blender

Blender Sketchbook

Blender Shader: Matrix

Martin · 29 days

A render from Blender showing a "Matrix" text effect cascading down the sides of a sphere.

This is my version of a Matrix shader!

This project stemmed from a custom material that I created for a client video, which animated a series of randomized streaks of light and color moving across a background plane. After finishing it, I realized it was about halfway towards a shader I'd always wanted to try my hand at: a Matrix shader. So, I cobbled this thing together!

It uses an included texture with custom characters that it flips through as it highlights them with streaks of glowing green light that fade over time. It also has a simple scanline effect applied. It's a bit of a monstrosity under the hood, but it works.

You can easily modify all of it, but the scale and animation factor are exposed at the beginning/left-most side of the shader to make them easy to adjust.

blendercycleseeveefxmatrixnodesrendershader
2121 9 0

Piranha Plant 2023 – Up Close

Martin · 1 year

Here's one more render of the same animation, with a closer camera, so you can really appreciate the details of the saliva. 😆

I did make one small change to the animation from the original "in the round" version. I noticed that in a few frames, the tongue clipped through the teeth, so I fixed that. Thankfully, only about 80 frames had to be re-rendered - the rest remained the same.

animationartblendercyclesproceduralrender
1508 76 0

Piranha Plant 2023 – In The Round

Martin · 1 year

After rigging up the piranha plant, I had to do an animation - so here's a simple "idle" animation of the plant just hanging out in its pot, as the camera spins around to show the entire plant.

It was never really meant to be viewed from the back, so the part where the "feathers" stick out is a tiny bit dicey. I also had some issues getting my rig to work the mouth properly, and spent way too much time editing the curves on the flying spittle. Overall though, I really like how this turned out!

animationartblendercyclesproceduralrender
1197 78 0

Piranha Plant 2023

Martin · 1 year

I opened up this project one more time to play around with Blender 4.0 and ended up doing a fair bit of alterations to it, including fully rigging the piranha plant, adding better lighting, and re-working a lot of the materials to make them fully procedural.

Some of the materials still rely on textures, but I've removed most of the more unnecessary ones - and largely improved the materials in the process. More to come!

artblendercyclesproceduralrender
1412 81 0

Morning Coffee

Martin · 1 year

Sometimes I like taking work from other mediums and recreating it in Blender. This morning I saw this post on Mastodon, and though it might be a good warm-up.

It took a bit longer than I expect, but I'm happy with it. And it doesn't tread too hard on the original, in my opinion, which is good when I'm pulling inspiration from other people's work.

artartworkblendercyclesrender
1243 79 0

Cereal Shuffling Machine Loop 3

Martin · 1 year

This was the final version of my cereal shuffling machine animation, where tons of cereal gets dropped into the scene, and then slowly churned away.

I had to add some special, hidden physics blocks to keep all the cereal contained as it was disposed of, but you can't really tell from the limited view. I also adjusted the background to be a little warmer for this one. I was getting tired of the colder blue/purple fade.

It took a long time to render this one - 2,290 frames, each taking 6-10 seconds to finish.

animationartblendercerealcyclesfoodrender
1218 77 0