The German magazine Digital Production is hosting the Animago contest for the 10th time.

Continue Reading 'Art Contest: Animago 2006' »

Here's a thought that has been nagging me lately: how come that there are virtually no commercial activities around Blender? A product with more than 250.000 users should be able to attract some entrepreneurial attention, right?

Continue Reading 'Where Are the Blender Products and Services?' »

Time has come for taking a look at the CVS repository again; so many changes were committed since our last overview that here at BlenderNation we were thinking of turning this into a fixed appointment (i.e. 2 times a month) with more detailed information so that anyone can be aware of where Blender is being pushed by the devs and take on a fully functional testing build without having to dig into the developers' forum or battle against gcc complaints. Now sit back and relax, its a long way down, but its worth it, believe me.

Continue Reading 'CVS: what's going on - Chapter II' »

All those nice little (and sometimes unfinished) games made with Blender's game engine that can easily be found here and there in the community's forums are really a good way to start learning and to show off what Blender is capable of in the game-design panorama, but what about a real game, with professional looking graphics and a gameplay longer than 2/3 minutes?

Continue Reading 'Radiance: Blender FPS goes Pro' »

Jim Chronister wrote to tell us about the second edition of 'Blender Basics' his classroom tutorial book. It is a very thorough, ready to use guide of 118 pages.

Continue Reading 'Blender Basics- 2nd Edition' »

Ton writes on the Orange Blog that on Friday March 24th, the premiere of Elephants Dream will be in Cinema Ketelhuis, Amsterdam. Afterwards, there's an afterparty in one of the coolest places of Amsterdam, called (believe it or not): Blender!

Continue Reading 'Elephants Dream Premiere: March 24' »

Well, let's face the truth, Blender's layer feature isn't what makes us choose it for our projects ;-)

Almost Maya, the less architect-friendly 3d package, managed to have a nice layer manager in its last versions.

Finally this is going to change thanks to another Python script project: Layer Manager by FourMadMen.

Continue Reading 'Improved layer management' »

Falgor explains how to create a convincing lightning effect by guiding a particle system along a curve guide and working on the particles' materials.

Continue Reading 'Creating Lightning with Particles' »

The first Libre Graphics Meeting will be held on 17, 18 and 19 March 2006 in Lyon, France. It will be a melting pot, with free software graphics developers and artists meeting each other, exchanging ideas and tips, and planning the future of free graphics. The meeting will bring together developers and users of the best of free software graphics applications - GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, Blender and more.

Continue Reading 'Libre Graphics Meeting, Lyon, France' »

o—-o wrote to us to mention his latest project, BFight. BFight is a free two person fighting game developed in Blender that uses the Blender Game Engine licensed under the GNU GPL license.

Continue Reading 'BFight' »

Damn, I wish I lived in London. From April 1st to June 10th the London Science Museum is hosting an exhibition on 20 years of pixar.

Continue Reading 'Pixar: 20 Years of Animation Exhibition in London' »

Sander Wit has posted an wonderful image on Elysiun that is based on the work 'Up and Down' by the Dutch artist M.C. Escher.

Continue Reading 'Up and Down' »

In this article Guarav Nawani explains the artistic process behind the making of some images that I remember as classics.

Continue Reading 'The Making of 'Ambassador Summers'' »

Many people (well, to be honest: about 10 ;-) have asked us to prepare some buttons or banners that they can put on their website to link to BlenderNation. Not only did we do that, but we have decided to take it one step further: you can now easily publish the BlenderNation headlines on your own website.

Continue Reading 'BlenderNation on Your Site?' »

by Federico "Lox" Lucignano

Are you a fan of POV-Ray & co. ? Are you bored by the thousands of settings available in the POVAnim script?

Then you'll be interested in taking a look at Blend2POV for sure.

Continue Reading 'One way ticket from Blender to POV-Ray (through Yafray)' »

Andrew Kator is hosting an impressive array of ready to use Blender objects on his Blender 3D Model Repository ranging from vehicles to animals, architecture and electronics. Most of the models are released under the Blender Artistic License.

Update [2006/11/25]: The site no longer exists; read more about it and an alternative.

Continue Reading 'The Blender 3D Model Repository' »

The .blend files of Orange are requiring more and more memory to render/composite and Ton has been struggling to find a solution. As it turns out, OSX (Orange uses an Apple XServe renderfarm) can only allocate 1.5GB per application at a time and windows seem to have similar problems.

Continue Reading 'Stupid Memory Problems' »

We reported earlier that Salvatore Russo has started a project to bring Blender back to the pocketPC. He now has a first version available for download

Continue Reading 'BlenderCE Available for Download, Splash Screen Contest' »