VOXIFY voxelizes meshes while aiming to preserve color and other material maps such as roughness and metallic. The workflow captures UVs, then creates attributes so the voxel result can pull data from the original textures. If you want a drinking game: Take a shot every time we write the word Voxel, and consider your current life choices, when you play drinking games at 8AM in the morning on a Monday, when this news comes out.

The tool targets stylised voxel art renders, LEGO-style renders, game environments, and abstract motion graphics. It also calls itself non-destructive, meaning the setup stays editable as a modifier rather than forcing an immediate apply.

Material support comes with a big practical caveat. The modifier cannot work with simple colour materials or multi-material objects unless you first bake all materials and colours into a single texture, then use that texture for colour transfer. The same rule applies to other maps. VOXIFY works well with 3D-scanned assets, where the look already lives in texture maps.

Import, scale, then touch the voxel size slider

VOXIFY loads into a scene through Blender’s append workflow. You append a VOXIFY collection from the downloaded file, which loads an empty mesh with the Geometry Nodes modifier. Duplicate that empty mesh per asset, then place the duplicate into the working collection for that shot.

Before you voxelize anything, two basics: apply transforms and keep object scale sensible. Applying scale uses the standard apply transform workflow and voxel size behaves like a real world control, so a tiny prop and a skyscraper should not share the same voxel size value. A very large object expects a larger voxel size value, otherwise performance and results fall apart.

Once the base setup behaves, voxel size becomes the main artistic lever. Smaller values create denser voxels. Larger values create chunkier results. That is where VOXIFY tries to feel like a production-friendly knob instead of a one-click filter.

Viewport choices and custom instances

VOXIFY includes controls for how the result displays in the viewport versus final render, switching the viewport representation to a point cloud for optimization, while keeping a voxel look for render. The modifier also supports custom voxel shapes. Instead of instancing cubes, you can instance a user supplied object as the voxel unit. Transparent areas get special handling. The setup includes masking transparent parts by enabling a mask with texture option and feeding an opacity map, so voxels do not fill areas that would never render.

Pruning, carving, and not paying for invisible cubes

Voxelization loves to create internal structure you never see, and VOXIFY exposes controls to deal with that. For transparent textures, the prune and mask controls help stop voxels from spawning in cutout regions. For solid objects, there is an option to remove internal voxels, reducing geometry that would sit inside the mesh and never contribute to the image. That internal removal matters both for render performance and for downstream conversion to a static mesh.

VOXIFY also brings pruning – carving out a more accurate outer shape. The prune section offers two carving methods: raycast and distance. Raycast is more accurate, while distance can help keep more vxoels where you need them. Tolerance controls how aggressively that carving behaves, and it often starts near the same value as voxel size.

Static mesh output, plus the part where topology bites back

VOXIFY includes a generate static mesh option, because internal volume matters here: without volume, the generated static mesh can end up with an unwanted inner wall. Keeping internal structure can provide the volume needed so the static mesh output produces a single outer shell rather than double walls.

Even with volume, a few stray points can remain visible. The cleanup uses a mesh selection workflow to isolate and delete unwanted vertices after generation. For leafy assets like a fern or a tree canopy, the volume approach can introduce unwanted voxels under thin surfaces. A distance tolerance control helps define how much thickness to assume, using a value that matches the thickest meaningful part of the object, such as a trunk when talking about trees (or strangely morphed elephants). Just give the algorithm enough thickness to produce a clean mesh while avoiding filling every thin sheet with junk geometry.

Fixed animation options for rigs and deformers

VOXIFY includes a fixed animation feature designed to avoid revoxelizing the mesh every frame. There is a contrast on an animated object: one mode voxelizes each frame, tracking the deforming shape. Fixed animation instead holds the shape of each voxel as it was first generated, while following the animation. There is a limitation when the animated object expands compared to the source mesh used for voxelization, which can produce gaps between cubes. A static mesh generation option can help close that visual gap, but at the cost of changing the nature of the result.

Fixed animation is especially suitable for animated characters, where deformation usually does not involve large expansion or compression. In practice, that makes it a tool for rigs where you want temporal stability, fewer recalculations, and less flicker from per-frame resampling.

Assembly animation, because everything must explode nicely now

VOXIFY includes assembly animation controls that animate voxels from a starting state into place. An animation factor control with keyframing it from 0 at the start frame to 1 at the end frame. It also flags a practical performance issue: changing the assembly value can be slow because the node graph recomputes upstream operations.

To speed that up, the tutorial demonstrates baking parts of the setup once you stop changing voxelization parameters like voxel size and maps. The idea is to freeze the heavy part of the graph so assembly animation updates closer to real time during iteration.

The assembly system includes a speed scale control that changes how fast each voxel moves from start to destination, affecting how much motion blur you might get. It also includes randomization options to avoid a layer by layer build, plus a distribution control that projects the assembled object onto a disc and uses radius and location to change where assembly starts.

Included is a progressive assembly option that tries to assemble the connected structure first, such as building the trunk before floating branches, or whatever the morphed elephant is made of. It has settings like iterations and selection controls, and the tutorial demonstrates debugging by inspecting selection masks in the viewport using standard node debugging interaction.

All of this remains a reminder that a modifier can feel like magic, until a shot needs determinism. Treat VOXIFY like any new procedural tool: test it on throwaway scenes and verify output stability before you use it in production.

Versions, requirements, storefront reality

VOXIFY requires Blender 5.1 or higher. Superhive has three tiers: Personal Use at 8 USD, Commercial Use at 25 USD, and Studio at 49 USD. The Studio tier is “team use” for up to 5 seats. Superhive also lists render engines used as Cycles and Eevee.

https://superhivemarket.com/products/voxify–mesh-to-voxel-modifier

https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/o5rnD/voxify-blender-mesh-to-voxel-modifier

The post VOXIFY turns Blender Meshes to Voxels and animates first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

In nuce: The 3D graphics software Blender will support the Metal programming interface with the release of version 3.5. This was announced on 13 January this year by Francesco Siddi, Blender’s Chief Operating Officer, on code.blender.org . Blender 3.5 is currently in the alpha phase. The release of the finished version 3.5 is planned for March this year.

In toto: The following new features for Blender 3.5 result from the aforementioned announcement.

• Metal GPU backend support for Mac operating systems: This is to be introduced. Currently, the OpenGL programming interface is still used in Blenders default settings. After a test phase, however, the plan is to switch to the Metal programming interface.
• The Eevee renderer is also to be supported – which means that Mac users will now also benefit from viewport rendering. The user interface is also to be improved. In a corresponding report on 80.lv, editor Gloria Levine writes that the Metal backend was previously only available for the Cycles renderer.

Blender as a member of the Blender Development Fund: The corresponding blog post sets the framework for how the development of the Metal interface took place. The post states: “About a year ago, after Apple joined the Blender Development Fund, Apple empowered some of its developers to contribute directly to the Blender source code.” This invitation to developers to get involved led, the post continues, to the Metal interface for the Cycles renderer – and now culminates in Metal as a GPU backend. With its membership of the Blender Development Fund, Apple – together with many other well-known companies from the media sector – ensures that Blender will continue to be expanded with new features, receive its bug fixes and remain visible within the digital content creation community. The other companies supporting the Blender Development Fund include Adobe, AMD, Facebook, Microsoft, Unity and Reallusion (Digital Production reported on 11 January 2022).

Outlook: Support for the real-time compositor is planned for one of the next Blender releases; again for Mac operating systems. Bug fixes are also in the pipeline – and support for AMD and Intel graphics cards is also in preparation. Digital Production reported on the release of Blender 3.4 on 20 December last year – at that time the Open Path Guiding Library (Open PGL) from Intel was installed.

Click further: To the announcement on code.blender.org.

Sources: code.blender.org (announcement by Francesco Siddi), 80.lv (announcement by Gloria Levine)

The post Blender 3.5 should support Metal programming interface? first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

In nuce: Every week we present you with the best tutorials that will help you polish your workflows with the hottest digital content creation tools in the world! For this week’s tutorial you will need Blender 3.0.

What tutorial awaits you this week? Today we are treating ourselves to the first part of a tutorial series that all fans of the series adaptation “Arcane” will be delighted with. incidentally, “Arcane” is based on the globally popular multiplayer game “League of Legends”.

What will you learn in this tutorial? In this almost half-hour tutorial by “Lightning Boy Studio”, you will be shown how to use Blender 3.0 and the Eevee renderer to create the kind of hair styling that viewers will recognise from the animated series “Arcane”. More specifically, you will learn how to style the hair using Blender’s particle system so that it looks like the styling of the protagonist Jinx.

Second part of the tutorial: According to the announcement, a second tutorial part will follow in which you will learn how to not only make Jinx’s hair look nice, but also how to create the rest of the character – using camera mapping, among other things.

What else does “Lightning Boy Studio” have to offer? If you want to find out how the three-person studio from Canada managed to win numerous film awards with their animated short film “Le Gouffre” (engl.: “The Abyss”), then click over to legouffre.com .

Adieu! Check back next week when it’s Tutorial Tuesday again!

Arcane Style Tutorial Part 1: Hair (Blender 3.0 / EEVEE)

The post League of Legends: Arcane | Tutorial Tuesday first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

In nuce: In a blog post by developer Joseph “Joe” Eagar, the Blender Foundation announces which sculpting features will be included in the next Blender version. If the releases of the next versions follow Blender’s roadmap, Blender 3.2 and 3.4 will be released this year (we reported on 30 December 2021).

Blender’s beautiful new sculpting features: One of the main functions is to be able to paint vertex colours even when you are currently in Sculpt mode. However, the function is experimental for the time being, but according to the blog post it already offers improved performance compared to the previous vertex painting mode – and supports masks, face sets and filters. In the blog post, Eagar also explains that users can paint other vertex attributes as well as surface colours. In addition, the painting tools are now also supported with cavity masking. This should enable you to align brush strokes (paint strokes) according to the surface curvature – always depending on the geometry concerned. This would also automatically emphasise edges or depressions.

Preview sculpting with Eevee – is that possible? Blender’s real-time renderer Eevee should now make it possible to interactively display changes that have been made. Eevee previews are initially supported in Sculpt mode – provided you use Dynamic Topology (Dyntopo). One of the new features of Dyntopo itself is that edge boundaries are better preserved, including UV seams and face sets. In addition, Dyntopo is now said to be significantly faster and also supports “just-in-time” triangulation. With just-in-time, an entire mesh is no longer triangulated.

Outlook: What can we expect with Blender 3.2 and 3.4? Among the features that these upcoming releases are expected to bring is an improvement for texture painting, or an extension of vertex painting to a general “attribute paint” mode. In addition, Multires Sculpting and Brush Management are among the key components of upcoming Blender versions.

Click further: The corresponding blog post by developer Joseph Eagar can be found at code.blender.org.

The post Blog entry announces new Blender Sculpting features first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

In this almost two-hour video tutorial, Simon Fuchs shows you how to create a three-layer blendshader in Blender (for Cycles and Eevee).

Simon says about his video: “Using vertex colours and heightmaps, you’ll learn how to blend different materials together – right in Blender’s viewport.” Simon also says that his tutorial is worthwhile for anyone who wants to show off their projects directly in Blender without having to calculate the material in a game engine first. Simon continues: “The tutorial is also great for anyone who wants to learn more about Blender’s shader editor in general.”

You can find Simon’s tutorial on Gumroad – or in the video below.

Blender 3 Layer Material Blending Tutorial

The post Material Blending | Tutorial first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.