A little while back I updated this site and switched to a new URL. In the process, a lot of the links were magically updated by WordPress to point to the new site. Because of this, I failed to test every page after switching, since it seemed like everything was good. Unfortunately, a reader just…
Mixing things up
When I first started using Blender procedural materials, I wondered how to get more than one material onto an object. In other systems I’d used, there was the idea of a “material map,” which was a grayscale image that defined where to put different colors or materials. For example, an image like this: …could be…
New name, new look
Well, my old domain name was expiring, so I decided to get a new one and a new look at the same time. I really hoped to blog more frequently than I have, but I only have so much time. Part of the reason I haven’t had time is that I was really trying to…
Hello From The Other Side
So far I’ve only posted about graphics explorations, but I also intended to talk about coding projects. I’ve been working on one lately that has taken my time away from graphical things, but that’s because I realized I started it quite a while ago. I always meant to finish it but life rarely goes exactly…
I’ve Finally Hit The Floor
Ever since I started exploring procedural wood shaders, I’ve wanted to then use those to make wooden planked floors. As I mentioned in a previous post, a wooden log is cut into boards by slicing it along the long axis of the trunk, moving outwards from the center. There are several ways to cut a…
Procedural Wood: From Oak To Maple Finale
If you’re just joining, be sure to check out the other parts of this post or this won’t make sense: Part 1 Part 2 We left off in the last post with the Maple shader looking pretty good, but it’s not quite there. As I have been known to do, I went to the local…
Procedural Wood: From Oak To Maple, Part 2
Last time we edited the scale of the wood. You might’ve noticed that in the Oak shader, the Y-coordinate was the same as X- and Z-, and now it’s 1. That’s something I realized was a mistake before, because we didn’t really want to scale the shader along the Y-axis. By making it 1, we’ll…
Procedural Wood: From Oak to Maple, Part 1
I wanted to show an example of a wood that is popularly used, but has different characteristics than Red Oak. I decided on Maple as I’ve worked on a Maple shader before and it’s different enough, yet there are enough similarities that the Oak shader is helpful. I was going to start at an earlier…
More Power
I finally upgraded my old laptop to one with an NVIDIA GPU, and that will help me to render a lot faster. One of my excuses for not posting very frequently is that it takes a long time to develop shaders with my slooooow rendering speeds, so now I don’t have that excuse anymore. I…
IMPORTANT: I’m Still Learning Too!
It’s been a while since my last post, and I was thinking I really need to get back into this. Fortunately, the Universe responded with a swift kick in the pants in the form of an astute reader named Ethos. Ethos has experience in woodworking, and not only asked me some great questions about the…