Waylena – FOSSdome

Spiky Balls in Blender

Spiky balls are part of the decor in some scenes for the planetarium show we are making. Easy to make, plus it uses a couple small things that I rarely use in Blender, so I figured I’d share.

The blend files are on my Github: https://github.com/waystar/Featured-Blend-Files/blob/main/SpikyBalls.blend and https://github.com/waystar/Featured-Blend-Files/blob/main/SpikyBall_HowTo.blend

Or you can watch the video:

Happy Blending!

Blender Conference 2026

Blender Conference 2026 (YouTube Playlist)

I haven’t watched all of the videos from BCON26 yet, but I’ve been mightily impressed so far.

Two (2) excellent talks on fulldome planetarium productions, talks on using Blender for science applications, unusual spaces, real time assets, 2D/3D combinations and so much more. Coding and node-ing and guided tours under the hood.

Don’t be surprised to see me reference some of the talks individually in the weeks and months to come.

Blender Conference 2026 (YouTube Playlist)

Birthday Cake & Orbital Material | The Ron & Way Show

Your favorite Open Source Sorcerers are at it again!

We take a dive into the birthday cake model I worked on for use in the planetarium, and we get to explore Ron’s delightfully clever way of using shader nodes to display a fading orbital trail.

Be sure to hit the Like button, and please do subscribe to both of our channels while you’re there.

The birthday cake was shown in the previous post along with a link to the blend file.

Recent Birthday

The file Birthday_Cake.blend can be downloaded from

https://github.com/waystar/Featured-Blend-Files

I’ll post a followup linking to a peek at how I made parts of it in the current episode of The Ron and Way Show.

The Ron and Way Show

Part of my return to sharing FOSS-y goodness online is thanks to my good friend Ron Proctor.

Ron invited me to hang out and make some YouTube videos and I’ve been having a great time. Here is our latest:

The UV dome is in my previous post here on FOSSdome, and here is the cute little galaxy I just made with Ron’s script and node setup:

swirly blue dots

A Very Fishy UV Map

Generating a hemisphere model in Blender with properly spaced UVs for fisheye dome masters.

UVs are texture coordinates. An image plane 3D model would be measured in X and Y coordinates. The image texture applied to that model would be measures in U and V coordinates.

I frequently need to apply fisheye images to a virtual dome within Blender. Sometimes I’m prototyping, sometimes I’m building a scene with a dome in it, sometimes I’m splitting the dome into parts for special effects in the planetarium.

The quickest way has always been to create a UV Sphere and delete the bottom half.

Orange wireframe sphere wireframe sphere, bottom half orange

This results in a nice looking hemisphere, but we can’t apply a fisheye, since the UV map is half of what was created for the full sphere..

wireframe rectangle on left, wireframe hemisphere on right

Applying an image to the map yields a fun result, but not what we want..

Abstract image within a circle

Of course, a new UV map is required:

By unwrapping the hemisphere model, we can create a closer UV map..

But the rings toward the edges get closer together, and this causes distortion at the edges of the hemisphere..

After giving up on getting Gemini to help me extract a proper map from a UV hemisphere, I asked Gemini to write me a python script with 3 parts:

Create a flat circle with equally spaced rings
Unwrap the model to get a lovely UV map
Reposition the vertices of the circle to form the hemisphere.

It worked! And just look at the spacing on this lovely UV map…

And the same image texture applied.. just look at those edges, they are true!

The script can be downloaded here: UV_Dome_Generator_for_Good_UVmap.py

For the script, example blend file, an exported fbx model, and summaries of the method and the several wrong turns it took before I thought to make a circle first, go to https://github.com/waystar/Blender-UV-dome-generator.

It has been a minute

I’m still around, and hope to start posting new content and samples of things I’ve been up over the past 5 years.

JunoCam Citizen Science

My first attempt at Citizen Science on display in the dome!

A few weeks ago, I watched this video, produced by the Griffith Observatory a year ago:

As in the demonstration video I watched, I used Gimp. Of course I could have used Krita, but Gimp is my go-to since I’m so familiar with it.

First I downloaded set of images from 2021-07-21 Perijove 35:

https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam/processing?id=11074

I opened the three color PNGs as layers and colorized them accordingly.

Then I played around with the individual layers’ brightness and contrast settings, then combined using Screen as the blend mode.

After I got the colors close to how I liked them, I used the G’Mic Tone Sharpening to bring out the detail. (https://gmic.eu/index.html)

I spent very little time on it, about 25 minutes total. I’m pleased with it and look forward to showing others how to make their own.

Cosmic Shaders from Darkfall

I saw this on my YouTube subscriptions feed last week. Very cool stuff. There is a good blog post on using the add-on as well: https://darkfallblender.blogspot.com/2021/03/blender-add-on-shader-library-version.html

Downloaded the python script from the Pastebin link provided in the blog post. Then installed the add-on through Blender Preferences.

The Shader Library is accessed through the 3D View. If you don’t see the tabs on the right, hover over the 3D View and hit the “N” key on the keyboard.

There are several shader types and options to choose from.

The add-on creates the node tree for the shader. This is a great way to quickly see what node trees can do without creating them from scratch.

I added some compositing to get a nice glow in Cycles.

Have to separate out the Environment (background as set up in “World” panel) and blur foreground alpha separately from the image to get that nice glow.

I always look for a Cycles way to make things glowy since I ultimately use fisheye for use in the dome. Eevee is super fast and that bloom is wonderful, but it’s a no-go when rendering straight to fisheye.