and normals, as everything else will be done with shaders. But I keep coming across… well, not really a issue.

Some exported vertex positions deviate from their in-editor position by literally a micrometer. Again, I know that this is basically irrelevant. Perhaps, if I were to compress the files, I might have a few kilobytes more data than actually necessary.

…but I keep seeing this and it annoys me for no practical reason. Does anyone know if there is a "fix" for this behavior?

My 1070 is getting old, and I need to replace my main rendering PC in 2026. But until then, I'd like to render something overnight instead of over 10 nights.

I am trying out smoke simulation and I am having a problem about the smoke showing up in Cycles. EEVEE will render the smoke just fine, but when I try to render with Cycles nothing shows up. After trying out everything I could think of, I tried opening the scene in Blender 4.5.5 and there the smoke showed up as expected in Cycles with same default settings, except density being increased. Has something changed in Blender 5.0.1 the smoke does not show up with same settings or what am I missing? It feels weird so major bug would go unnoticed, but I could not find anything on the bug tracker or elsewhere online.

Here's the file of the very trivial scene demonstrating the issue: https://walop.kapsi.fi/temp/smoke.blend

I wish to make high quality animation. The machine is more than 15 years old. What are the upgrades required for making such a machine suitable for making high quality animation and for working on Godot ??

Disclaimer, I am a novice/hobbyist. Only use blender for 3D printing purposes.

TLDR; Add-ons Mesh Tools -> Offset Edges and Curve Tools -> Recursive Offset can achieve offsetting similar to a CAD program like Fusion 360. Watch this video (not mine) for a more comprehensive guide on Curve Tools https://youtu.be/HSUpmhGdgGQ?t=191

Full Explanation

I ran into an issue recently where I needed to offset an edge, similar to what a program like Fusion 360 can do with a sketch. After some searching, I found that there is an add-on built in that can be enabled called "Mesh Tools" that can do this pretty easily.

Mesh Tools approach (Didn't work for my specific issue)

On Blender 5.0...

• Edit -> Preferences -> Get Extensions
• Search "Mesh Tools"
• Click "Install"

Then, in edit mode:

• Select edge you want to offset
• Right-click -> Mesh Tools -> Offset Edge

There are a few different options and this works fairly well. I used the Extrude option

My issue was I had a sharp edge and it was causing intersecting edges/faces

I made a post on Reddit asking what the best way to solve it was and never got a reply, and then I realized I never checked if there was a Blender community on lemmy.

Curve Tools approach

Anyway, I found a solution to my specific problem, "Curve Tools" in this video: https://youtu.be/HSUpmhGdgGQ?t=191

Caveats before starting:

• The object/edge needs to be planar and on the XY plane.
• This will ruin the topology and I'm not the guy to tell you how to fix it.

On Blender 5.0...

• Edit -> Preferences -> Get Extensions
• Search "Curve Tools"
• Click "Install"

Then, in edit mode:

• Select the edge you want to offset
• E to Extrude
• Esc to leave it in place
• P to separate by selected
• Go back to object mode, and select the object you just separated
• Object -> Convert -> Curve
• Go back into edit mode, select everything
• Make the curve 2D and set Fill Mode to Both. (Under the Data tab in the Properties section)

• Press N to show the context menu if it's not already displayed on the right side.
• Edit -> Recursive Offset
• Set the offset to the desired amount

After this you can convert that object back into a Mesh object and use it how you want.

I have no idea if this is the best solution, maybe there is a plugin that does this without converting to a Curve, but I wanted to share what I found here.

If you‘re interested, here‘s my portfolio on blenderartists: https://blenderartists.org/u/nautilux/activity/portfolio

One room of my "Grandpa's Flat" series

I made this with Blender 4.5

Hello Blender community!

I'm returning to Blender after a few years away and feel like a total beginner again. This hit home when I watched some of my old animations; I was simultaneously amazed I ever made them, and horrified that I now struggle to remember how to model a decent cube!

What are your top tips for a returning beginner? I'm especially curious about:

• Must-change settings or preferences?

• Best free add-ons to install day one?

• Your favorite short YouTube tutorials for getting back up to speed?

For what it's worth, I stopped around early 2023/24. Geometry Nodes were out, but they kept changing how the nodes worked, which confused my simple brain beyond belief. It seems they're more stable now, so any fun projects you know of or advice on picking them up would also be hugely appreciated!

Any helpful advice is greatly appreciated!

After watching This Cody Gindy video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8N00rjil_4&t=268s) I knew I had to use the effect on my characters. Problem is, after hours of hand painting an object space normal map, I learned the lighting doesn't work right on a rigged character and it needs to be in tangent space (the issue can be seen on the character's arm) I don't think I can handpaint it in tangent space. Is there a way to convert it? and will it keep it's painterly effect?

I was asked to create a poster for an event of a hobby group I am a part of; This image formed the base of the poster. That's why there's a larger unused area in the sky, to make place for headings and texts. Nonetheless, I am generally very happy with the image even outside of its use as a poster.

I am particularly content with the clouds; those are a relatively simple procedural shader, but Eevee's improved volumetric rendering made working with it a joy.

Otherwise, the image is rather blatantly based on Idylls of the King, a work by Gustave Doré which has been used for album covers on multiple occasions. What can I say, it's just a really nice illustration.

I am considering to build a desktop pc for 3d modelling and some rendering, mostly still images. Not interested in AI/crypto stuff, where apparetly most progress is focused. How should I think about it? Does it still make sense to avoid Nvidia? Maybe even second-hanf market is worth attention now?

Shoutout to the 19 upvoters who saw my previous progress posts! Refer to my previous post for the full writeup on how it works. Feedback welcome for development -- rock on, noders! 🤘

Made with Blender. Source files and extras available at https://studio.blender.org/projects/impulse-purchase/

Operating System: Bazzite (Linux)

GPU: Intel Arc A770

Tried with both Flatpak Blender 3D and from Blender.org directly. Same result.

works in Blender 4.2.10 LTS, except for Embree.

• Invidious
• Youtube