Recently I became interested in writing Python scripts for Blender (being the new maintainer of the Kerkythea exporter I needed to get a little training), I'm amazed by the control level supplied by the API, handling/creating objects/materials, modifying meshes/IPO curves, building/animating full scenes is almost straightforward (at least for any mid-level C/C++/Java/C# programmer), creating a script of average complexity is really a matter of minutes… at the pact of sticking to "Alt+P" scripts.

Continue Reading 'ScriptUI: Give your scripts a nice GUI the easy way' »

This month, two mini tutorials were published on Elysiun on how to make a lightsabre in Blender.

Continue Reading 'Lightsabre tutorials' »

Computer Arts has a free tutorial in pdf form entitled "The Rules of Camera Tracking." It's more of a tips and tricks of camera tracking, and though it makes mention of some commercial software, the overall guidance is sound.

Continue Reading 'Rules of Camera Tracking' »

WhiteBoy has published a 20-minute video tutorial called 'Blender Tricks' that explains more than 25 Blender techniques.

Continue Reading 'Videotutorial: Blender Tricks' »

Baking materials consists of taking effects generated when an image or movie is rendered and store these effects in a UV texture. Currently, in Blender 2.41, this is not an in-built feature. But fear not! BRayBaker is the right tool for the job.

Continue Reading 'Bake Materials Into UV Textures' »

In the collective conscience of the Blender Nation there will always be great works that show that Blender can do the job, and do it well. Today lets take the time to view a animation triumph not only for Blender but for a well-known dog and the Rebellion!

Continue Reading 'Blender Animation Classics – "Beagle"' »

Daniel Salazar (ZanQdo) has posted a script on elysiun that exports an object's Loc, Rot, and Size channels to a Lightwave motion file (.mot). You can find the script at http://www.3developer.com/temp/LightwaveMotionExporter.py. The .mot format can be used in many different applications (including Lightwave (obviously), WorldBuilder and Vue) making this another useful tool that helps incorporate Blender into your production pipeline.

Jason Pierce has posted a nice library of furs on Elysiun. They are all made by combining static particle systems with clever material settings. Static particles are a particle system that are 'frozen in time' so that you can see the full particle trajectory at any frame of the animation. By setting the right perturbation and gravity you can create some pretty convincing hair or fur effects.

Continue Reading 'Fur Library' »

If you want to create embedded interactive 3D graphics for websites with Blender, then check out 3DNP (3D – No Plugins).

Continue Reading '3D – No Plugins' »

Guys at BlenderProjects.com chose a very original topic for their first contest which is being sponsored by directron.com, the challenge deals with toons in the style of 1950's or 1960's ones and focuses mainly on modeling and materials settings.

Continue Reading '50/60's styled toon contest' »

3Delight is a fast RenderMan-compliant renderer featuring multi-threading, ray tracing, global illumination, motion blur, depth of field, programmable shaders (RenderMan Shading Language support), quality antialiasing, and antialiased multi-depth shadow maps. Continue Reading 'Blender to 3Delight Export Script' »

Welcome to the third appointment with Blender CVS development overview; since you are all probably used to this kind of article, I'll leave out all the cerimonials and go directly to the list of new features/improvements that the CVS official repository is actually storing.

As always, sit back and relax, the list is long to read ;-) Ready? Let's go then.

Continue Reading 'CVS: what's going on – Chapter III' »

Hi all, I'm back at home in Portugal, it is always great to come back after a long fun journey to see things haven't changed much, but I myself, on the other hand, have. Now I am packed with some more knowledge :) .

Continue Reading 'Libre Graphics Meeting: Summing Things Up' »

When I was playing with blogging for the first time in January I wrote '..we’ll see where this goes :-)'. Well, it certainly went somewhere! Here's a short overview of where we are today.

Continue Reading 'Site News' »

Minor update to Blend2Pov released as 0.0.6a.

With the premiere of Elephants Dream approaching, the media are really starting to pick up the news. Today, an interview with Ton Roosendaal appeared on the frontpage of 'Het Financieele Dagblad', one of the leading Dutch financial newspapers.

Continue Reading 'Elephants Dream on Frontpage of Leading Dutch Newspaper' »

Free software is a great thing as long as it enables us to keep our hands on tools that otherwise would be impossible to try/learn/use (mainly for economical resons), but sometimes free contents created for/with such tools are even more usefull since they supply us with something that can be used as a template for our projects; when those contents are high quality ones they become a great educational resource, and this is the case for CuteBear, a fully rigged character created by Tommy Helgevold (aka Joongle) and released on elYsiun for the pleasure of all the animators-wanna-be around here.

Continue Reading 'Fully rigged character for free (as in free beer)' »

Blend2Pov 0.0.6 has been released for Windows and Linux and is now integrated into Blender! See the thread for download information.