If you are a laptop user, you might be frustrated with the lack of easy access to the number pad when you want to quickly navigate from the camera, the front, the top, or the side views.  Thanks to mugwah, laptop users can finally use the number pad without remapping keys* thanks to a python script.

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Developers of the GPL game Nexuiz are looking for modelers, and who better qualified than a blenderhead?

Continue Reading 'Modelers Wanted For The 3D Game Nexuiz' »

Chronoh over at Yafray.org recently posted a header design contest in the forums for the entire Yafray community. According to the thread, the Yafray site will be the splash area for several lucky header image designers. The images will be displayed randomly for an entire week.

Continue Reading 'YafRay Header Design Contest' »

Ton has posted an update on the Blender Foundation's activities on Siggraph: there's news on the Birds of a Feather meeting, a major company showing Blender at their booth, new people and Open Source projects who will be present, free tradeshow tickets and a few calls for content. A bit too much for a short intruduction really, so read on ;-)

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Are you anywhere close to São Paulo, Brasil?  Are you looking for Blender workshops for yourself or your children? Then Plan to attend the "Game Cultura" event!

Continue Reading 'Event: Game Cultura (Brasil)' »

We received word from Tony Mullen that he will be working on a new Blender book called "Introducing Character Animation with Blender". Tony could use your help! Read on to see how.

Continue Reading 'Blender Character Animation Book Planned' »

Node based materials are in full swing even before 2.42 is released and already there is some amzaing work being done. But after finding this old timer of a tutorial, we thought a beginner level material tutorial was due to go over a very basic material concept in Blender. Having multiple materials on the same mesh.

Continue Reading 'Videotutorial: Multiple Materials On A Single Mesh' »

Remember the Blender web plugin from long ago? Like a veritable phoenix, it has risen from the ashes and been brought back to life!

Continue Reading 'Blender 2.42 3D Web Plugin Alpha' »

A new version of this nice script is out, here's a short changelog:

• Save/load parameters functionality have been added
• generation time significantly reduced (sometimes it works two times faster than v0.3)

You can download it here. If you don't know what it is all about read the full article.

Have you ever tried to create a walkcycle only to find that it didn't 'feel' right? George Maestri, the original animation producer of "South Park", explains how to do it properly.

Continue Reading 'Tutorial: Anatomy of a Walk' »

… time to take a break and go on vacation. No, it's not about me being an alcoholic under stress, it's simpy the Big and Ugly Rendering Project team informing us that all the testing sessions and related services (support, website, etc.) are going to be put on idle for a little amount of time.

Continue Reading 'BURP! Oh, sorry… (B.U.R.P. Project Update)' »

Campzone 2006 is the largest outdoor LAN-event in the Benelux (Belgium-Netherlands-Luxembourg) with over 2000 participants. BlenderNation was contacted by Ben Kamphuis to find people who can host a Blender Game Design workshop for this event.

Continue Reading 'Campzone 2006: Looking for Game Design Instructors' »

Have you been struggling with architectural visualization? Been frustrated with being unable to create meshes to scale? Looking for Standard and Metric mesh creation? Then Ron Walker is your new best friend.

The Blender Mesh Attribute Editor (BMAE, pronounced "B-May") is a mesh creator for use with Blender whose main function allows you to set the size and location in Standard and/or Metric values. Other features include mesh naming, axis orientation, edit mode/object mode draw type selection, mesh resizing and a fraction to decimal calculator/ledger combo. The size feature has some limitation and special needs to be effective. And it also comes with an instruction manual.

*Edit:  Since this was posted Ron has released the script under the GPL license.

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The call for proposals to the Blender Conference is here and people are getting hectic about it. Are you excited? If you are, now is the time to give your contribute, just continue reading.

Continue Reading 'BConf - Workshops You Would Like to See?' »

Pieter Visser of Illusoft has been spearheading the Collada 1.4 specification support for Blender and has made huge advances in the plugin (for example, physics support). Recently, a proposal he submitted to implement animation support in the Blender Collada plug-in was accepted by the Dutch version of the "Summer of Code" (Dutch). Now Pieter needs our help to make the plugin better than ever.

Continue Reading 'Call For Content: Blender Animations For Collada Animation Support' »

A lot of Blenderheads want to customize Blender to their designing preferences. Some like dark colors and others like light colors. Some like blue others, such as VenomGFX like pink! Back in the day, people would pass their default blend files around. When this became cumbersome, Willian P. Germano created the simple Blender Theme Script which allowed for a whole new way of saving and loading Blender Themes. It has now become one of the many features that Blender offers (File>Export>Save Current Theme…).

Continue Reading 'Blender Theme Repository' »