Pencil Pro is a Blender add-on by CGMatter, sold through Superhive (formerly Blender Market). Officially categorised as a “Modifier Setup”, it converts meshes into animated hand-drawn sketches. Unlike simple material overlays, it simulates actual drawing strokes: dual-pass lines and shading, screen-space rendering, and edge-flow aware strokes that follow mesh curvature.

The add-on requires no UVs, works on multiple or animated meshes, and lighting is optional. Setup is a single-button operation: assign a target collection in Blender, hit Pencil Pro, and the add-on spawns both a line-art controller and a procedural shading material.

Update 1.1: faster strokes

Version 1.1, released on 7 May 2025, introduced a 2.5× performance boost plus a “fast mode” for more aggressive optimisation. Pencil Pro is sold standalone for US$15, or discounted as part of the Genie bundle (a multi-add-on pack on Superhive).And yes, we only got to the Update now – sorry for being late, but… this is too good not to share.

Why it matters

Standard NPR converters often break down under close inspection, repeating UV-bound textures or ignoring mesh topology. Pencil Pro instead calculates in screen space, with strokes that flow along the underlying geometry. Zooming out retains line density. Lighting is optional, but when used, shading and line placement respond dynamically. The system works live: moving, rotating, or editing geometry triggers immediate redrawing.

Workflow and setup

After installation, the add-on appears in Blender’s N-panel. It only activates once a target collection is selected. Users can choose whether to generate material shading, line art, or both. Once enabled, Pencil Pro creates a controller object with collection and light assignments, applies a Pencil Pro material to each object in the collection, and generates a Grease Pencil object for strokes. Multiple meshes can share one controller as long as they are grouped into the same collection, and lights can be included to enhance shading.

Line art controls

Line work is Grease Pencil-based, with boundary outlines and interior strokes working together. A light threshold setting determines where lines appear on illuminated faces: lower values suppress strokes in highlights, while higher values draw them across bright areas. Stroke population is influenced by density, which sets the number of strokes; length, which controls whether they appear as short stipples or long contours; and opacity, which acts as a transparency multiplier. Resolution defines how finely each stroke is segmented, with at least two points required to form a line, while the duplicates option repeats strokes with slight offsets to simulate sketching over contours.

Because strokes follow mesh curvature, geometry resolution is critical. A quality level setting subdivides input geometry automatically to improve stroke flow, but low-poly meshes still benefit from manual subdivision to avoid faceted artefacts. Stroke appearance can be further adjusted through thickness controls, radius variation between boundary and interior strokes, and smoothness, which reduces jaggedness at the cost of precision. Natural imperfections are added by transform variation, which offsets strokes slightly in rotation, scale, or position, and by noise variation, which controls the amount and frequency of stroke wiggle. Overshoot settings allow strokes to extend beyond contours for a more human look. All strokes are drawn relative to the camera, meaning that hidden surfaces are ignored.

Shading controls

Shading is screen-space based: the image plane acts as the paper. Correct aspect ratio is important, since mismatches distort hatching patterns. A time parameter drives temporal randomness, with shading and strokes changing slightly per frame to mimic hand-drawn flicker. This effect can be disabled by removing the driver, leaving shading static.

Surface appearance is controlled by several parameters. A light multiplier adjusts the sensitivity of shading to scene lighting. Fresnel brings back edge highlights and contour definition, while roughness breaks up the transition between light and dark. Smudge adds irregularities to shading, preventing the tiled look of procedural patterns.

Two main shading techniques are available. Hatching is controlled through line thickness, patch scale, rotation angle, and distortion, which moves away from an unnatural grid into more organic variation. Dark regions fill automatically with more hatch strokes, and increasing thickness deepens shadows. Dots, or stippling, operate with their own threshold, radius, spacing, and randomness controls. They provide a dithering-like effect that differs from hatching but can be combined with it. Both methods respond to lighting conditions, including world background light, which influences the perceived shadow depth.

Dynamic behaviour

All aspects of the effect are procedural and update instantly. Moving objects, rotating meshes, editing topology, or changing lights triggers live redrawing. Temporal randomisation adds an authentic flicker that resembles flip-book animation, though it can be locked if a static look is required. Demonstrations show Blender’s Suzanne mesh being rotated, extruded, and shaded on the fly, with immediate recalculation.

When zoomed out, the viewport may display cross-hatch artefacts, but these do not persist in renders. Overlapping strokes can be reduced by shortening stroke length and decreasing overshoot values.

Pricing and availability

Pencil Pro is available as a standalone product for US $15 via Superhive and is also offered at a reduced price within the Genie add-on bundle.

Reminder

As with any procedural tool, users should run in-house tests before committing Pencil Pro to production work. Behaviour may differ at render scale compared to viewport previews.

The post Pencil Pro sharpens Blender with hand-drawn precision first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Rahul Parihar has released Clay 4.Doh, the latest update to his procedural clay shader and toolkit for Blender. Announced on 22 August 2025, the update is free to existing users and continues the promise of one‑time purchase pricing with perpetual updates. The toolkit, originally designed to mimic the look and behaviour of real clay, now expands into new territory with additional tools, modifiers, and shader refinements.

Clay 4.Doh retains its foundation on Blender’s Principled BSDF shader, which ensures physically accurate rendering without requiring UV unwrapping or manual texturing. A single master node drives all clay variants, streamlining material creation for artists working across Cycles and Eevee. This design makes the shader predictable and consistent, an important consideration for production environments where stability outweighs novelty.

New Tools and Modifiers

The update introduces several new creative tools including a Pottery tool, Clay Text, and Eyes. These extend the procedural approach, allowing users to generate complex clay‑like effects without leaving Blender. Clay Text supports all fonts and languages, broadening its use in motion graphics as well as character work. The Eyes tool integrates directly into the clay system, enabling stylised character creation with consistent shading.

Clay 4.Doh also brings modifiers for Mesh, Curve, Grease Pencil, and VDB objects. This widens compatibility across Blender’s different object types, allowing artists to maintain the clay aesthetic whether working with geometry, strokes, or volumetrics. Fingerprints and finger dents have been upgraded, producing finer, more realistic surface variation. These refinements address one of the key demands in claymation‑style projects: believable tactile detail.

Animation, Surface Effects, and Rendering

Support for sticky textures ensures materials move correctly with animated meshes, preventing sliding artefacts. Clay 4.Doh continues to include stop‑motion capabilities, enabling animators to simulate the frame‑by‑frame look of traditional clay animation directly inside Blender. Additional surface overlays have been added, including glitter, dust, and crackle effects. These run alongside existing shader controls such as subsurface scattering, ambient occlusion, and transmission, giving artists flexibility in shading without adding complexity to the node setup.

The toolkit is positioned as a production‑ready material system. By remaining tightly bound to Blender’s existing rendering engines and keeping everything node‑based, the workflow avoids external dependencies. This ensures projects can be archived or shared without versioning headaches.

Pricing and Availability

Clay 4.Doh is sold exclusively through Superhive Market. Pricing is tiered: Clay Doh Solo at 35 US dollars for individual users, Clay Doh Team at 140 US dollars for up to five users, and Clay Doh Studio at 299 US dollars for up to fifteen users. All licences are non‑subscription and include future updates at no extra cost. For a limited time, buyers can apply the discount code “claydoh25” for 25 percent off. The package includes tutorials and documentation, with further training available on Rahul Parihar’s YouTube channel.

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ClayDoh Product Page – Superhive Market

The post Clay 4.Doh Update Sculpts Blender Workflow first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Push Gets Physical

The Push modifier in Autodesk 3ds Max 2026.1 now supports volume, making it far more production-friendly for character sculpting and shape deformation. Artists can now choose to preserve the volume of a mesh when pushing vertices, ensuring that inflation-like operations don’t lead to balloon animals. The new algorithm approximates volume constraints by projecting affected vertices along averaged normals and applying corrections post-transform.

There’s also a new “Use Normals” mode that supports Smooth, Face, and Edge Corner normals as input types, offering more granular control over the deformation direction. For more nuanced sculpting workflows, the modifier supports a “Push Normal Bias” parameter and even provides an optional vertex color channel for custom weighting—meaning you can paint influence directly onto your mesh. This expands the Push modifier from blunt tool to nuanced modeling instrument.

XForm Gets Smarter

The XForm modifier—long the go-to for non-destructive transformations—finally gains axis-specific controls. Instead of being limited to uniform transform operations, artists can now enable or disable translation, rotation, and scale on a per-axis basis. Want to scale only along X or rotate only around Z? That’s now possible without scripting workarounds. This fine-grained control enables more modular rigging setups, better procedural modeling, and fewer modifiers stacked to accomplish basic transform operations. There’s also a toggle for gizmo display, which makes scene clutter optional rather than mandatory.

Attribute Transfer: Now With More Attributes

The new Attribute Transfer Modifier brings new tricks: In 3ds Max 2026.1, it can now transfer Soft Selection and Vertex Color data from source to target geometry. That means artists can propagate deformation falloffs or color data (used often for masking or shading control) with less fuss. Transfer operations support both Raycast and Barycentric methods, and filtering by face and vertex normals helps avoid misdirected transfers on complex geometry. There’s also a preview display mode for visual QA before committing, and the whole thing plays nicely with animation and deformed meshes. It’s a technical artist’s Swiss Army knife—without needing a scripting holster.

OCIO, Skin & Spline Tweaks

In 3ds Max 2026.1, even legacy tools get meaningful polish. The Vertex Weld Modifier now defaults to a tighter weld threshold of 0.001 units—more in line with precise modeling workflows and less prone to over-welding adjacent verts. Meanwhile, Optimize Spline adds a new “Colinear Knots” reduction mode, which intelligently culls inline knots before executing other reduction passes. This helps preserve spline continuity while avoiding unnecessary geometry. Both the “By Percentage” and “By Maximum” reduction methods are now animatable, letting artists procedurally fine-tune spline simplification over time—useful in motion graphics or rig-driven shape morphs. On top of that, it now dynamically adapts corner types to reduce intersection artifacts—a critical fix for spline-based rig setups or shape modeling.

Normalize Spline also joins the animation club, with its parameters now fully keyframeable. This unlocks timeline-driven normalization for procedural workflows where spline uniformity must shift over time, such as in extrusion-based animation or rigged mechanical systems. On the rigging front, Skin Modifier gets a speed pass: voxel calculation and vertex weight adjustment are now faster, and long FBX load times tied to skin data are squashed. That means less downtime when painting weights, swapping bones, or exporting bound geometry. Also under the hood, OpenColorIO support is bumped to v2.4.2, laying groundwork for up-to-date ACES workflows—though the update is technical, not feature-expanding. And while OpenPBR viewport performance has improved, it applies primarily to simplified materials (i.e. those not using SSS, Coat, Fuzz, or ThinFilm)—so you’ll still want to bake those heavy looks before you go full-screen playback on a laptop.

Link: 3ds Max 2026.1 Help Portal

The post 3ds Max 2026.1: More Than Just a Modifier Update first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Mike Kuhn.

Autodesk has announced the release of 3ds Max 2024, which offers several new features. A technology preview now enables the use of OCIO colour management in Max. A new Boolean modifier with OpenVDB meshing method enables alternative calculation methods that are independent of the initial geometry. The array modifier has also been updated to provide a new phyllotaxis distribution technique and a progressive transformation mode. A new controller allows the addition of multiple transform controllers as layers of overlaid animation data. In addition, the slate material editor has been reworked and the material editor now includes a new compound node. The list of modifiers has been improved and now includes a search function. The default mirror axis of the symmetry modifier has been changed to X to better suit artists’ workflows. There are also improvements to STL import speed, automatic smoothing and retriangulation for Edit Poly and Editable Poly. 3ds Max 2024 comes with Substance 2.4.10 and Arnold 5.6.0.1.

Here are the full release notes.

The post 3ds Max 2024 is here! first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Mike Kuhn.