passivestar

Instance scattering in blender

Tue, 14 Oct 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Blender 5.0 is coming to save us from the spaghetti hell!

Here’s a ridiculously simple blender 5.0 node setup that scatters objects on the surface of a mesh inside of the volume of some other mesh:

And here’s a cooler version that also scales instances near the edges and allows baking instance distribution before culling and scaling (we’ll get into all that in a sec):

Here’s what that setup looks like in action:

Accelerator keys in godot menus

Sat, 27 Sep 2025 10:00:00 +0000

One of the coolest things about blender is that you can press digits and letters to activate menu buttons. In blender it’s very useful because of how many different tools there are in blender. Some time ago I also made a blender addon to take this workflow even further by putting a bunch of common operations in menus.

Godot doesn’t have nearly as many menus (natively at least), but being able to press keys in the existing ones can still speed up quite a few operations, which is why I made an addon to add this feature.

Simple height blend shader in godot

Tue, 23 Sep 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Here’s a stupidly simple godot shader that blends between two PBR texture sets based on red vertex color channel and a height map:

height_blend.zip

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This kind of blending is used in a lot of games. For example it’s what Overwatch does, most surfaces in that game blend between 2 PBR sets based on height and vertex mask to create variety:

Reflection probe preview in godot

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 08:00:00 +0000

This simple addon draws a reflective sphere for the selected reflection probe:

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Been missing it a lot in godot because it can be hard to understand what’s going on with reflections in the scene when you don’t have clean reflective assets around. It allows to quickly see how different settings such as probe render distance and culling masks affect the final rendered reflection.

Single click resources

Sun, 21 Sep 2025 10:00:00 +0000

So I’ve been making a shitton of small experimental godot plugins, some of them proved useful, a lot of them didn’t, but those that I ended up using were never shared.

This simple addon is one of those that stood the test of time.

Just dropping code here for now because I may not have time to support and respond to GH issues. One day I might put everything I make in some kind of a single thing, but in the meantime this could help somebody and it may give people ideas for their own tools too.

Light beam shader in godot

Fri, 12 Sep 2025 11:12:05 +0000

So I was noclipping through d1_canals_08 in HL2 as one normally does on a saturday night when I saw this:

A nice sharp volumetric light that does a lot for the mood of the scene.

Half Life 2 was released in 2004 so obviously it’s not “real” volumetric fog but just a picture of a light beam that rotates towards the camera using Z-Billboard technique. It’s only visible when you look at it from the side. When you look at the light straight on, it fades out to hide the fact that it’s a billboard.

Smart materials in ucupaint

Mon, 08 Sep 2025 12:15:00 +0000

I recently added a button to ucupaint to make it possible to copy layers from an ucupaint material from blender asset library into the current ucupaint material:

Previously to do that you’d need to drop the material onto some temporary object and then copy layers from it manually.

Now that copying layers from assets is an option, we can easily reuse procedural layer stacks, aka smart materials, between different ucupaint materials!

Texturing in blender with ucupaint

Sat, 30 Aug 2025 12:15:00 +0000

What is ucupaint?

Ucupaint is a free and open-source layering and baking addon for blender. It abstracts away the shader graph into a layer stack to allow texturing with layers rather than nodes:

The obvious advantage of layers over nodes when texturing in blender is you don’t need to manually connect channels between layers, which would be a nightmare with PBR materials where you have albedo, metallic, roughness, normal, displacement, etc. For example this is what the shader graph for that material looks like:

Godot minimal theme 2.0

Fri, 27 Dec 2024 01:00:00 +0000

The minimal theme has just undergone a complete rewrite. It’s now dynamically generated just like godot’s own built-in theme, so it supports editor settings and fixes some issues that couldn’t be fixed before!

Why minimal theme?

Minimal theme solves two things:

Removes excessive UI decorations.
Adds whitespace where it helps readability.

By decorations I mean borders and lines, you can see them everywhere throughout the editor. One example that has a lot of them is the animation player (top one is the built-in theme, bottom is minimal theme):

How to light scenes

Tue, 17 Dec 2024 20:15:00 +0000

I’ve been toying with godot lightmapper and made some simple scenes:

Some people asked how I do lighting.

I add a LightmapGI node and click bake!

Why lightmaps?

Lightmaps have been around ever since videogames became a thing and it seems they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Lumen is awesome! But it’s also expensive. And so is hardware raytracing. You can get an RTX card and enjoy realtime GI on your desktop but you can’t fit it into a small device like a standalone XR headset. It needs a lot of power and it runs hot. I did some gaming on a Zephyrus G15 laptop in bed (as a real gamer does) and it left literal burn marks on my legs that didn’t heal for weeks! A ‘gaming’ laptop isn’t really a laptop. More like a tabletop. You probably don’t want that on your face either.

Is it finally time to use godot?

Sat, 14 Dec 2024 11:12:05 +0000

Kinda. It depends.

There’s no best engine. Some engines fit your needs well and some don’t. I don’t know what you’re trying to make. People have been making games in godot. It’s possible. But you’re here reading a blog post about godot instead of making your game. Maybe you’re just looking for some more information. It’s fine.

Since we’re both here I might as well tell you about my experience with godot so far.

Hugo

Wed, 11 Dec 2024 13:46:47 +0000

Webdevs have all the best shit!

It’s a huge W to be able to grab a static site generator and make a simple blog in a matter of minutes. I’ve always liked that static generators have become popular in recent years but never tried one myself.

It’s just:

> brew install hugo
> hugo new site my-site
> cd my-site
> hugo new content content/posts/post.md
> hugo # Build

If you run hugo server it will watch changes to the content and refresh the page. You don’t need any fancy WYSIWYG markdown editor for preview because you can just open a text editor and browser side by side.