Introduction
This is the official Squishy Volumes user guide.
Important
The Squishy Volumes extension currently requires Blender 5.0, 5.1, or 5.2
You’re likely looking for Getting Started.
Getting Started
In this chapter, we’re getting started with Squishy Volumes.
There is no prior experience assumed, and we are going to go through these steps:
In the end, we are going to have this (very) basic Squishy Volumes simulation:
Let’s start by installing the software.
Installation
The first step is to install Blender and the Squishy Volumes extension.
Blender
The Squishy Volumes Extension runs within Blender, so download Blender if you haven’t already. This section of Blender Guru’s beginner video got you covered if you’ve never done this.
Important
The Squishy Volumes extension currently requires Blender 5.0, 5.1, or 5.2
Unpack or install and start Blender.
Squishy Volumes
Here we’re going with the ZIP-approach.
The preferred way to get Squishy Volumes is via Gumroad. It is Pay-What-You-Want, and any amount is greatly appreciated!
This is what you get:
You only need one of these ZIP files, choose the one that fits your operating system. It contains everything you need to run Squishy Volumes.
Then you just drag and drop the ZIP file into Blender like this:
The info Installed "squishy_volumes_extension" pops and we’re ready to squish some volumes!
See troubleshooting installation if you don’t see that info.
Next, we’ll discover the Squishy Volumes UI.
Discover UI
With everything installed, we have to find the UI.
Sidebar
The most important Squishy Volumes UI is in the sidebar, which is hidden by default. You can open the sidebar either by pressing the hotkey ‘n’ or by clicking on that tiny arrow:
Squishy Volumes Tab
Within the sidebar, most likely at the very bottom, there is the Squishy Volumes tab!
There is only this one panel with two buttons to start with:
Kick in the next gear, we’re about to simulate an example setup.
Example Setup
Having found the UI, we can skip a few setup steps by using an example setup.
Select Example
Click the ‘Example Setup’ button in the ‘Overview’ panel:
At the time of writing, there is really only one example setup (‘Boing Block’) which consists of a simple solid deformable cube and a collider plane. Click ‘Ok’.
Already Simulating!
Once the example setup is completed, we’re already simulating!
This is indicated by the moving progress bar and it should look something like this:
Now to view the simulation result, we can just press the hotkey ‘space’ or click the play button on the bottom.
Finally, hide the objects blocking our view of the beautiful squishiness, either by selecting them and pressing the hotkey ‘h’, or by clicking the eye button over in the outliner.
Got Started :)
That’s it! 🎉🎉🎉
Of course, this is only the most basic thing you can do with Squishy Volumes. But, getting started is usually half the effort in learning something new!
Take your time, scroll through the panels.
You might already have a pretty good guess at what each knob and button does, and if not, do not panic. We will cover the UI in detail in the next chapters of this book.
A Basic Scene From Start to End
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Troubleshooting
Installation
Troubleshooting