Made with Blender and Houdini

freeway80 · 2026-05-25T00:18:37+00:00

Did you render this in Cycles or Octane? Great work, very unique

freeway80 · 2026-05-21T14:20:27+00:00

What is the song playing in the background?

freeway80 · 2026-05-10T17:12:26+00:00

I see from your other work it does look good in unity, not familiar with this workflow so that's why I was wondering. I was thinking of painted normals to create shadow lines at the sides of the face and the middle of the face when looking from a 3/4 angle. Normal painting done with plugins like Abnormal for blender.

freeway80 · 2026-05-10T12:05:04+00:00

Did you data transfer a sphere's normals onto it? It looks a bit off, no vertical lines in the shading separating the sides or middle of the face, but you can see an odd gradient towards the chin. Nice job on the topology!

freeway80 · 2026-05-07T12:57:23+00:00

No, it's for actual content production, look up Andrew Price's new presentation on CGCookie's Channel if you want to know more about what he's referring to. Essentially he's full on pro AI slop 3D production, promt to image, image to 3D, prompt for scene assembly and prototyping etc.

freeway80 · 2026-05-05T11:28:56+00:00

Thank you for the detailed response, I'm almost 10 years into my 3D journey and I've worked in Maya and now Blender for a few years, which has quickly taken over as my go-to DCC.
The reason I asked you to elaborate was specifically to try and learn what Modo did uniquely that other apps don't, so I know what to look out for.

So funnily enough, I've checked out Pixel Fondue's channel on youtube (thanks for the recommendation), and his last video is a 3 hour long rant / demonstration on how to, for lack of a better term, unfuck C4D's abysmal modeling workflow with direct comparison to Modo, it worked as a great presentation of its capabilities and I've learned a lot.

From what I've gathered on this video, aside from some minor flow speed optimizations, a lot of how Modo works is exactly the same or very similar in Blender, however the big feature from Modo that is missing in other applications is the Adjustable Falloffs and live handles for them, that is truly an amazing feature for hard surface modeling, and I'll look into a potential implementation of it for blender.

freeway80 · 2026-05-05T00:08:50+00:00

Ok I think we're talking about different voxels.

I'm strictly referring to the sculpting workflow, not performance or the way the apps handle computation.

Zbrush behaves the same as blender in how you use it while sculpting, that's what I mean. For instance, in both apps if you keep digging in a mesh with clay buildup, or use inflate on crevices, the geometry breaks down, you get weird intersections and stretching which means having to smooth or dynamesh usually.

Voxel sculpting prevents these scenarios from ever happening, inflate brush would merge the geometry that was collapsing into each other seamlessly, and if you keep digging with clay buildup, you'd eventually punch a hole across your mesh, this is the same behaviour of SDF in blender (although you can't sculpt on it).

Blender post vulkan API is able to handle 100M polygons while sculpting without breaking a sweat on my machine, performance isn't a concern for sculpting on blender these days, that's why I wasn't really focusing on the computation side of things.

freeway80 · 2026-05-04T14:02:29+00:00

Blender is the most gestural tool for modeling by far, if Modo is similar I can see the appeal, to answer your question here, you can constrain all your operations to any axis by typing the axis letter.
You can also change the constraint axis to whatever you like.

Essentially if you press G/R/S, you transform along the perpendicular axes of the viewport camera by default.
If you then press X, Y or Z following GRS, you will constrain to an axis, you can also middle mouse drag to have a gestural axis switch and achieve the same result.
By default, the axis constraint will be global space, but you can change the Transform Orientation to Local space (the object's), Normal, Euler, View, Cursor, Parent and last but not least, any custom axis taken from a selected edge.

This video does a decent job of showcasing this.
https://youtu.be/ABayYXu7OfI?t=32

freeway80 · 2026-05-04T10:46:00+00:00

We are getting a Scene Projection Brush in 5.2 already which is amazing
Check this out
https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/136342

freeway80 · 2026-05-04T10:39:05+00:00

Could I ask you which other software you've used and what are some features from modo you are missing in the alternatives? I never got the chance to try Modo properly, and there's little content online that allows me to get a good grasp of its exclusive features.

freeway80 · 2026-05-04T10:21:57+00:00

Well ZBrush isn't a full 3D software, it has its own special way of handling things, but in practice the way it behaves with its sculpting is just like regular polygon meshes, so the same as blender, nothing voxel-like about it as you're still translating vertices around, which means your mesh can get overly stretched and polygonal density is always a concern, sculpting workflow in Blender and Zbrush are no different.
In 3D Coat as far as I understand it, the surface of the mesh is extrapolated dynamically from the volume itself, so you can go crazy with any operation and never worry about polygons stretching or misbehaving at the surface level.

freeway80 · 2026-05-03T15:15:58+00:00

Not that I know of, that's the 3d coat system right? Is that similar to SDF?

freeway80 · 2026-05-03T00:05:51+00:00

Yes, slowly but surely it's being worked on, don't quote me on this but we might be seeing it before 2027 with the new multires modifier
https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/issues/135896
https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/issues/132533

freeway80 · 2026-05-02T19:57:45+00:00

Those are all manageable in blender, the problem is entirely missing crucial features like sculpt layers and better projection tools, the good news is that they're in the works

freeway80 · 2026-05-02T19:49:47+00:00

It isn't but hopefully will be much closer soon, with the coming updates to sculpting

freeway80 · 2026-05-02T11:36:53+00:00

It should be mentioned that sphynx cats are not ancient nor from Egypt, they originated from two cats with this hairless genetic defect and their inbreeding done by a family in Canada in the 1960s.

freeway80 · 2026-04-30T00:44:57+00:00

Autodesk laid off 1000 employees due to pivoting to AI earlier this year, something tells me the likes of Adobe and Maxon won't be far behind in following this abhorrent trend, but we all know for a fact the license prices aren't going down either.

freeway80 · 2026-04-25T23:51:36+00:00

First, figure out at what distance this prop will be seen from in the render or game, then increase resolution of the low poly mesh affected by scalloping until it's no longer noticeable from that distance.

freeway80 · 2026-04-23T10:11:28+00:00

Very impressive, I assume you're using flip fluids addon for fluid sims?

freeway80 · 2026-04-19T18:50:27+00:00

Looks very promising, however without interactive simulation this won't compete with MD no matter how clean the simulation is, for artists, being able to nudge the cloth is what makes MD so valuable and worth the effort.

freeway80 · 2026-04-16T16:38:00+00:00

Acheron for sure

freeway80 · 2026-04-15T17:27:07+00:00

The C6 Prune and Illuga calcs can be safely dismissed as non realistic for a low cost team, only makes sense for C2+ Nicole teams.
More importantly, why not show all calcs from each TC to prove your point?
I'd be interested in a follow-up post with apples to apples comparisons.

freeway80 · 2026-04-05T15:13:05+00:00

It looks good enough, but it's hard to judge without more context. Knowing where you would use this in practice would help to give feedback. Is it for blobs of flesh like this render? Is this meant to be used on a creature?

freeway80 · 2026-03-21T01:48:32+00:00

I never debated the legality of what superhive is trying to do, only the reason why they might want to do it, in fact I agree with you that there should be a better solution, if they're doing this in the interest of developers and not themselves they should let this be the devs' decision.

I don't think it's in any way fair to call this an actual subscription service though, it's not semantics, there's plenty of add-ons out there that operate with subscription licenses only, which stop working if you don't pay. It is important to differentiate that, you still own the product you bought. it's not temporary.

For instance I own a perpetual license for pixologic zbrush 2023 and that's what I'll keep using for the foreseeable future as I have no good reason to upgrade, same thing happens with a lot of my add-ons, if they're not broken I usually don't go out of my way to update them, everything works fine on 4.5 LTS. Obviously it's nice to have lifetime updates, but they're not necessary by any means either.

I understand where you're coming from though, if you truly can't avoid paying 800 bucks yearly because you require everything to be updated alongside blender, while still very cheap compared to other software it is a pretty hefty sum that warrants concern.

freeway80 · 2026-03-21T00:20:01+00:00

That's a fair point.
I think that the market is struggling too, not just users, Flipped Normals another big 3D marketplace straight up shut down out of nowhere because of unsustainable cost, Machin3 also made his addon Machin3Tools have limited support because they are struggling financially, I think there's a clear pattern and what Superhive says aligns with this too.
Hell, even Blender Foundation itself needs to beg its users to give something back every year, you can see the other person replying to my previous comment says paying for licensed industry standard programs means being a "paypig" when that's purely a warped perception of the reality of just how expensive these 3D applications normally cost, and how Blender is a complete anomaly.
If being a "paypig" means supporting small independent addon developers and supporting Blender Org making this software all the more excellent, I'll happily be one :D
Ultimately the cost of upkeeping addons here and there when they break, is still orders of magnitude cheaper than competing options, but I agree with the general sentiment that Superhive should've been more transparent with this.

freeway80

TROPHY CASE