If you have followed us over the last six months, you know we're nuts about Blender news. In fact, we have a 'mission statement' that tells us that we publish daily news and nothing more. We're not interested in adding forums, user galleries, private messages or other cool community features - we'll leave that to the community sites. And once they do, we'll tell you about it here!

We did however find that we regularly publish about contests, user meetings or other events that have their moment of fame here but once the moment arrives most people have forgotten about them. So we decided we needed an easy to use calendar that shows you the upcoming events in a way that is nicely integrated with the rest of the website.

Continue Reading 'Introducing the Event Calendar' »

Macouno (the guy that brought us the BCG Panorama Renderer, BrayBaker 3, this cool animation and more) has announced today a Blender t-shirt design competition!

Continue Reading 'T-Shirt Design Contest' »

Joeri was kind enough to post smaller versions of 3 great videos showcasing the making of "Elephants Dream." See some of the Blender Masters in action! (DivX required)

Continue Reading 'Elephants Dream, The Making Of Videos' »

Go Pieter go! Illusoft has released another update to their Collada 1.4 plugin for Blender (now version 0.2.56) with the following feature additions and bug fixes:

Features:
import - Import file to new scene (GUI)
import - replace existing scene on import (GUI))
export - export triangles (GUI)
export - export polygons (GUI)
export - bake matrices (GUI)
Bugfix 0000022 - Import Extremely slow imports
Bugfix 0000033 - Export crash when importing polygons with more then 4 faces
Bugfix 0000032 - Export Select Error
Bugfix 0000021 - Export ID's not unique

Since the version tracker has been posting about the Collada plugin a lot due to Pieter's quick turn-around of features and bug fixes, I decided to graph it! Boy is he moving!

The Blender Foundation today announced their presence at the 2006 Siggraph Exhibition. They have teamed up with the Gnome Foundation and the Uni-verse consortium to create, for the first time ever, an Open Source pavilion on the exhibition.

Continue Reading 'Blender Foundation in the 'Open Source' Pavilion at Siggraph' »

Ton confirms on the Elephants Dream website that the total number of downloads has now passed 500,000. Because not all the numbers from the mirrors are in yet, he estimates that the real number may be as high as 1,000,000.

Continue Reading 'Elephants Dream: 500,000 Downloads' »

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