Okay, this post is going to be a bit silly but I had a laugh when it happened to me so I guess I'll share it with you!

Continue Reading 'Blender Trash' »

3toedSloth posted about a neat technique for using using vertex painting to blend textures in the node editor. After reading the entirety of the thread it seemed that some people were having trouble getting it to work. So I did a quick video of the vertex paint technique that's mentioned in the thread as well as a technique similar that involves texture painting using UV mapping.

Continue Reading 'Videotutorial: Mixing Textures Through Painting' »

As you may know, Elephants Dream was released under a Creative Commons license. This license encourages you to do anything you want with all the files (including the audio and video), as long as you give proper credit to the creators. Some people have picked up on this and have started making remixes of the movie.

Continue Reading 'Elephants Dream Remixes' »

Pablo over at Max Underground (the Max version of BlenderNation) posted about some updated fluid simulations on Ron Fedkiw's Stanford site.

Continue Reading 'Fluid Simulation Research Demos' »

We have few announcements to make: we have two new team members, did a software upgrade on the site and I'll be away for a few weeks. Read on for the details!

Continue Reading 'BlenderNation News' »

Leigh van der Byl has posted a great overview/tutorial on texturing that is a must read for those looking to learn more about the art of texturing.

Continue Reading '"Texturing For Dummies" Article Released' »

The Blender Summer of Documentation is drawing to a close (a few loose ends need to be tied up), but already a project that was accepted outside of the main scope of the project due to it's importance is already completed.  Matt Ebb (broken) has completed his restructuring of the wiki, and it couldn't have come at a better time.

Continue Reading 'Wiki Restructuring Complete' »

With all of the hype about Blender Compositor Node system, Fluid simulation, Game Engine, etc. it is nice to see that we don't forget the good old Blender UI! Matt over at his blog has recently published a really interesting menu selector concept which he refers to as Radial (Pie) Menus. This concept is nothing new but it is a very interesting and fast selection mode.

Continue Reading 'Radial Menu Concept' »

Folly, who are preparing a Blender workshop for the f.city exhibition in Lancaster, UK, are now also working on a 3D festival and they are looking for 3D content.

Continue Reading 'Open Call: 3d Film Night' »

While visiting graphicall an interesting build by RCRuiz might have caught your eye. It was simply titled "Blental v0.0.1 (Blender for MentalRay)." Those two sweet words "MentalRay" automatically had me downloading the build and checking it out. Do I hear final gathering?

Continue Reading 'Blental: Blender For MentalRay' »

You may have heard about the new DVD formats that are coming your way. Whether it's blu-ray or HD DVD, they are capable of storing much larger amounts of information on a disc tha the current DVDs. Because of their large storage capacity you can use them to store HD content. Not many movies have been released on this format, and not a single one of them was of European origin. Until now, that is. Michael Becker from Skywalk Mastering GmbH / Imagion AG has produced an "Elephants Dream" HD DVD.

Continue Reading 'Elephants Dream Is The First HD DVD Title In Europe' »

It looks like I was quite late with posting that voting for the Bullet Physics Contest had started. Only one day later Erwin already mails me with the results ;-) I can't say I'm surprised by the results, but congratulations to all the participants are in order – you created a great showcase for the Blender game engine and for the Bullet Physics Library!
Continue Reading 'Bullet Physics Contest Winners' »

Learning Blender and all that it has to offer? Then you might be interested in the over 100 video tutorials and 25 pdf tutorials that Neal Hirsig has released to the public. That's not a typo… there are really 104 video tutorials. From naming objects to layer animation, one minute tutorials to longer discussions, Neal certainly covers a range of basic Blender functionality.

Continue Reading 'Tufts University Blender Course Tutorials' »

I ran into Erwin Coumans at the Open Source Pavilion at Siggraph where he showed me the 15 entries that he has received for his Bullet Physics Contest. Erwin is the original developer of the Blender 2.0 game engine and he is now working for Sony where he is developing the Bullet Physics Library for the PlayStation 3. Sony has allowed him to open source part of that library and he has been busy implementing it in Blender.

Continue Reading 'Bullet Physics Contest Voting Has Started' »

Mathias Pederson's "Starry Night", which Mathias revealed on the forums a little while back, is an amazing display of talent. The image alone is probably worth it's own post, but Mathias went a step further and put together three amazing tutorials on how he created this gorgeous image.

Continue Reading 'Mathias Pedersen's "Starry Night" Tutorials' »

Here's another demonstration by Bassam Kurdali at the Open Source Pavilion on Siggraph. He talks about the techniques that were used for rigging the character of Proog in Elephants Dream.

Continue Reading 'Siggraph – Character Animation' »

We posted about Retina-Software's contest a while back, and after a deadline extension and prize money increase, winners have been announced. You can find the results here.

Continue Reading 'Retina Software Modeling A Cityscape Contest Results' »

The new site and new release (zip) are a testament to Nicholas Chapman's work on his free unbiased raytracer Indigo (now version 0.6 test 1).  And as usual, Nicholas keeps on top of the Blender export script for each release.

Continue Reading 'Indigo, New Site and New Release (0.6 test 1)' »