Leif Dehmelt has been working on a Python script to create skinned rigs from an armature. The concept is simple: you draw an armature and the script will generate a cylindrical mesh around it.

Continue Reading 'Skinny: Automatic Mesh Generation, Rigging and UV-Mapping' »

Late last week, Stéphane Grabli of the Freestyle project sent an email to the Blender developer mailing list and posted an announcement on BlenderArtists.org, voicing an interest in integrating Freestyle into Blender and calling for assistance. For those of you who don't know, Freestyle is a very powerful open source non-photorealistic renderer (NPR) that's been developed as a joint research project between students at INRIA in France and MIT in the US. Below is an excerpt from his email to the Blender developers:

Continue Reading 'Non-Photorealistic Renderer Integration for Blender' »

Alexandre Rangel has created a four-hour Portuguese videotutorial that introduces you to Blender modeling and texturing by using a Honda Shadow motorbike as an example. For only R$35 (about $16) you can download the eight chapters, reference images and .blend files.

Continue Reading 'BlenderZine 2 - Modeling a Honda Shadow' »

Bob Holcomb, whom you may remember from his workshop on video compositing and garbage matting at Siggraph, is hosting a series of Blender compositing contests at BlenderArtists. The theme of the first round is 'The Elements!' - using Blender create your best effect that captures one or more elements (earth/wind/fire/water).

Continue Reading 'Compositing Contest: The Elements!' »

Yes, you read right.

Open Source Multimedia Training organized by the InterSpace Media Arts Center and sponsored by the European Union.

Continue Reading 'TOSMI - Open Source Multimedia Training (almost) for Free' »

Geom Tool is an powerful Python script that will help you with mesh editing. It contains fourteen functions to align, distribute, project and intersect. Allan Brito, author of the Portuguese 'Blender 3D - Guia do Usuário' has written an extensive tutorial on how to use it.

Continue Reading 'Using Geom Tool' »

In an effort to keep the site spam free I re-queued all the comments in the database into our spamfilter today. It suspected 179 messages to be spam, but they were all genuine (which means the spamfilter was pretty good in the first place!). I did have to approve all of them though and as a result, a few hundred extra notification mails have been sent out. Sorry for that!

Matray, a French director, did this music video using some of the new features in Blender 2.43, especially the displacement modifier. Though Matray himself modestly considers this an unserious “test”, it’s really an art piece in my opinion. Very surreal and lovely style!

Continue Reading '"Meischeid" Music Video' »

TrueBones.com is offering several sets of reasonably prices motion capture files. One of their sets, CrazyLazyBones, comes with eight freely downloadable files.

Continue Reading '8 Free Motion Capture Files' »

Olivier Saraja has offered to spot news for us in the French Blender community - something that has been a bit hard for us op to now. Today: no less than five new compositor nodes: threshold, circular, radial and directional blur and a 'random value' node.

Continue Reading 'New Compositor Nodes in Development' »

If you ever wanted to know where it all began then this article is a good place to start. And to think it all started in the 1960s.

Continue Reading 'The History of 3D Rendering' »

This article was submitted by Tony Mullen

Hello Blenderers,

It's been quite a wait, but at last Introducing Character Animation with Blender has hit the shelves! As of today, Amazon.comis listing the book as available. They've also enabled the feature of letting you search inside the book online, so you can see what you're getting into before placing an order. Still more good news is that as I write this, they still seem to be offering a 34% discount.

Continue Reading 'Introducing Character Animation with Blender Has Hit the Shelves' »

Viralata has written two tutorials on his site using some of the new features of Blender 2.43 to achieve nice toon and sketch styled renderings. Are you tired of doing the same old photorealistic rendering? Try this out!

Continue Reading 'Toon/sketch rendering with nodes' »

I made a little video to show what I received in the mail following our donation at Oxfam.

Continue Reading 'BlenderNation Fundraiser: Oxfam Gifts!' »

My name is Bassam Kurdali. You may know me as the director of "Elephants Dream". I am a blender user for many years- since the 2.2x versions of the software, a bit before the Open Source Era.

Continue Reading 'Interview with Bassam Kurdali (Director of Elephants Dream)' »

Here's a great script and tutorial, created by "blendenzo" for Blender's Game Engine, showing you how to easily create a custom mouse cursor for your game projects.

Continue Reading 'New Game Engine Custom Cursor Script with Tutorial' »