The first Elephants Dream DVDs have arrived in Europe and the buzz in the international community is growing. Europeans have started posting the first reviews and people farther away are impatiently awaiting for the package to arrive in the mail.

Continue Reading 'Orange: First Reviews, Sales Hit 2000, Wikipedia Prank' »

After the announcement that Google was releasing SketchUp for free, there was an immediate hope that there would be a way to import models from the free version of SketchUp into Blender. Well, jms has got something that might be the answer.

Continue Reading 'Import SketchUp And Google Earth Files Into Blender' »

If you are working on a car model (and somewhere in your Blender career you probably are) then this may come in handy: Sonix provides a car materials library for Blender with no less than 54 materials and textures.

Continue Reading 'Car Material Library' »

Mariano is a scripting machine. He has already posted an update to his Blender Library script. In this version? Particle Library can now store particle systems with force fields and deflectors!

For those of you using Blender 2.41, Ton has started to post a list of changes that will be in the next version (which most of us are currently referring to as version 2.42).

Continue Reading 'Upcoming Blender Changes' »

The latest SharpConstruct (a 3D modeling program that paint depths on to polygon models in real-time) was released on April 29th with several fixes. (Image by TorQ)

Continue Reading 'SharpConstruct 0.12 RC 2 Polygon Painter Released' »

The March edition of the blender.org gallery is online. Lots of beautiful images, and a few crazy, funny and even scary ones.

Continue Reading 'Blender.org Gallery Updated: March 2006' »

Mariano has updated his Library script to include some new features and has created a website dedicated to the script. The site also has downloadable libraries.

Look out Muppets, Andrew Young is about to bring classic puppetry and cg together into a feature length film.

Continue Reading 'Bear Town - An Open Movie Using Blender' »

Blender Battles kicks each month off with a new Monthly Challenge topic… This Months challenge is centred around compositing, with the winner receiving a months free rendering at Respowers online renderfarm.

Continue Reading 'Blender Battles May Challenge - 'Then it Became Reality'' »

Working with Render Reality, Macouno has published a helpful script designed to allow measurements in Blender. Especially useful for architects (see our previous post about CAD modeling), this script allows scalability, measurements in several units and even render time results.

Continue Reading 'CAD Tool: Blender Caliper Script' »

Chris Kulla has released his latest version of Sunflow, the open source, platform independent (thanks to Java), photo-realistic rendering system.

Continue Reading 'Sunflow 0.06.1 Photo-Realistic Renderer Released' »

The professional 3D industry is slowly starting to discover Blender. Last month, two job opportunities have appeared on the BlenderArtist forum, and a new website has appeared that focuses solely on Blender jobs.

Continue Reading 'Blender Jobs' »

IpoDrivers are one of the less exploited feature of the new ones packed in the previous version of Blender (2.40) although it could be a powerful tool and a real time saver when it comes to complex animations, this is mainly due to the difficulty in understanding what they really are, how they can be used and in which scenarios they are more handy.

Continue Reading 'Tutorial: Cartoon Eyes and IpoDrivers' »

Eskil Steenberg (Eskil) has possibly discovered something quite amazing and I'm sure that you will agree, because Blender might have made it into prime time television.

Continue Reading 'Blender on U.S. Television?' »

Ton visited Joeri today and brought him the first Elephants Dream DVDs.

Joeri, who prepared the DVD masters, comments on BlenderArtists:

Ton just brought me my ED dvd's. They look great. I was a bit worried the dvd prints would be messy, but they are great. The sleeve could use a little more saturation and a lot more logos (and is alas missing my name) and a better… It's great.

Continue Reading 'Elephants Dream DVDs Shipped' »

This one was really an unexpected surprise; those of you guys who follow the development related mailing lists (Bf-committers and Bf-blender-cvs) know that the end of the Orange "affair" and the discussions about this year's Google Summer of Code proposal made the development slow down considerably, in this fermenting scene nearly noone noticed two small commitments from Ianwill (aka William Padovani Germano) which make the PyDrivers dream come true.

Continue Reading 'PyDrivers at Last!' »

As a BlenderNation.com author and editor, it's my responsibility to scour the internet for anything interesting that is Blender related: new features, new ideas, new communities. Imagine my surprise when I discovered a little site called Elysiun.com. Some of you may have even been there: Elysiun.com sports an impressive 300,000 hits a day from 6,000 unique visitors, doing up to 25 Gigs in daily data transfer. The forums there get about 360 posts daily… that's even more than Blendernation.com!

Continue Reading 'Blending Ahead: Timothy Kanters and BlenderArtists.org' »