In order to be able to present the best Blender artwork at Siggraph, we are working on a new Blender DVD.

If you want to try and get your work shown on the world’s most important 3D exhibition, then read on.

Continue Reading 'Siggraph Demoreel Call for Content' »

jms has posted updates to his kml/kmz import scripts (version 0.1.6 released June 5th) for importing SketchUp And Google Earth files into Blender. I waited to post about this because I was thinking that jms, always working amazingly fast to update his scripts, would put out a new version again.

Since he's let us catch our breath, I'll post it now! Here are the changes from the site:

__version__ = "0.1.6, june 05, 2006" :
Manage file with html code

This summer (July 15-16th 2006) the Crystal Space team, together with the sponsers will hold the first ever Crystal Space Conference in Aaechen Germany.

Continue Reading 'Conference: Crystal Space Developer and User Meeting (Germany)' »

Raive Studios have published a short but sweet tutorial on creating a model of a software box.

Continue Reading 'Tutorial: Creating a Software Box' »

Illusoft has released another update to their Collada 1.4 plugin for Blender (now version 0.2.65) with basic physics support. Be advised! You will need the latest CVS build of Blender to utilize the physics portion of the Collada script!

Here is the run down for this release:

export - export paths relative to collada file (GUI)
export - export Texture information from Material
import + export - store usersettings (from GUI)
export - export only current scene (GUI)
export - disable export physics (GUI)
import + export - physics, cylinder + cone support

Bugfix 0000040: Orthopraphic camera fails to export.
Bugfix 0000037: Cylinder and Tapered Cylinder need 2 radii.
Bugfix 0000031: Static meshes should always export a Rigid Body, with false

Chris Kulla has released his latest version (0.06.3) of Sunflow, the open source, platform independent (thanks to Java), photo-realistic rendering system as well as the Blender export script.

From the site:

A new version has been released which fixes a number of small bugs and adds a few new features and options.

The biggest feature change is to how color spaces are handled. Sunflow assumes linear color data like most renderers, but now offers methods to apply or unapply nonlinear color transforms from this data. At the moment only the sRGB standard curve is handled, more options might be provided in the future. Floating point textures/output images are assumed to be linear while 8 bit images are assumed to be in a non-linear colorspace. Likewise, the default framebuffer assumes your monitor matches the nonlinear sRGB profile curve and corrects the image accordingly for display. The advantage of this change is that the colors you specify during modelling/texturing will correspond to what you see in your rendered image, and the lighting calculations will be done in a correctly linearized colorspace. In older version, even when specifying a gamma of 2.2, the resulting images could appeared washed out or too light.

You may download the updated release and blender exporter from the downloads section as usual.

Pixar has been posting some nice papers on techniques they have used to overcome several issues in film production.

Continue Reading 'Pixar Research Papers' »

Juan Carlos pointed us to a screenshot at the open source Combat Simulator Project (CSP). Needless to say, I was intigued to see Blender used in this project. So I e-mailed Mark Rose (mkrose at the CSP Sourceforge page) to ask about how Blender is involved in the project.

Continue Reading 'Blender And The Open Source Combat Simulator Project' »