the best of the best blender RND
video:
The blender community serves as the vanguard for Blender’s innovation, diligently stress-testing the newly introduced tools. the community stands as the finest research and development community in the industry, showcasing the untapped potential of the software long before anyone else. If you aspire to unlock the true capabilities of Blender, these are the artists whose footsteps you should follow. They delve into cutting-edge features like Geometry Nodes, the Blender Python module, and much more, providing invaluable insights into the limitless possibilities that Blender offers.
Sometimes there work are so good that they are added as demos in blender release notes like the case of sean terelles fluid simulation in side geometry nodes
this list is going to contain alot of R&D like this, things that require a great understanding of the program, and artists who have sunk hours and hours of research and development to figure out how to do cool things inside blender, and sometimes even give out there projects out for free like this free eye generator by tinynocky.
its this spirit that has allowed blender to grow and develope at a speed no other application can match.
3 Lace Generator
to tie things together, popek gives us this amazing shoelace generator that you can use to lace anything in different variations.
4 Animating curves
if you thought you knew everything blender can do, think again, higgas shows us that there more ways to produce content than the usual way, here, he is playing a video in the viewport as curve silhouettes, curves are one of the hardest things to work with in blender, so to see them being used like this is just mind bending to me.
5 Blender Game engine making a come back!
uh the good old days, where blender had a full blown game engine that you can use to make complete games, it was removed around blender 2.5. but how fun would it be if it was to make a comeback, here eric on twitter shows how using geometry nodes and python you can control a car’s animation with an xbox controller, there are even particle effects like dust and smoke added. this kind of setup can also be useful for animation, imagine setting up a run animation you can control via a controller like this, chase scenes would be 10x easier to make.
6 Animation driven by game controller
here is another demo of using a game pad to controll animation in blender using blender geometrynodes and python
7 the power of geometry nodes
blender man on twitter puts it best, this is the power of geometry nodes babe, what a satisfying reveal effect.
8 sorting algorithm in blender
if you took cs50 this sorting alogarythim demostration by celestailmaze should look familiar
9 blender Parallax shader RND
what blender really needs is parallax rendering, this is the best way to get alot of detail in a render without using alot of polygons, and it seems am not the only one who thinks so, because HotDogNugget on twitter just created a shader that does exactly that, the shader also supports self shadowing and the detail it captures is insane, this level of detail is not possible with normals, you can do it with displacement maps but the level of subdivisions you need will be too great that most computers will struggle rendering it.
10 block of cubes to full scene
bagattini is one artists who does alot of blender rnd that if i made a video about his demos only, it would be one whole day long, enjoy this rnd demo of how he uses sorcery to conjure buildings out of cube blocks.
11 strain based constrain breaking simulation with blender
this type of simulation was not possible in blender unless if you are using addons like molecular, but seanterelle shows us that with some RnD and geometry nodes he can do it
he also has this satisfying inter-noodle friction demo, i swear simulation nodes are the most underrated part of blender, but thanks to artists like sean and there Rnd demos people are starting to appreciate simulation nodes as they should.
12 Procedural Clouds shader
Nugget also made this amazing procedural clouds shader.
13 Water rendering in blender
Martinis is another blender r&D artist i like to follow especially when it comes to shader creation, in blender you can use the absoption node to produce the same effect he showcases here but it works in cycles only, in this R&D Martinsh shows a way to archive better results using geometry nodes by calculating mesh proximity and some shader magic.
14 fluid simulation RND
Miettinen has some of the best geometry nodes R&D and i can make a long list of things he has done but here is a few, including a fluid simulation scene done with geometry nodes, his able to fake a 3d look but its actually 2d. this is the type of results that we expected from manta flow but never got, am sure you can archive it still but not without alot of stressing.
miettinen jess also made this fully procedural ocean using the ocean modifier
15 Blender Ant simulation RND
you probably dint know this was possible, well thats the point of research and development, Globglob like many other artists in this list shows his R&D off by giving us this demo of how you can simulate ants following trails left by other ants to collect food, now just imagine replacing the moving dots, with animated ants, a realistic cave enviroment and you will have an interesting timelapse of ants.
16 Nebular Hand Animation
if you watched the new guardians of the galaxies and loved it, you will also love the fact that you can recreate Nebulara’s hand to weapon morphing animation inside blender with geometry nodes. if you can’t well then just enjoy cartesian caramel’s demostration here, the hand fibres can morph into something else and then back to a hand, you can also see the fibres moving as muscles nice.
the project is available to download and explore on gumroad if you want it
17 Fluid simulation in geometry nodes
believe it or not, this is Realtime fluid simulation in geometry nodes, its not perfect yet, but blender artist shahzod boyhonov demonstrates here how geometry nodes can be used to create a fluid simulation using geometry nodes, while it does not give a more accurate simulation like manta flow or flip fluids, this is still usable for most projects.
18 Another Custom fluid solver
Martins made his own fluid solver that also has texture advection, inside geometry nodes, so you can show dirt mixing with your fluids.
19 Hair simulation RND
You may already know that since blender 3.5 hair grooming is done inside geometry nodes, replacing the old particle based hair, the only thing that the geometry nodes based hair could not do was hair simulation, and before the blender team could add such functionality, carstesian caramel came along to show the functionality was already there with his geometry nodes hair simulation test.
20 oil painting effect
most artists think that blender is limited to the functionality provided by the built in tools, but under the hood you can unlock unlimited ways of using blender like what simon lee did to render roses in an oil canvas style, you can not get these results without jumping behind the curtains and start breaking and putting things together.
21 text to video inside blender
i bet you dint know this existed, this addon by tin2tin can let you generate video out of text inside blender.
Your content is amazing.
ey thank you