I swapped out the lighting on this scene for an HDRI, for a little more realism. It doesn't need to look 100% real, but I like the change.
Oh, and I added a spoon, too.
Blender Sketchbook
This milk is looking thiiick. 🤤
Here's another cereal render. I adjusted the colors a bit here so they are more true to what you might see in a real cereal like this.
Mostly happy with the cereal piece for now, though I plan on making more. Couldn't help but try out some physics sims first, though. Fill 'er up!
I tried making the bowl an active physics object in this one, but Blender does not like my mesh, so it gets a little jumpy. Fun to watch anyway, though.
I've been thinking about a creative project I want to do that will incorporate almost every skill I have, and these explorations in 3D rendering cereal might be the start of that. 😄
Using displacement in my materials is something I've experimented with a lot, but not something I use in practice too often - but it's incredibly useful when your geometry needs to be in sync with a procedural material in a way that normal map manipulation and bump mapping can't achieve.
This is my take on a bubble material. It's meant to look soapy, but it looks a lot like the sizzling grease you get when you cook things like bacon. It comes with a lot of customization options, and you can animate it easily by adjusting the vector offset parameters at the bottom of the node group.
There are probably further refinements to be made here, but I find myself getting... intimidated? burned out? bored? with these projects once the node tree gets sufficiently large, so this is how I'm releasing it. 😝
As-is, I think it could be useful for the right project!
I thought I'd challenge myself to create a Blender shader that could make good eyeballs, and this is the result! With this shader/node group, you can load up a standard sphere mesh and make it into an eyeball of almost any type with only a few clicks.
It's currently restricted to round pupils only, and it doesn't do any fancy lens distortion that some other eyeball shaders do, but... not bad for a few hours of fiddling.
I've been continuing to dig through my old Blender projects lately, and like the Piranha Plant I did a month ago, this Blaster Master tank looked primed for a re-work.
So I spent some time yesterday adding new details, re-working materials, and fixing some things that looked very unfinished in the original work. This is the end result!
The scene uses a mix of images and procedural textures, and I had a great time roughing things up. You can see it from all angles over at Sketchfab.
This is more of a node group than a full shader, but the obvious use for it is for ripples in water - or some other liquid - caused by drips.
The Ripples node group included in this file have a handful of properties that can be adjusted, and the W property can be animated to make the ripples expand. It loops between 0 and 1.
6 years ago, I posted a render of a piranha plant I modeled and textured to practice Blender. It isn't a bad render, but the procedural materials look a little rough and I wanted to revisit it and see how I could improve it.
This is the result - an updated render with a blend of procedural and texture-based materials and employing all the stuff I've learned since creating the original.
There's probably a little more that I could do to clean it up, but overall, I'm pretty happy with how this one turned out. I might have to revisit some of my other older projects soon to see what I can do!
If you're interested in inspecting this one from other angles, you can see it on Sketchfab.