iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 30/09/2026

Fun little UV trick I stumbled on because I'm really stubborn about how long I keep my mirror modifier active: Giving mouth textures a "profile" view when I slide them away from the mirror point #b3d

Head on view of face sprite with standard mouth

Moving the mouth's UVs slightly to the right breaks the mirror, revealing the left side of the mouth sprite (flat edge)

From the side, the revealed left side of the mouth looks like an intentional anime-style mouth viewed from the side

Texture sheet view of mouths drawn for this effect

011

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 20/09/2026

Rotating the bone also blends over to a cel shaded version and I do like how chunky cel shaded vertex lighting is

cel shaded version of character from first post

000

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 20/09/2026

Made a simple little Geometry Node vertex (well, face corner) lighting system that uses a bone as a "light" and saves the dot product per face corner as an attribute that the shader can then reference as a simple mask between colors #b3d

Screenshot of a Geometry Nodes setup to calculate the dot product between (normalized vector pointing towards a given bone) and (face corner's normal). I used face corners instead of vertices because I really like my sharp edges (see the nose shadow). The other transforms of the bone are also stored for use in the shader (scale affects threshold/easing and rotation switches between cel/smooth shading)

171

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 08/09/2026

did you know this little shit's eyes are floating planes? they didn't even have blender's shrinkwrap modifier yet

000

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 19/08/2026

me when it's new 3D Mainichi Modern day

Thompson from 3D Mainichi Modern with a g on her dang head

000

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 15/08/2026

Like sure I could do this pretty trivially with a cylinder, adding edge loops and scaling them. But I kinda like the feel of the workflow where you separate the structure and shape, and also that it can give you some nice rectangular UVs as a baseline

a bunch of arms with a normals matcap showing a bunch of arms that are curves with simple square/hexagon profiles. Two are actually already converted to meshes to just connect the elbow to test the deformation

one of the arms with a color grid applied as a texture, which automatically is given UVs where U runs along the length of the curve and V wraps around it

000

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 11/08/2026

it can in fact be that easy

Geometry Node setup in Blender to add an arbitrary value to the default UV map of an object, with a driver typed in the modifier panel to scroll the U once every 24 frames

010

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 11/08/2026

playing with manipulating UVs with Geometry Nodes for a lot of reasons, one of which is that you can arbitrarily animate a tiling texture without needing to build/keyframe within the shader itself #b3d

130

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 06/08/2026

This one maybe takes the cake because I also built another shader just to make textures to feed into the first shader. "efficiency"

a bunch of floating little palette grids. everything's so tiny

010

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 06/08/2026

every year I fall deeper into the pit of building increasingly convoluted universal shaders I never actual put into production because I have to get started on the next universal shader. but look how clean that layout is

Blender shader node setup. It's a lot. Really it's impossible to read there's just noodles everywhere and a monkey that's covered in textures. disgusting

110

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 22/04/2026

Mine is steady through April but I have video autoplay off and mostly just check in during lunch and somehow used 7gb in 21 days? Good lord

100

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 13/04/2026

So I think the "curve" here is that one side is triangulating in a way the cheek is curved inward, and the other appears a little flatter. Hard to tell without lighting but hope that helps! Typical cure is triangulating yourself, i.e. knife tool so you only have triangles, but, well, it depends

Diagram from a random reddit post where two faces of the same shape triangulate differently, one convex and one concave

100

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 31/03/2026

Baby's first wandering monster logic. Every two seconds, they grab X points nearby, and then move to the closest point to the player. X is 4 here but I can bump it up for more aggressive chasing. I feel like the discrete strides support the minotaurs' hulking aesthetic. #pico8 #gamedev

122

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 28/03/2026

Updated prototype. More progress, dropped the menu interface for now because it kept distracting me from the core of the system: Going into a menu, generating an internal list of enemies in range, cycling through them, and not crashing whenever one of them is deleted #pico8 #gamedev

Screenshot of a pico8 game where a player is targeting an enemy minotaur, indicated by green circles

142

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 28/03/2026

pretty proud of my little pico 8 event log in the corner that basically anything can report a 5 digit code so I can easily see button presses and such

pico8 game with a bunch of text in the corner recording recent actions

011

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 25/03/2026

the important thing is that I had enough pixels to fit in Ashley's assless chaps though

110

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 13/03/2026

You can take the rat out of the lab but you can't take the lab out of the rat. Literally, removing his cybernetic implants would be lethal

a lowpoly rat with several cybernetic enhancements and a smile that could kill

052

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 09/03/2026

If anyone needs a rotating 2d cheese for #ratjam or anything else I hereby license this sprite sheet under cc0. Go wild

071

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 07/03/2026

character development for #ratjam

0132

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 05/03/2026

terrifying enemy for #ratjam. Having fun with textures from @screamingbrainstudios.itch.io

0113

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 09/02/2026

Face sprites for lowpoly characters! Megaman Legends style, just some simple expressions in a row you could animate the UVs for to prototype models. Even just a set of simple :) type expressions in a grid to draw over could be handy!

Main character face texture sheet from Megaman Legends 2

030

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 08/02/2026

Working in lowpoly is an exercise in condensing a character down to their essentials and only having the most important details. For example, only giving your clothing exactly two bones that can make the collar pop to increasingly unsustainable degrees

lowpoly character with a dramatically popped collar

the collar grows to extraordinary lengths

010

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 31/01/2026

Beyond my tile setup, you could also do some fun stuff with cel shading. Here the factor is instead driven by a Diffuse -> Color Ramp, and I can quickly determine both the "lit" and "shaded" colors for parts separately without creating new materials

Screenshot of Blender workspace where Suzanne has three different sets of cel shading colors for different parts of the body based on one material

000

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 31/01/2026

To elaborate, because the palette is a straight line, the only part of the UV that matters is the U (x position), e.g. orange is at U=0.1875. So I just have a second image node that uses the same UV coordinates, but swaps U & V, so if V=0.1875 then the secondary accent color would be orange

Blender UV editor with points located in various positions

Node setup for swizzling the X and Y values of a UV map, making the second color of a Mix Color node into the V (y position) of the UVs, with a factor offscreen based on a black and white mask

100

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 31/01/2026

Developing a cartoon environment workflow that uses a tilesheet of @kenney.nl patterns that are interpreted into pairs of colors based on a palette from @lospec.com. Just had a big "oh duh" for how to pick two colors with one UV map, which is that the Y is just swizzled into a second X #b3d #blender

Blender workspace of a black and white mask texture, a color palette "swatch" texture, and a cube where each side has a slightly different color scheme picked from the palette

120

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 29/01/2026

Character sketches - crow boy

Sketches of a boy who has some crow-like features

020

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 11/01/2026

tired: oh man social media compression is ruining the quality of my animations wired: I'm going to present my animations as a video screen inside of another blender scene at an angle and then post that to social media

010

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 10/01/2026

Putting the camera on a hanging rig too that spins around the set. real fond of scaffolding these days

100

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 10/01/2026

made a hanging digital screen rig including a bone to warp the UVs (to correct aspect ratio)

110

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 09/01/2026

Node layouts. The compositor setup is 90% just the standard way to recreate the "Combined" pass (see diagram at link below), but with a color ramp on the Diffuse Direct's Value in an HSV node, plus some bloom on the emission because why not. docs.blender.org/manual/en/la...

Composite node layout, where the diffuse, glossy, emission and environment are all added together. Instead of doing a Diffuse > Color Ramp in the material, which is pretty standard for cel shading, the color ramp is here in the Compositor and applied to the results of all Diffuse lighting.

Screenshot of all the lights, objects, and materials used in this scene: One object, two lights, a pretty glossy BSDF and an emissive material for the eyes

020

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 09/01/2026

I'm becoming really fond of this method of recreating the "beauty pass" and then doing my toon shader nonsense on the diffuse portion, but adding the glossy on top of that normally. So you get your toon shader but then realistic highlights on top #blender #b3d

Base render of Suzanne with glowing red eyes

Composited render with cel shaded shadows and highlights drawn on top

100

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 01/01/2026

I want to do a big tutorial post about this in the near future but here are the nodes in the meantime for anyone curious

1/ Shader nodes to scale UVs to the size of a single tile, with inputs of a UV Map and X/Y Count (integer number of tiles in X and Y directions)

2/ Shader nodes to move the UVs horizontally to match the the selected tile

3/ Shader nodes to move the UVs vertically to match the selected tile, and also to flip it so that the 1st tile is in upper left corner. Output of this group feeds to image texture node

000

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 01/01/2026

I love when I'm able to tackle a Blender project that I thought was legitimately impossible two years ago. Everything in this scene is one material going off one texture (tilesheet courtesy of kenney.nl). Each face has its own tile selection via Mesh > Set Attribute, multiplied on vertex colors

Small polygonal seaside scene with fog, where everything is using simple repeating textures

Screenshot of UVs for the large structure in the previous image, where the UVs can be stretched/shaped but the actual tiled image is determined by shader nodes

100

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 23/12/2025

doing terrible things to Suzanne in the name of understanding normals #b3d

010

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 09/12/2025

working on anime style environments

210

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 04/12/2025

I think Alt click should do it? Or if it's about how to center that output in the world, you can probably turn on Snapping, change that to Grid and fiddle with it so the grid is large enough you can clearly snap to the center point?

000

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 04/12/2025

Another thing that sort of emulates the textured face workflow and working with UVs - this neat Offset modifier for grease pencil, which lets you move a layer around in 3D space. You can do simple X/Y translation (or tie it to a bone without weight painting), or even rotate slightly for depth.

An eye looking to the left of camera, using a grease pencil Offset modifier to move its iris+pupil layer to the left 0.26m

000

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 04/12/2025

A fun bonus to working with Time Offset is that using Frame 0 is basically a shortcut to hide that layer. I have everything except the brow masked by the sclera, so if I just bump that down to 0, I can hide everything and just work with a "special" layer for unique eye shapes.

A hand drawn spiral eye in Blender with the previous eye being masked by a Time Offset modifier set to 0, referencing a null frame

100

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 04/12/2025

A major component that makes it all work is the Time Offset modifier for Grease Pencil set to Fixed Frame. With this, you basically get the functionality of an image sequence without leaving Blender - so for these shimmers/sparkles, I just draw two frames of the shimmer and animate between them

Close up of glimmering eye with a Time Offset modifier, with a keyframed frame

100

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 04/12/2025

Specifically working on various configurations of #b3d Bendy Bones and Grease Pencil. I think the ideal eye system I'd want mixes face textures - static images you can cycle through as your predefined expressions - and also the ability to pose your "main" eye shape with bones.

Two 2D green eyes looking at the camera, projected above a 3D face

A 2D eye with bones overlaid above it in Blender3D

130

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 04/12/2025

spent a couple days messing with eyes

130

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 01/12/2025

also I vastly underestimated the power of the eye shimmer

010

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 01/12/2025

Also considering giving this a try - eyes as a separate object I shapekey to create expressions ahead of time, and then shrinkwrap onto the face (via a lattice modifier). Getting the eyelashes a little 3d pop while still basically working in 2d is a nice compromise.

Blender screenshot of a pair of eyes parented to a deforming lattice, which is then shrinkwrapped onto a curved pink surface

110

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 01/12/2025

Playing with #b3d shapekeys for expressions. Still debating on if I pull the trigger and do actual 3d face rigs for my next set of models, or stick to textures

150

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 25/11/2025

attempting some basic 2D animation compositing and also voice acting without waking up Mrs Dude #animation

021

Mr Dude @mrdude.art · 21/11/2025

You can't sample the empty's coordinates directly but I think if you do some maths between the Object Coordinates of both the shaded object and the empty you can get there. Or maybe two empties you can spin around each other to form a sunlight direction

Diagram depicting a Monkey's object coordinates in space (10,5,2), which generates a vector from world origin (0,0,0) of (10,5,2), and an Empty's object coordinates generating a vector from an arbitrary (-1,0,1) of (11,5,1). Subtracting Empty's object coordinates from Monkey's gives you the Empty's original coordinates, which can be used as a point in space or to represent a direction for e.g. sunlight

100