If you would like to work on your lighting and texturing skills then check out the CGTalk Lighting Challenge; download the model of a fruitbowl and post the result of your work to compare it with other artists.

Continue Reading 'CGTalk Lighting Challenge' »

The Docboard team have published a very useful 'Blender Quickstart Guide': everything you need to get started on one page.

Continue Reading 'Blender Quickstart Guide' »

Colin Litster has posted a tutorial on faking really nice looking volumetric clouds on his site The Cog Project. It covers working with textures on particle systems, lighting them well and then cheating a bit.

Continue Reading 'Tutorial: Cloud Creation' »

It was long overdue, but I have finally managed to put the December 2005 gallery online on Blender.org. After some feedback from the community I have become a lot more picky on which images should be included and which not. Please let me know if you think it's better now.

Ton is planning a rather large code rewrite of Blender's render engine. Apart from cleaning up some old cruft the main issues seem to be to allow for multi-pass, multi-layer and multi-thread rendering, storing everything in a single EXR file and building a Noodle editor for compositing the rendered layers. Oh, and *real* vector based motion blur. Joy!

An excerpt of Ton's announcement is inside.

Continue Reading 'Blender Render Engine Rewrite for Orange' »

Zupermonkey posted a Blender testbuild of the Orange development branch of Blender. While the Orange artists are working on producing a movie, Ton is slaving away at building the tools they need to get the job done.

Continue Reading 'Blender, Orange branch' »

Autodesk, creator of 3ds Max, has acquired Alias, the creator of Maya:

On January 10, 2006, Autodesk completed the acquisition of Alias for $197 million USD. Alias is a leading developer of 3D graphics technology. This acquisition extends Autodesk’s 3D software leadership in the manufacturing and media and entertainment industries.

Continue Reading 'Autodesk Completes Acquisition of Alias' »

One of the things Ton has been trying to explain to me time and time again is the concept of Gamma correction. I never got it until I read this tutorial by Alvaro Luna Bautista. He explains how to work with the Gamma settings in Yafray, how to analyse the histograms with the Gimp and how to Gamma correct your textures for better results.

To be honest, I'm still not sure I understand Gamma for 100% now, so this tutorial is probably more useful for you than for me ;-)

A few days ago I reported that using Blender 2.40 was problematic on Macs with NVidia hardware. The Blender developers had reported this issue and Apple has supplied a bugfix in the graphics drivers in the 10.4.4 update that became available today. I tested Blender and it now works like a charm.

Continue Reading 'OS X 10.4.4 update' »

The February 2006 edition of 3D World features an article about Open Source graphics and project Orange:

The open source revolution
Professional graphics created with free software: fantasy or reality? We interview the key players in the market, and bring you the first of six production diaries from the set of Elephants Dream [the movie that the Orange team is working on, bart], the world's first 'open source movie'

I haven't picked up this copy yet, but 3D World Magazine has always been one of my favourites so I'll be sure to get one today :)

Update: buh, the February edition wasn't in the shop yet…

Earlier this week there was a bit of an stir on Elysiun.com when it turned out that ResPower had posted some positive comments about their renderfarm service under pseudonyms. Some people even suggested a scam. I contacted them to hear their side of the story and Early Ehlinger, President of ResPower, sent me the following reply:
Continue Reading 'ResPower reaction' »

Earlier today 'xserve', the server that hosts www.blender.org, mediawiki.blender.org and orange.blender.org was experiencing load problems and was unreachable for a while. Usually these problems are caused by people who are trying to 'spider' a website for offline browsing. Measures to throttle the maximum number of connections are being taken so hopefully this will soon be a thing of the past.

Anyway, to whoever jumped on his bike to ride to the server location facility today (Ton, Marco, Stefan?): thanks for bringing xserve back to us!

The Blender development and documentation group are asking for some help in translating the Blender tooltips and the Blender manual, specifically for Indian, African and Arabic languages.

They link to the Ubunto Rosetta project which hadn't heard of but which is really cool: it allows volunteers to help with software translation projects. Looking at the list, there are many more languages that could still need a hand.

The Orange Team have been putting the thumbscrews on Cinepaint (a Gimp fork for use in the film industry), but things don't look good:

Cinepaint’s capability of editing on a higher dynamic range was instantly evident in a simple curve and level based colour correction. There was no banding, no colour flipping, really nice!

Continue Reading 'Noodles and CinePainting?' »

Every Blender release is followed by a 'bugfix' release. From the developers meeting notes, it looks like 2.41 may see the daylight next week:

Instead of "2.40a" we drop the a/b convention and the 2.40 bugfix release will be called 2.41. in addition to bugfixes, it will include bpy api additions to complete the new armature/bone module, and the recent game engine improvements. So this week we attack the tracker, next sunday we then do 2.41 release, unless showstopper are found during meeting.

2.42 later, with bigger patches like the sequencer memory management, and perhaps this is when the orange merging will happen (so armature layers, nodal material editing etc. will be included).

Aidan volkofsky posted a very nice tutorial on creating fur with static particles on the CGTalk forum. It requires Blender 2.40.

Secunia.com issued the following security advisory yesterday:

Blender "get_bhead()" Integer Overflow Vulnerability

Damian Put has reported a vulnerability in Blender, which can be exploited by malicious people to cause a DoS (Denial of Service) or to potentially compromise a user's system.

The vulnerability is caused due to an integer overflow in "get_bhead()" in "readfile.c" when parsing ".blend" files. This can be exploited to cause a heap based buffer overflow by tricking a user into opening a specially crafted ".blend" file.

This vulnerability has been fixed in 2.40 so if you haven't already, upgrade now. If you ask me, embedded Python scripts are a much bigger risk so it's always a good idea to check the source of a .blend file before you open one.

You can read the full advisory here.

Yesterday I mentioned that the ResPower renderfarm now supports Blender. But that's not all. Early Ehlinger, President of ResPower writes on the Blender.org forum:

Also, we have some minor bugfixes/patches that our lead blender developer, Cory King, should be signing on to the dev list to get integrated back into the trunk.

Kudos, guys! It's really nice to see companies who don't just take from the Open Source community, but who give back as well.