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.
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.
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.
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.
Today we show Bob Holcomb giving a demonstration of video compositing and garbage matting in Blender. Garbage matting is used to occlude material from a video that should not be included in the final edit. Although I’m sure it’s pretty common, it was the first time that I saw someone use this technique and I was intrigued by what he showed.
During Siggraph, the RealFlow/Next Limit booth was giving out informational booklets and t-shirts. The back of the books and the front of the t-shirt had an image of the number “4″ written in python to indicate that the newest version of RealFlow had python scripting abilities which was highlighted with the words “RealFlow” and “Scripting Features” in bold. However, it seems that the marketing company hired by RealFlow must be HUGE Blender fans.
This video shows Andy Goralczyk, the Art Director of Elephants Dream, working his magic by creating an alien face in only thirty minutes.
After the highlighting of open source software at Siggraph, a conference is already scheduled in Argentina to focus on 3D animation with open source tools.
Today, you can see Jason van Grumster (or Groo, as everyone is calling him) showing you everything you need to know about Blender’s internal fluid simulator.
