Oh no, it’s this guy again— the one who never finishes anything in the ‘Work in Progress’ section!” Yeah, I know that’s what you’re thinking, but hold on to your nodes! Things are about to get spicy.
This time, Rudy and the team are bringing the heat with some jaw-dropping cinematic renders. We’ve been grinding harder than Blender’s autosave at 2 a.m., and trust me, you’re gonna want a sneak peek. You can catch a glimpse on the Fluent Discord channel, or if you’ve got the patience of a stone texture bake, wait for the big release!
But here’s the kicker: I’m also celebrating my 8th anniversary with Blender! To mark the occasion, I’ve crafted four killer scenes with the help of Fluent, HardOps, Machin3Tools, Mesh Machine, Group Pro, and NSolve. I’ve been building assets inspired by none other than Sergey Tyapkin’s iconic game development style—he’s been my Blender guru from day one.
To keep things extra snazzy, I used Group Pro to create collections by instancing parts and mixing them like the ultimate shader cocktail. The result? A Blender file that’s just 20.7 MB (yes, you read that right!) with memory usage floating between 130 MiB and 178 MiB depending on which version you’re exploring.
So, to all my fellow Blenderheads out there—here’s to 8 years of crashing render engines, battling UV maps, and finally getting things done!
Catch you on the Fluent Discord, or see you in the next ‘Work in Progress’ post… that I might actually finish this time.
And just a heads up: While these are just workbench renders for now, the real magic is coming. Rudy will be posting the actual Cycles renders from time to time on the Discord channel. Stay tuned!
But also – while we are waiting “in breathless anticipation” – why not tell us a little more about the tools that you used, and how and why you used them. There’s probably a month’s worth of postings that you could possibly write about all of this . . . (hint, hint)
Alright, but this took 10 days to model and 4 days to assemble. I used Fluent for the booleans, HardOps for CSharps, Machin3Tools for the focus feature, MeshMachine for the symmetry parts, BMesh Clean to remove unwanted elements and reduce poly count, and Group Pro to create collections and set up proxies. Nsolve helped me add hard loop cuts.
I used just 1-segment bevels for everything, but I set Face Strength under the Shading tab of the Bevel modifier to ‘All’ and enabled Face Influence in the Weighted Normal modifier. This mimics the effect of the Custom Normal tool in 3ds Max and solves shading issues like magic. It’s a technique often used by Star Citizen game developers.
Each asset has specific metrics—the floors, walls, ceiling, and props were all created based on precise scale and depth to snap easily and perfectly in Blender’s incremental snapping mode. I also created trims and decals, but because Eevee either displays as a chaotic red and black anime effect (or crashes), and Cycles would take 50+ hours with about 30+ trials to render just 12 samples, I decided to use the actual meshes for the pack.
I set them up for kitbashing by adding meshes that are invisible in the render but appear as wires in the viewport, with the objects grouped and parented to the wire objects. I then instanced them on each asset to create details, saving memory. I also instanced some parts of the assets, which remain consistent across other assets, by making changes before grouping them into collections.
Although these addons serve me well in other projects, this is how I used them in this particular one. Other addons I typically use weren’t employed here. If you’re still confused, I can provide links to videos showcasing workflows from experts like Alexey Ryabtsev, Sergey Tyapkin, Luan Vetoreti, and others. Not all of them even use Blender, but there’s still a lot to learn from them.
Why do you use all these addons, what is the appeal? Can’t you do this all in blender with the normal tools? What advantages to the addons provide. BTW I really like all your modeling work so I am curious why you use those tools.
It simply makes things faster and easier—that’s what addons do. Sometimes, they reveal possibilities you didn’t even know existed. For example, I can manually use a 1-segment bevel to achieve a model that looks like Fluent Power Trip’s multi-bevel system.
Yeah, I know that’s what you’re thinking, but hold on to your nodes! Things are about to get spicy. 
To mark the occasion, I’ve crafted four killer scenes with the help of Fluent, HardOps, Machin3Tools, Mesh Machine, Group Pro, and NSolve. I’ve been building assets inspired by none other than Sergey Tyapkin’s iconic game development style—he’s been my Blender guru from day one. 
The result? A Blender file that’s just 20.7 MB (yes, you read that right!) with memory usage floating between 130 MiB and 178 MiB depending on which version you’re exploring. 
