2024 in Blender

All through the year I've been working on 3D projects in Blender - often as a form of relaxation to get away from just thinking of programming projects all the time. Working in Blender is like meditation for me.

Many of the experiments ended up nowhere but here are some projects that were good enough to post on blenderartists.org.

Three of these ended up in BlenderNation's weekly Best Of Blender selections, which I'm particularly proud of.

This was a design I created as a wallpaper for my new MacBook - it looks awesome on the amazing screen of the Mac.

"Waiting For The Late Ferry" - This started as an attempt to get a good hazy evening sky with water reflections, but then turned into a sci-fi themed scene. A Best Of Blender selection.

"The Secret Clearing" - Experiments with the Polycam photogrammetry app left me with a wide array of statues from Japanese temples. I created this scene to see how well some of these low-res scans would do in a low-light scene. Yes. It's very dark. That was the plan! :-)

"Bob's In There" - I wanted to learn more about how to animate objects along curves and ended up creating this very short video: Bob's In There. A Best Of Blender selection.

"Artifacts" - The spiral structures in this scene were created with geometry nodes. I'm still learning ever more about how to use geometry nodes and it is a whole huge universe of amazing opportunities. So much to learn.

"Endless Bamboo" - This video is part of my exploration of long-form minimalist videos that I post on YouTube for people to use during meditation or as calming background videos in their environment. Creating repeating video loops with seamless 3D animations is actually surprisingly tricky and getting this bamboo forest to be truly never-ending was quite a challenge. A Best Of Blender selection.