While the Blender Wiki is getting more and more translations, the Chinese Blender community has been steadily working on their own translation. On the Docboard maillist they commented that they needed their own installation because internet access is restricted in China and not everyone can reach the Blender site. In time, they will port their content to the main Wiki though. You seem to have to log in to see the actual content, but just looking at the table of contents makes me happy :-)

If you are a Mac user like me, you may be experiencing some OpenGL problems (no screen updates, no menus) under Mac OS X 10.4.3. From the reports it seems that this only happens on systems that have NVidia videocards. The problem seems to originate from the OpenGL drivers. Apple has been notified of the issue and hopefully it will be fixed in 10.4.4. In the meantime, people have reported a workaround: resize the Blender window to a smaller size and the menus will work again.

More information can be found on the Blender bugtracker and on the Blender.org forums.

ResPower, the global leader in the on-demand computer graphics rendering industry, today announced another industry first: unlimited rendering for users of the Blender 3D graphics suite, for a low monthly price, available January 2, 2006.

"Blender 3D has caused quite a stir in the computer graphics world," says Early Ehlinger, ResPower's president. "More than 1.8 million users downloaded the free Blender software over the past year. More recently, over 250,000 users downloaded the 2.37a upgrade in just the first week of its release. The 2.40 upgrade made headlines in recent weeks. I believe this explosion in Blender's popularity means a whole new wave of creative 3D graphics enthusiasts is ready to make its mark in the computer graphics industry."

Does anyone have experience with this service? More info on their website, including prices for Blender.

The German magazine C'T features a 2-page article about Project Orange. They were kind enough to offer a PDF version of the article (in German, of course).

Source: Open Movie, Florian Sailer, c't magazine issue 01/06 page 172-173. This document is presented by courtesy of Heise Zeitschriften Verlag.

This is really cool: the popular Community Journal is back! There's a new issue available on BlenderArtist.org with (of course) an Art overview, an interview with basse (one of the guys from team Orange), a 'making of' and a cool tutorial.

Read it here.

This one's a bit of an oldy: I wrote it years ago when I still worked for Not a Number (the company that developed Blender for a while). It's now part of the Blender Manual which is released under the Open Content License.

It teaches you everything you need to know about the Sequence Editor by editing a tiny videoclip which is composed of several layers of animation.

The tutorial is available here.

After struggling for years with the arcane XML Docbook standard, the Docboard has now switched to Mediawiki (the software that powers Wikipedia.org) to maintain the Blender Manual.

Continue Reading 'Blender Manual Wikified' »

Blender 2.40 has been released.The major additions this release are the Character Animation rewrite, the added Fluid Dynamics system, improved editing and rendering of Particle Based Hair, and the Modifier Stack.

This new release is the result of two big events: Google Summer of Code and Project Orange.

Continue Reading 'Blender 2.40 released' »

As already mentioned in different boards(e.g. the posting on elysiun.com) there's a new zine under the CC license for the Blender community.

Lead by Sandra Gilbert [dreamsgate] the team (Gaurav Nawani, Stefano Selleri, Alvaro Luna Bautista and others) intend to distribute frequently a news package for the blenders. Embeded in a nice design, it contains news from Blender development and the OSS graphic scene, galleries, tips, workshops and of course tutorials.

The first volume includes a review of GIMP 2.4, a detailed tutorial for modeling and animating a smart robot, a step by step introduction to the BMG plugin, and news news news…
Get it here [5.6MB Zipped PDF]

It has been years since I have last updated my website. To my astonishment, still over 300 people visit each day and I figured I need to put in some more effort. I still need to integrate the layout of my tutorials with the rest of this site, but we'll see where this goes :-)

Update: I got some questions about the number of visitors so I re-checked my numbers. It turns out that I have around 400 unique visitors per day of which 85% are new. Let's see what the Blog will add to that!