r/blender

Hello community,

I'm a simulation engineer at ZOZO, Inc., the largest fashion e-commerce company in Japan. As part of my work at ZOZO, I maintain an open-source physics solver, which we call ZOZO's Contact Solver. Some of you may already know it from its feature in Two Minute Papers. Just to be clear, this is a company project, not my personal project, and I've been supported by many colleagues along the way.

Today, I'm fortunate that the company allowed me to disclose our Blender add-on, and I've also been given permission to share it here, as I thought it might be of interest to the community. Without further ado, let me summarize what the catch is:

* Finite Element deformable and penetration-free contacts

* Strictly strain-limited cloth that does not stretch like rubber

* Intended to be used for cloud-deployed GPUs, such as vast.ai or AWS. If you have a powerful NVIDIA GPU, you may run it locally.

* Runs either locally or remotely on Windows and Linux, while macOS is supported via a remote solver engine

* All tools are exposed via MCP, allowing an LLM to set up simulations.

Everything is open source, not just the Blender add-on but also the simulator engine itself. The core technology is backed by a peer-reviewed publication, Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH Asia 2024). It's under the Apache 2.0 license, so you can take this apart, pick only what you need, and embed it into commercial proprietary code, as long as you comply with the license. With coding agents these days, deciphering the codebase and adapting it to your own needs should be reasonably doable.

Also, a disclaimer: this add-on is not a drop-in replacement for existing tools. It's slow and needs many UI clicks even to get a very primitive simulation running, but I provided video tutorials that cover the fundamentals. I am also aware that the add-on still has many gotchas, and while we run many automated tests, they do not cover everything; the simulator itself may stall in difficult situations. The documentation may also sound a bit LLM-spoken (we clarify how LLMs are used), but please kindly understand this is the best I can do with the limited capacity I currently have at work. Nonetheless, I think it's still usable, as shown in the demo video.

Here is the link:

GitHub: https://github.com/st-tech/ppf-contact-solver

Blender add-on development is not my main role at the company, and I'm currently focused on another project. I'd be happy to have your feedback, because if this receives enough attention from the community, I may be given more opportunities to continue working on it in the future.

Thank you!

Hi, I'm starting to use Blender and a few weeks ago I did this

(i love futurama)

enjoy this shoddy game of thrones parody lol..

full video here

Hey everyone!

Here's an abstract poster I made, inspired by early computer graphics, the covers of old science textbooks and sci-fi magazines from the 70s and 80s. Tried to capture that mix of didactic seriousness and quiet weirdness those books somehow always had. Curious what you think!

Tools & credits:

• Source visual: Blender (rendered with Cycles).
• Post-effects and layout: Affinity.
• Fonts: Gambarino and Switzer. Both available on Fontshare.
• Grain: a superposition of standard digital noise and a custom Turing pattern I built.
• Paper texture: texturelabs.org

Hope you will like it.

Hi everyone,
I’m learning Blender and I’m trying to figure out if it can be used for a specific workflow.
I want to create webtoon backgrounds (school, city, interiors etc), with a style similar to SketchUp (acon3d…) : simple geometry, clean shapes, and maybe a stylized or semi-flat look. The idea is to build full environments that I can quickly pose a camera in and render screenshots for comics/webtoon panels.
I’ve seen SketchUp is often used for this kind of architecture/background workflow, but I’d prefer using Blender instead since it’s free and more powerful.
So my question is:
Is Blender suitable for this kind of “SketchUp-style” background workflow?
Is there a recommended way to keep things fast and not too heavy (modular assets, collections, etc.)?
Are there any specific tools/workflows in Blender that are good for architectural background creation?
I’m not trying to do animation or game development, just static scenes for comic panels.
And is it possible to do simple interactive-style actions easily, like:
opening a door in real time while setting a scene
changing an analog clock time
turning screens on/off
small adjustments like that for different panels

Here are some pictures of the style I’m aiming for:

Thanks for any advice!

(No AI used) - Did this on Blender. I know she lowkey looks like MJ too here lol.

Inspired by the track "Voyager" from the rest EP.

This is my second model and honestly I am having great fun with blender, learning basics from YouTube . and it will be helpful if anyone would guide me to learn faster.

I have more on my YouTube Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/@SUQMATIC

Scene done with Blender and Speedtree

i've been told it looks cozy for a dungeon lol. I post more on my bluesky

My first finished stylized character sculpt in Blender.
I also included one of my older sculpts to compare the progress.

I upload daily progress of this Tug Spaceship project on my socials, so if you are interested you can check it out here:

https://www.instagram.com/baran_hasancebi
https://www.artstation.com/baranhasancebi

I'm continue of my self education of low poly modelling in spare time.

This is my second attempt at 3d, This is based on lowpoly artwork by Matthias Jessen. On the side i have been watching tutorials from Polygon Runway. Please let me know if you have good learning resources for environments.

[effacé]