Over the last several months on the forums, we’ve answered quite a few Blender questions — and sometimes they were answered with the help of blend files. I figured it might be useful to list some of them here, in case they can be of help. So here they are, along with some others. It’s not a complete list, just some of the ones I thought to be more interesting or instructional. Most of them are simple; not intended to impress but usually to demonstrate a single how-to…

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Composite with sky color, consisting of Combined, Modified Shadow, Reflection, and Specular passes

In Part 1 of this series, we started by looking at some of the key render passes that result in the final image as seen when we press F12 to render. We also reviewed how to set up for node editing, and we “built” a small part of the render pipeline by compositing diffuse and specular passes into a final image. Finally, we looked at the basics of pixel math, demonstrating some of the ways that Blender composites pixels internally – which can also be reproduced with a simple node setup…

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Viewer nodes showing Combined, Alpha, Diffuse, and Specular render passes.

I’ve been experimenting with compositing nodes lately; not so much for achieving specific results as for understanding how they work. The subject is also educational for increasing understanding of Blender’s rendering pipeline. Believe it or not, it’s possible to get a grasp on this without diving into the code…

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Blender Basics Series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 3 Supplement, Part 4, and Part 5

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Our forum users, among others, have sought fit to post their own tutorials, hints, and tips: Keyboard Reference, Auto Naming, Proportional Editing, Selection Painting, Viewport Rendering, Twisty Curvy, and More…

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While going through my access logs I noticed a link from the CarveWright user forums. A user there had posted a tutorial showing how to use Blender for CarveWright patterns. If you don’t know what CarveWright is, it happens to be a bench-top woodcarving machine that automatically mills images into wood based on a 2D height map…

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I’ve been toying with Blender’s particle system and this is what I came up with. It makes use of dupliverts and xsort, and a wind effector.

UPDATE: I added another version of the effect…

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Time running forward and reverse with the Time Ipo

There was a question on the Blender Artists forum today regarding how the Time Ipo works. I answered briefly, but figured it would be good to go just a little more in-depth in a post. Here is a brief tutorial on the Time Ipo and how to use it. Keep in mind that the applications of the Time Ipo probably go far beyond what’s presented here, but if you’re unsure about it, this should serve as a good introduction…

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The fifth part of the Blender Basics series is finally here. Part 5 attempts to educate in the fundamentals of the materials panel. Now this is a huge tutorial, timing out at 1 hour and 45 minutes. Hopefully you’ll find it worthy of its length…

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If you’ve played around with Shape keys, you know that they are basically vertex key frames. They’re very handy for animating organic models in ways that are more difficult to accomplish with bones. They are especially useful for aspects of facial animation, or for augmenting weighted deformations, which are difficult to achieve perfection with. What may not be immediately obvious is their use with Curves…

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Probably the best way to make a spring mesh is to use the Screw tool – but what if you want to compress and expand the spring for animation? It’s possible to rig a dynamic spring with an armature, and then animate it with Ipo curves or the Action editor.

There was a question posted on the Blender Underground Forums about how to make a spring in Blender. If you don’t need a dynamic spring, just use the Screw tool. If you need more than a static mesh spring, i.e., something that appears to function, the answer isn’t so simple…

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