This Beautiful Hand-Painted Scene Was Textured Using a Mouse

Create Real-Time Caustics In Blender 5.1

Alan Wayne demonstrates how to create real-time caustics in Blender 5.1's Cycles renderer. The tutorial covers fundamentals, building a basic caustics shader, experimenting with procedural textures, and expanding into an advanced setup for detailed caustics. The shader is available for free on his Patreon.

Building a 3D Game in React Native + Kotlin Multiplatform

A developer rebuilt a 3D chess game using React Native as the UI shell while keeping all game logic in Kotlin Multiplatform compiled to JavaScript via Kotlin/JS. The architecture separates concerns strictly: chess rules, FEN handling, UCI integration, scene math, camera, and raycasting all live in a single Kotlin module compiled once to JS and shared across iOS, Android, web, and desktop. Two renderers are used — React Native Filament for mobile and Three.js for web/desktop — both consuming the same Kotlin Board3DScene model. Stockfish is the deliberate native exception, running as a TurboModule on Android for compute-intensive chess search. The key insight is that Kotlin's type safety guarantees (null safety, exhaustive when expressions, sealed types) survive into the emitted JS, making it preferable to TypeScript for correctness-critical game logic.

This Tool Brings Blender's Hotkey-Based Transform Workflow In UE5

Blenderize Transform Pro is a new Unreal Engine 5 plugin that brings Blender's keyboard-driven transform workflow into the UE5 editor. It supports hotkeys for move (A), rotate (R), and scale (S), axis constraints, real-time numerical input, dynamic duplication, a quick-add search dialog, and customizable shortcuts. The plugin targets UE5.6–5.8 and is available on the Fab marketplace.

Free Tutorial on Animating & Rigging Gaussian Splats in Houdini

3D artist Bogdan Lazar offers a free tutorial and project files covering the full pipeline for rigging and animating Gaussian Splats in Houdini. The workflow uses a proxy deformation approach, walking through importing and segmenting splats, creating a KineFX skeleton, binding it to proxy geometry, APEX logic, animation, Look Dev, and Karma rendering. Project files are available on Gumroad as a starting point for your own Gaussian Splat animation work.

Check Out These Free Crowd Reaction Mocap Animations

Anderson Rohr has released his June free mocap animation pack, featuring approximately 6 minutes of crowd reaction animations across 22 clips. The pack supports three skeletons: Rokoko Default, Reallusion iClone, and Manny for Unreal Engine 5. Animations cover actions like clapping, cheering, swaying, posing, and texting, suitable for games, cinematics, VFX, and other 3D projects. The pack is available for free on Gumroad.

Joys of cancelling a TBB task group · Aras' website

A deep-dive into a subtle and hard-to-reproduce crash in Blender caused by TBB (Threading Building Blocks) task group cancellation. When a task group is cancelled, TBB walks a linked list of live task group contexts and follows parent pointers to propagate cancellation. The problem: Embree (used internally by Blender's Cycles renderer) also uses TBB, so building BVH structures creates task_group_context objects that record a parent pointer to the outer parallel_for's on-stack context. With Cycles' 'Persistent Data' option, these BVH objects outlive that stack frame, leaving dangling parent pointers. When an entirely unrelated thumbnail UI task group is later cancelled, TBB's cancellation propagation walks into that stale memory and crashes. The fix was to remove all usages of TBB task group cancellation from Blender entirely, since it was used unnecessarily in most places.

Add Retro Anime-Style Bloom Effects With This Blender Pack

Gói Blender mới của cgchefs lấy cảm hứng từ phong cách retro anime khoa học viễn tưởng, tích hợp sẵn node Retro Bloom Compositor cùng mô hình, shader và preset. Dự án đang tuyển tester từ mọi trình độ Blender qua form Google.

Lập trình viên làm đồ hoạ 3D sẽ tìm hiểu cách áp dụng hiệu ứng Retro Bloom trong Blender để tạo phong cách nghệ thuật retro anime độc đáo, giúp nâng cấp chất lượng sản phẩm visual của họ.