Community resources¶
Online communities¶
The Blender for Science discord server is a community of developers, artists, and researchers that use Blender in diverse scientific fields for visualization. You can find example use cases, ask questions or get feedback on your work, or just stay up to date with a lot of developments in using Blender for research.
On blenderartists.org lots of Blender users and artists are hanging out. There you can ask questions or feedback, show off your work or check out the vast amount of knowledge, tips and Blender renderings in the forums.
BlenderNation gathers information on different topics and includes video tutorials, blog posts on art created with Blender and a lot more.
The Blender subreddit contains many different posts, ranging from simple questions to artists show off their amazing work.
Extensions¶
The Blender community has produced some amazing extensions, including a few that are directly targeted at scientific use (descriptions taken from the respective extension page):
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Import and animate molecular data formats seamlessly inside of Blender. Atoms, small molecules, protein structures, molecular dynamics trajectories, cyo electron microscopy, cryo electron-tomography, starfile instancing, CellPack molecular ensembles.
Molecular Nodes handles all of these different atomic data formats, allowing manipulation and animation of molecular data inside of Blender. A suite of pre-built nodes for selecting, styling and animating molecular data inside of Geometry Nodes are provided.
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Microscopy Nodes is a Blender add-on for visualizing high-dimensional microscopy data—designed for scientists, or anyone working with biological images.
For any type of microscopy: fluorescence, electron microscopy, or anything in between! This tool helps you turn complex 3D+ datasets into stunning, accurate, and animatable visualizations.
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Bioxel Nodes is a Blender addon for scientific volumetric data visualization. It using Blender's powerful Geometry Nodes and Cycles to process and render volumetric data.
Artists and gurus¶
Well-known artists and gurus working with Blender are:
- Jan van den Hemel shares many tips and tricks through Twitter, both on Blender usage as well as making a scene look a certain way. He also publishes these tricks in an e-book.
- Andrew Price (twitter) aka "Blender Guru" provides many cool tutorials on https://www.blenderguru.com/ and his YouTube channel. He is well-known for a multi-part tutorial series on modeling a realistic donut!
- Glex Alexandrov (twitter and twitter) aka "Creative shrimp" has some very creative and inspirational tutorials on his YouTube channel.
- Ian Hubert (YouTube and twitter), famous for his Lazy tutorials (very efficient 1 minute tutorials), has videos on advanced green screen techniques and VFX in Blender.
- Simon Thommes (twitter and YouTube) is a materials wizard, he is able to create complex geometry out of one cube or sphere with just the Shader editor.
- Steve Lund has some great Blender tutorials on his YouTube channel.
- Zach Reinhardt has some great modeling, texturing and VFX tutorials on his YouTube channel
- Peter France is the Blender artist at the Corridor Crew which just started his own YouTube channel with some instructive tutorials.
- YanSculpts does not fit this course material perse but it goes to show how versatile Blender can be, this artist creates some amazing sculptures in Blender of which he shows the process on his YouTube channel.
- Josh Gambrell shares a lot of tips and tricks for advanced mesh editing on his youtube channel (mostly hard surface modeling).