We reported earlier about the nomination of Elephants Dream for the UK Linux & Open Source Awards 2006. I just talked to Ton, who is in London right now, and he told me that Elephants Dream won, making Dreamworks’ Over the Hedge and Sony Pictures Imageworks’ Monster House bite the dust!

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All of the Blender Conference presentation videos are now online and you can download them using BitTorrent. Many of them have by now also appeared on Google Video.

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Getting help with Blender is often arduous task. Between books you can’t afford, forum posts that go ignored, and online tutorials that were written on autopilot, where’s a beginner to go for quick answers? This may not be news to many, but there is a collection of public Blender chatroooms where Blender users can get help and friends can meet. Before I continue, props go out to Florian Mayer (who went by “name” in chat) for giving me the idea behind this article.

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During Siggraph 2006, Mark Puttnam (who along with Bob Holcomb, Martin and Dave was keeping an eye on all the Linux machines) conducted the following interview with several Blender notables. The first was Andy Goralczyk aka @ndy.

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On October 25th, 2006, Ton will be putting on a tux and heading to England for the UK Linux & Open Source Awards 2006.

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Without further ado, here’s the BlenderNation Journal for the last day of the Blender Conference 2006. The absolute highlight of the day was the presentation of the Plumiferos project; these people are really working on an amazing project. In order of appearance, the interviews are: Tony Mullen (author of ‘Introduction to Character Animation in Blender’), Colin Litster, Samo Korosec, Ivan Hoffman and Manuel Perez of Plumiferos, Jason van Gumster and finally the man himself: Ton.

Update: hi-res Quicktime file added

Continue Reading 'Blender Conference – Day Three' »

A blueprint is generally defined as a plan or technical drawing usually documenting an architecture or an engineering design. Within the world of 3D a “blueprint” can be more generally defined as any plan, its the 2D representation of the 3D model you wish to create. This 2D drawing can be anything from a building plan to a model sheet of game character.

Now what do you do if you lack the skills to create your own “blueprint” or need some obscure blueprint and can’t find it? Have no fear, Blendernation is here!

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DecadeCreations and Raive Studios have a new search engine in development called Tutorial Search Beta. This new search engine has hundreds of tutorials ready for browsing. It even has a category for Blender tutorials!

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It is with pain in my heart that I had to leave the ‘after-party’ of the Blender Conference in Café Cuba tonight. Talking to Bassam about his time in Buenos Aires with the Plumiferos team and our shared admiration for what they are accomplishing, discussing the Blender.org redesigns with Matt, learning about Colin Litster’s history and aspirations with Blender, having some good laughs with Andy and Lee, finally meeting Rui and looking back on our time in Boston with Wybren – all of it came to an end because of one simple reason: tomorrow is just another day at the office, and I had to return home…

Continue Reading 'All Good Things…' »