As a free, open-source software for 3D modeling and animation, Blender has democratized the industry to a generation of aspiring designers, architects, and animators. The system is quite intuitive on its own, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a need for additional training tools and support guides to grow your skills. While there are plenty …

Blender 2.9 has made great strides in improving visuals and rendering 3D models and animations. Most noticeably, the way it visualizes OpenVDB and volume simulations. Where it was merely implemented as importable in 2.83 LTS, 2.9’s update has drastically improved the visual fidelity of voxels that allow for simulations such as smoke, fire, and explosion …

What Is Blender? If you’re not already familiar, Blender is a computer graphics software used to create 2D and 3D animation, digital art, visual effects, and more. As a free-to-use, open-source software, Blender’s source code can be customized to cater to the user’s needs and runs on most operating systems including Windows, Linux, and MacOS. …

Whether using the video sequencing editor or the compositor, the following guide explains how to properly render and complete an animation in Blender 2.8 onward, as well as the differences between rendering as a movie file and as an image sequence (rendering each frame as a still image). Preparing to Render an Animation in Blender …

One of the most important aspects of producing a beautiful final image is noise reduction. When using Cycles to render a scene, you may still find your renders suffering from a great amount of noise and dead, burnt-out pixels or “fireflies.” Keep reading to learn more about one trick that is often overlooked—Multiple Importance Sampling. …

There are several ways to set up materials and backgrounds as transparencies for post-processing and compositing in Blender. Below, we explore each way and walk you through the process. Transparent BSDF The Transparent BSDF node is at its core designed specifically for achieving transparency. Simply put, this material node allows you to control different types …

View Layers can help you composite images, change a scene, and render final images without having to re-render after any alterations. Keep reading to find out more about what View Layers can do for your composite render. How Layers Are Separated in Blender When starting a new .blend file, you will find yourself heavily relying …

As the final public release of the 2.8 series, Blender 2.83 is the software’s most comprehensive and definitive iteration to date. The newest Blender release is 2.90 (as of August 2020), but it’s still prone to potential bugs, security fixes, and updates. Version 2.83, on the other hand, has achieved Long Term Support (LTS) status, …

No matter what your preferred style may be, not all designers are after true-to-life, photo-realistic scenes in their renderings. Non-photo-realistic (NPR) art is also in demand for 3D artists, and sometimes they want a more expressive, comic-like final render; perhaps like an animated film for kids. Blender’s solution comes in the form of Freestyle. Let’s …

Once an image has been rendered and rasterized, the scale may no longer be able to widen (or scale up) depending on its number of pixels. If the pixel count has decreased (or scaled down), usually the quality of the image will also decrease. A good way to understand this effect is to imagine that …