News

Jun 5: Added linkable headers to the guides (thanks for the idea, Jack!). You can now hover over any header (or tap one on mobile), and a small gray link icon will appear. When you click that, it copies a direct url link straight to that header into the clipboard so you can paste it elsewhere. Good for bookmarking locations in a guide, sending to others, or eventually working into a more unified learning system if you're the author of said guides and are thinking of new projects for this site.

Accessibility settings are now their own thing in the navbar too, not linked to the gear/logged in user section. They still save locally in your browser.

Jun 4: Added a Guide Tracker to replace the Google Sheet. Quite a bit more functional already, and I have thoughts on how to improve it. I haven't finished populating it with all the data, but the structure is there. Send a note via the contact form if you have thoughts about it too - interested to hear.

Jun 1: The site's live! Shipped a minimum viable product - all the guides are here with some basic sorting and filtering, a privacy policy, an about page, a contact form, RSS, an anonymous likes system, a privacy-focused email-only signup for the newsletter, accessibility modes (light/dark/high contrast/text size for guide text only), and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting. It's been a crazy few weeks of learning, and I have lots to share in the coming months about how I did it all.

How an LLM Works is the first AI guide on the site. It's a deep dive into how an LLM works, and hopefully it'll help you understand how to better work with one. It's really weird and fascinating, and was super interesting to write about.

May 30: [A Hex Value's Journey, Book III](OG057 A Hex Values Journey - Book III - Post) has been posted. This touches on the Post Production part of the journey. It uses the Picture Viewer in C4D as a rudimentary post app to explain the fundamentals of a post process.

Apr 11: Book II: Octane has been posted. This covers the Octane part of the equation, which is arguably the most important one. Book III will be kindasorta about post production, but through the lens of using C4D's Picture Viewer as a rudimentary post app.

Apr 4: Back to color management. Who doesn't love color management. With the 1.8.4 build of Octane, we can now use ACEScg as a working space in C4D and it doesn't hose our colors. Of course this means I needed to update the color spaces shorty guide... So I did, and it ended up being 15,000 words. Not a shorty. I split that into 3 guides and created a series based around following a single hex value through the whole system . Book I: C4D is has been posted II and III are on the way.

Feb 18: 1.0 of the Photorealism: A Not Quite Walkthrough is up. This is the first in a new series of long-form guides called Studies meant to help us through the critical thinking involved in producing a certain style. Pretty excited about this because it brings together a lot of the other stuff learned in the other guides to start producing things.

Jan 14: Updated the Custom Presets for Octane in C4D guide. Added the issue with ACES-as-default in C4D and rewrote a bunch more to cover new changes in Octane 2026 and C4D 2026. Should be good for another year, hopefully!

Jan 7: Happy new year! First guide of the year is up: Procedural Wood: A Deep Dive. This is a really long, very detailed walkthrough on exploring and building a procedural 3D wood texture. 10,000 words+, not for the faint of heart, but super helpful in learning a ton about building 3D textures.

Dec 5: Started a new category of guides called "shorties" that are less than 1,000 words (as opposed to 5-10k words like the rest), and hyper-focus on one particular node or technique. The first one is about the new-to-2026 Distorted UVW node, and can be found here.

Nov 10: Posted 1.0 of the Linear: A Very Deep Dive guide. That one was a serious labor of love. It's the longest guide to date (~10k words), and really explores the concept of "Linear" that's caused so many issues in the past. Hope it clears things up for everyone.

Sep 10: Posted 1.0 of the Baking Camera & Rest Position Walkthrough guide. This goes step-by-step to explain how to create a non-MeshUV projection and then stick it to your model when it scales or deforms using two different methods (Rest Position & Baking it to a UV-friendly map). It was made using C4D, but the concepts should transfer to other host apps.

Aug 30: Posted 1.1 of the Texture Projection in Octane Render guide to include the new Rest Attribute/Position system.

Aug 27: Posted 1.0 of the Standard Surface Material Deep Dive guide. This focuses on the (wait for it) Standard Surface material type. It should be applicable to all DCCs, but some of the illustrations show the C4D node graph. This is the 50th guide!!

Aug 4: Posted 1.0 of the Texture Projection in Octane guide. This is the follow-up guide to the Intro to Texture Projection guide and explains how to all the concepts in the intro apply to Octane.

Jun 26: Posted 1.0 of the Intro to Texture Projection & UVs guide. This one is DCC and engine-agnostic, so it should help anyone in the 3D world make sense of this. The follow-up guide on how to implement it in Octane should be ready in July.

May 20: Posted 1.0 of the Subsurface Scattering guide.

Mar 3: Posted 2.0 of the Universal Material Build guide. Structure stayed the same, but I redid all the images and reworded it to be more clear and up to date with Octane 2024.

Feb 24: Posted 1.1 of the Intro to Output AOVs guide. This addresses several bug fixes, name changes, and improvements done to the Output AOV system.

Feb 19: Posted version 2.0 of the Mixing & Layering Deep Dive guide to bring it up to date with Octane 2024. Archived the Mixing and Layering walkthroughs (Standalone and C4D) - I'll revisit these after writing a deep dive that focuses on projection.

Feb 6: Posted version 2.0 of the AOV Checklist to bring it up to 2024. All AOV guides are now current (yay). Messed around with the formatting a little more: Created new headers for cover images and color-matched dividers to make the categories more apparent.

Feb 1: Posted version 1.0 of this guide, redesigned the thumbnails and some of the guide graphics, tried out Behance Pro which let me put the guides in buckets and reorganize them to match the different learning tracks.

Jan 1: Rewrote the Node Editor guide to bring it current with Octane 2024. Also fully rewrote and reorganized the Index and Study Guide with a brand new reading order.