Now that we have release of Blender 2.43 and of the new www.blender.org website behind us, I'll tell you a bit of what went on behind the scenes on the website.

Continue Reading 'Blender 2.43 Release: Behind the Scenes' »

Centre College in Danville, KY is using Blender in its Principles of Computer Animation class. The class is designed to learn the basics of computer animation. The students started the three week course, many of them with little to no computer animation experience, animating a ball bouncing.

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Well, this wasn't easy but it looks like it's done: Blender 2.43 has been released and we (finally!) have the new blender.org website online. This release is already dubbed by Ton as the 'Multi' release because there are so many Multi functions: multi-resolution Meshes, multi-level UV, multi-layer images and multi-pass rendering.

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It's almost there! I'm guessing that more than 15 people have been working frantically for the last few days to get the 2.43 release AND the new www.blender.org website ready. We're in the final stages of collecting and placing the release packages, testing the new website and adding the final content – expected release time is later today. Stay tuned!

This amazing rig demonstrated by Bassam at the Blender Conference is available for testing. Bassam plans to release a new version of Mancandy with each release of Blender. Thus ensuring that the latest goodies are included in the rig.

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While working with Blender it's easy to forget what a math processing powerhouse it really is. It's all hidden behind buttons and windows, but behind the screens there's a LOT of calculus going on. I ran into an article called 'Blender’s Orientation Matrix' by Luma (the makers of the game Club Silo) which kind of puts things in perspective again.

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Kitsu (also known as Kitsune) won the latest modeling challenge “Tentacles” on the well-known subdivisionmodeling.com forums. In his entry, he utilized Blender’s new sculpting feature very well, giving the finished model a great level of detail.

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Here's a simple, yet pleasing example of Blender's Displacement Modifier done by Robert J. Tiess (RobertT).

Continue Reading 'Displacement Modifier Test' »

When creating a 3D model or scene its often a good idea to begin with a sketch in 2D. Meaning pencil and paper. But perhaps you are lacking in drawing skills. Have no fear! Blendernation is here!

Continue Reading 'The Structure of Man' »

The Dutch SARA Computing and Networking Services have rendered a clip of Elephants Dream at a resolution of 4096×2160 pixels, and played it back on their 4K visualization setup which consists of 15 LCD displays.

Continue Reading '4K Digital Cinema Technology with Blender' »

Blender’s Video Sequence Editor (in short the “VSE”) is an old feature that has been used to edit Elephants Dream and also is used to edit in the Plumiferos project. After being almost forgotten for a time, the new focus made it take on as enthusiastic a development as the rest of Blender. Roger Wickes has written a section of the Wiki, in which he describes the use of the VSE in a very comprehensible way.

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Just imagine what that will mean for your characters, and more…the ability to easily shape and design not only hair but, anything created using particles!

Well, previously, we could only drool over a demo video…now, we can get hands-on experience with these experimental features!

Continue Reading 'Patch Available for Particle Hair Styling Features' »

Matt Ebb has developed a simple setup in the Blender compositor to achieve an Unsharp mask. Unsharp mask is based on calculating the difference of a blurred copy of an image and the original, so he only needed two nodes to create the filter. He then goes on to apply a modified version of the filter to get a fake ambient occlusion effect. Pretty cool stuff!

Continue Reading 'Compositor: Unsharp Mask and Ambient Occlusion' »

Look out everyone, we are on the verge of the next great Blender release. After the CVS freeze shortly after our last report, the cvs has been filled everyday with bug fixes. The freeze means that nothing new should be added, but there are on occassion a few commits that are just a little more than bug fixes.

Continue Reading 'February CVS Report: During The Freeze' »

More a look at technique rather than a tutorial persay, but a very fine example of what is possible with sculpt mode. And how even the simplest scene can benefit.

Continue Reading 'Sculpt Mode Tutorial' »

Inkscape 0.45 has been released. Inkscape is a vector drawing program that's quite powerful and versatile. It's also open source – in fact, one of their developers, Jon Phillips was giving demos on the Open Source Pavilion with us as Siggraph. Jon was a cool guy and I consider Inkscape to be Blender's twin sister in 2D land.

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