Using app templates to boost productivity

Making video tuto­ri­als? Juggling mul­ti­ple projects? Ever want­ed to switch between dif­fer­ent Blender setups with­out hav­ing to remem­ber what pref­er­ences to flip every time? Application tem­plates allow you to save Blender con­fig­u­ra­tions and eas­i­ly swap between them. This includes dif­fer­ent start­up files, addons and even splash screens. App tem­plates can also run cus­tom Python code 

A quick peek at Mirage 3.5

I’ve been work­ing on Mirage 3.5 for a while now and have some neat new fea­tures to show; includ­ing a new move/rotation tool, new ter­rain type, new mod­i­fiers sys­tem, new set­tings for mod­i­fiers, rewrit­ten mod­i­fiers, dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tem maps and more. This is still heavy work in progress so many things can still change.

How to scale UVs from the center in Blender

Ever tried to ani­mate a tex­ture’s scale, only to find out it was grow­ing and shrink­ing from the cor­ners? This lit­tle prob­lem can be fixed eas­i­ly with a cou­ple nodes. Find out how to scale UV and gen­er­at­ed tex­tures from the cen­ter in Blender’s node edi­tor in this super-quick tip.

Animated Film Grain with Eevee

If you ever tried to do film grain in the com­pos­i­tor you may have hit a wall when ani­mat­ing, since the “old” noise tex­tures are pret­ty basic. There’s a bet­ter way! We can use the new nois­es to sim­u­late film grain, dust and oth­er imper­fec­tions direct­ly with Eevee.  Note that you can also use the Generator Modifier instead 

Amazing UILists in Blender with Custom Filtering

For this tuto­r­i­al you need to know the basics of mak­ing UI lists with Python in Blender, luck­i­ly some­one has already made a tuto­r­i­al about that! In the last episode we learned how to make a UIList and place it in a pan­el. It even had sort­ing and search­ing for free. So what’s left to do? Build our 

Moving slices with Blender

Welcome to anoth­er motion graph­ics quick tip! This time we are look­ing at a basic overview of the mov­ing slices effect in Blender. You can often find this effect in slideshows and tran­si­tions. It looks best when com­bined with some ani­ma­tion in the tex­tures, be it scal­ing or mov­ing them. This tip uses NLA tracks to 

Circle Bursts in Blender

2D motion graph­ics aren’t the domain of After Effects alone, Blender is becom­ing more and more capa­ble as a mograph tool. In this quick tip I’ll show you how to make a sim­ple pop­ping effect (some­times called Circle Burst). This is an updat­ed video ver­sion of one of the first tuto­ri­als I post­ed on this site. This is my 

Mirage 3.4 is out today!

The time has final­ly come. Mirage 3.4 is out today! The high­light of this release is the new ter­rain engine. It’s been a while, has­n’t it? This has prob­a­bly been the longest time between releas­es, but there’s a good rea­son for the delay! Mirage 3.4 comes with a new ter­rain engine com­plete­ly rewrit­ten in Rust for top-per­­for­­mance. I’ve codenamed 

Render+ 2.1 is out

It’s release time! Render+ 2.1 is now out. This ver­sion comes with sev­er­al small qual­i­ty of life improve­ments. I’m try­ing to small­er, more fre­quent releas­es mov­ing for­ward. This way you can get bug fix­es and small improve­ments faster instead of wait­ing until I imple­ment some big fea­ture. Let’s look at the changes in this ver­sion Debug messages 

Calculating distances in Blender with Python

In this super quick tip we’ll see how to cal­cu­late the dis­tance between two points. The for­mu­la for Euclidean dis­tance in 3D is the fol­low­ing: There’s at least three ways to do this in Blender. The clas­sic way The ben­e­fit of this snip­pet is that it will always be avail­able. It does­n’t depend on a specific 

Making After Effects' Fractal noise effect in Blender

Fractal noise is a well-known effect in After Effects. Probably one of the most used too, it’s ver­sa­tile enough to cre­ate all kinds of effects. Users com­ing to Blender from an After Effects back­ground might be won­der­ing if there’s a sim­i­lar effect or at least some way to ani­mate noise. Let’s see how we can repli­cate it 

Getting Property groups as dictionaries

I recent­ly reworked Mirage’s live mode to be more effi­cient. One of the things I want­ed to improve was detect­ing changes in ter­rain set­tings. I fig­ured the best way to do it was get­ting a dic­tio­nary of the set­tings and find­ing what changed in it. So I wrote a lit­tle func­tion to get all the prop­er­ties inside a PropertyGroup as a dic­tio­nary. I figure