Yorik van Havre wrote us about two of his latest Blender projects: visualisations for large-scale urban development projects (the largest of them measuring 29 million m2).

Continue Reading 'Tutorial: Urban Design with Blender' »

Adkiller has posted an updated x64 build of YafRay 0.0.8.

This build is specially for AMD64/EM64T processors that do not have SSE3 support. If you have been having problems with the YafRay x64 and your CPU only has SSE2 support, please use this build.

Minor updates to RCRuiz's widely popular, Blend2POV.

Mariano has posted a script for the storage, retrieval, and managing of all your materials, objects, textures, ipos, cameras, paths, worlds, and lamps and automaticly generates the preview image.

Continue Reading 'Content Manager Script for Blender' »

You might recall when BlenderNation posted about Google's purchase of SketchUp, we mentioned that after Google purchased the for-money "Earth Viewer" it then released Google Earth for free (with a for-money version available). And you may also recall that we speculated that Google might do the same with its SketchUp acquisition. I am happy to announce that this has indeed happened! —Download it now!

Continue Reading 'Google Offers SketchUp For Free' »

Can Blender be used for professional CAD graphics? Ebow3d has started an interesting experiment on the BlenderArtists forum to find out.

Continue Reading 'CAD Modeling in Blender' »

D-Man has posted a script to import OGRE3D mesh information into Blender.

Continue Reading 'OGRE3D Mesh and Character importer' »

Two reports have appeared on the Orange Blog. First, the DVD masters are now ready and the production has started. Ton is still reluctant to give off a shipping date, but he expects the production to start at the end of this week or early next week.

Further, Bassam has posted an update of the downloadable Mancandy character rig.

Continue Reading 'Orange: DVD Production Started, Free Downloadable Model' »

Deep_Thought recently posted an Icarus import script for Blender 2.41. For those of you not familiar with Icarus, it is a motion tracking tool that turned into the "for money" PHTrack. It's still available for educational use only for Windows and Mac. The Icarus site has several instructional DIVX videos also. *Update* Colin has kindly updated his Icarus site to include the latest Icarus import script. It's good to see that Icarus is still being used and is continuing to get support from the Blender community.

One of the most famous modeling tutorials on the net is 'Joan of Arc'. Almost 80 pages long, it covers everything from modeling the body and accessories to texturing and rigging the model.

Continue Reading 'Tutorial: Joan of Arc' »

The focus of this website has been mainly on the English speaking part of the Blender community. But have you ever wondered what people in, say, India, Brazil, France, China or Japan are creating with Blender?

Continue Reading 'Blender Around the World: Japan' »

BlenderNation started as an experiment in blogging three months ago. By now, the site receives some 5500 unique visitors per day and the combination of a 10 year old 300Mhz server and a cable modem didn't quite cut it anymore.

Continue Reading 'New Webserver for BlenderNation' »

With recent news of Physical Processing Chips (PPUs), or physics cards, like Aegia's PhysX I began to wonder if the eventual outcome of it's usage might its adoption into Blender as an alternative to Bullet (the dynamics engine), fluids, particles, and cloth. I asked a few of these aspects developers if they see PPUs being utilized in the future.

Continue Reading 'Blender and Physical Processing Chips (PPUs)' »

I thought we were due for a nice group of links to free texture and reference images. Of course there are too many to list here, but here are a few that I've visited on occasion. Some of these are standards for free images, but not everyone knows they're out there.

Continue Reading 'Free Texture and Reference Images' »

Salvatore Russo has updated BlenderCE in three key ways.

1. The website has changed to http://russose.free.fr/.
2. The name has changed to BlenderPocket. And…

Continue Reading 'BlenderCE Is Now BlenderPocket' »

The Blender Manual is available online as a Wiki, in which the editors continually collaborate on improving the content. This is nice if you're a broadband user but if you're not always connected then you used to be out of luck. Not anymore!

Continue Reading 'Download the Blender Manual' »

Distributed Rendering is the cornerstone of large productions. There are several options in Blender to achieve this, the most popular open-source solution being Dr. Queue. If you were like me, a Windows XP user in Dr. Queue's Linux world, you might have found Dr. Queue difficult to setup, if you got it setup at all.

Continue Reading 'Dr. Queue Manual For Windows XP' »

Elephants Dream is the first Open Source movie. This doesn't just mean that Open Source software was used to produce it, but that all the production files will be Open Source as well! So, if you don't like one scene or you want to change it you can fire up Blender, load the files and go ahead. The files will be published under a Creative Commons license.

Continue Reading 'Elephants Dream License Explained' »