A few BlenderNation readers pointed us to the latest issue of the German digital content creation magazine Digital Production which features a 4 page review of Blender2.42a.

Continue Reading 'Blender Featured In Digital Production Magazine' »

We've previously posted about "The Sprint" which is a project to get Blender to work in a VR/CAVE environment.  Now the Blender Sprint project has set dates and is calling for participation.

Continue Reading 'Blender CAVE Development Sprint Dates Set' »

Interested in making realistic Earth models with stunning topography and recent climate changes? NASA, the ever popular space program has once again amazed us with high resolution photographs of our great planet Earth.

Continue Reading 'NASA Blue Marble Project' »

Python is perhaps the least understood (and arguably the most powerful) aspect of Blender.  To resolve this, Tim Wakeham (timmeh) has started a wiki site dedicated to Python in Blender, aptly named blenderpython.org.

Continue Reading 'Python For Blender Wiki Site – BlenderPython.org' »

[By Jason "Groo" van Gumster (Fweeb)]

Last month (July 9-15) in Raleigh, North Carolina, Red Hat held a summer tech camp for 52 rising 8th and 9th-grade students. At this camp, students could choose to learn how to use open source software in one of four tracks: web design, video, audio, and 3D modeling/animation. Blender was the application of choice for the 3D track. While students in the other three tracks were instructed by Red Hat employees, the 14 students in the 3D course were taught by three blenderheads who volunteered from the community: Jonathan Williamson (mr_bomb), Jeffery McGregor (Enzoblue), and Jason "Groo" van Gumster (Fweeb).

Continue Reading 'Blender at Red Hat High' »

The much anticipated update to BlenderPeople has been released. Now at version 0.8, Blender again has crowd simulation.

Continue Reading 'BlenderPeople 0.8 Released' »

It's always nice to get your hands on a Blender model that was made by a professional and in my opinion, this model of a dragon head made by BgDM falls into that category. There's not much more for me to say about it, so download the .blend and have fun!

CGIndia has published a texture pack containing 15 medium resolution concrete textures. Not all of them are seamless but these should come in handy whenever you want to do some architectural modeling nonetheless.

Continue Reading 'Concrete Texture Pack' »

Looks like a well known Blender user has made the big time with a spot on the Colbert Report.  The Colbert Report is a U.S. TV show hosted by Stephen Colbert and is a parody of pundit news shows (and is a show I watch all the time).

Continue Reading 'WeirdHat's Blender Work On The Colbert Report' »

After seeing the two threads about the new amateur film (video) called "V de Vicioso", a parody of the 80's "V" tv series and how all the 3D VFX was done with Blender, Bart (I'm posting in his name – etr9j) asked Nicolas Morenas (Caronte – the guy who did all the Blender work) some questions on the project:

Continue Reading 'V de Vicioso – Movie Special FX Made With Blender' »

After some quiet reflection on how to support armatures, Illusoft has released an update to their Collada 1.4 plugin for Blender (now version 0.3.91) with – guess what – beta armature support, and the following features/bug fixes:

Continue Reading 'Collada 1.4 Script Released With Armature Support' »

The Quake Community site Quake3Bits has published an extensive series of video tutorials on terrain creation in Blender and on exporting the resulting model to Quake. Obviously, they're aimed at the novice Blender user but they do go into subjects such as mesh modeling, assigning multiple materials to a mesh, UV mapping and UV painting.

Continue Reading 'Videotutorials: Creating Terrain Map Objects' »

Alvaro Luna Bautista pointed us to a great YafRay/Lighting discussion that has just recently been translated into English.

Continue Reading 'YafRay Lighting Discussion' »

The Blender Google Summer of Code (GSoC) projects are still going strong and their is still more that we haven't touched on. We’ve looked at the very early stages of the Sculpt tool, the Modifier Stack Upgrade, and now we look at Dmitriy Mazovka's Sky Gen project.

Continue Reading 'Google SoC Progress Report: SkyGen' »

Not Blender news, but think of Jahshaka as Blender's cousin. As an open source project Jahshaka was part of the Open Source Pavillion at Siggraph with us. Jahshaka is a realtime editing and effects system supporting Linux, OsX, Irix and Windows, and is certainly an up-and-comer in the open source graphics/film community. They certainly got plenty of attention at Siggraph, so I expect nothing but good things coming from the team.

Continue Reading 'Jahshaka V2 Startup Screen Finalists' »

Colin Levy (effstops) has done it again.  Not only has he made another great film, but he's also posted a great video entitled "Breakdown/Overview of a VFX Shot in Suburban Plight."  This overview is what Colin presented at Siggraph at the Open Source Pavillion to show what Blender can do.  Bart never got a chance to film Colin in action so we are lucky to have the overview available to us!

Continue Reading 'Movie and Tutorial: Suburban Plight' »

After the extensive re-making (and addition of an extended version) of my texture painting for material mixing video tutorials and thinking about it's use of UV's, I realized that one tutorial in particular was great for learning about them. But where could I go to find it?

Continue Reading 'Blender Artist Tutorials' »