James Chronister (author of Blender Basics) and his colleague Jason Hancock held a presentation titled ’3D Design and Animation in the Classroom Using “FREE†Software’ at the International Technology Education Association Conference in Baltimore in March.
In my mind there is a grand trinity of powerful 3D functions that all 3D programs should possess: Hair, Fluids, and Cloth. In Blender, cloth simulation was possible only through either animated displacement maps or softbodies, until now.
The POV-Ray site has recently updated their news site with a range of nice bits of information as well as distributed rendering solutions. One that certainly should draw the Blender community’s eyes is a newly updated tool from Theo Gottwald.
It has been a while since their last post, but Matt has posted an interesting update report on the Orange blog.
Ludwig is a fully rigged and animation ready character for Blender. His features include IK/FK arms, stretch and squash head and spine, and a lip sync ready face controlled by a custom UI. Ludwig was created to provide the Blender community with a high-quality humanoid rig and to promote Blender as a character animation tool.
Rumours are that Blender 2.42 will be released in May and like with the previous versions, a splash screen contest has started on Elysiun. If you want to burn your work into the minds on thousands of Blender users, then this is your chance!
In a professional production environment, a large number of tools can be used in projects. Source material can come from many different programs and in a variety of formats or it might be easier to create content in one program over another. For this reason it is important to understand how Blender can be used in concert with other programs, closed or open source.
In preparation for the upcoming Blender 2.42 release and the Dapper Drake Ubuntu release the Blender DocBoard group is hosting a translation day. The aim is to help individuals who are unfamiliar with the translation process, or who are experienced translators but have not translated for Blender to help get involved.
I’ve just finished updating the February gallery on blender.org. It’s quite overdue and I’ll be doing the March gallery as well soon. Again, congratulations to everyone who made it in!
I thought that this time I would talk a bit about my work behind the scenes on the gallery.
Blenderart Magazine is preparing for their 4th issue and they are looking for content. Sandra Gilbert sent in the following call for content:
Ok, it’s time to start thinking about articles, tutorials and images for Issue # 4 of Blenderart Mag. This issue we are focusing on ‘Character Modeling’.
We are looking for articles and tutorials on any and all aspects of character modeling.
