No 3D model is much without suitable textures. CG Choice Award Winner Stefan Morrell shows methods and tips on painting high-quality hard surface textures in this tutorial.

Continue Reading 'Hard Surface Texture Painting' »

Today I got confirmation of my bank that my creditcard limit has been raised so I could finally place the order for our Fundraiser on www.oxfamunwrapped.com!

Continue Reading 'BlenderNation Fundraiser: Donation Done!!' »

We've posted about texture libraries before, now we have found the king of texture libraries. With over 25 links to other texture libraries, this is the biggest collection we've published so far!

Continue Reading 'More than 25 Texture Libraries' »

Blenderart Magazine is preparing for their 9th issue and they are looking for content. Sandra Gilbert sent in the following call for content:

It's time again to start thinking about articles, tutorials and images for Issue # 9 of Blenderart Magazine. In this issue we are focusing on ‘Space’.

Continue Reading 'Blenderart Magazine #9 Call for Content' »

Release Candidate #3 has quietly been uploaded to download.blender.org. More than 200 issues have been fixed, but again I couldn't get my hands on a list of changes (which I think is kind of disappointing). Anyway – download a fresh version here and take it for a spin . This is your last chance to find any bugs before the release, so hack away, have fun and report your bugs on the official bugtracker!

Note: at the time of writing the only the Windows and OSX versions were available. Ton couldn't give us an indication how soon builds for other platforms will be up.

Samran Abed Alsalam sent me a list of 10 Blender video-tutorial in Arabic. Now I know that this will be of little use to many of you but the reason I'm posting these tutorials is that I think they are very well produced. Give it a try: look at one of them and see if you can follow the story. I watched the episode on MultiRes meshes and I think I learned a thing or two.

Continue Reading 'Arabic Videotutorials' »

Bassam Kurdali and Andy Goralczyk were invited to speak at the Future Film Festival in Bologna, Italy last January. It looks like they had a blast – here is their report.

Continue Reading 'Elephants Dream at Future Film Festival' »

Edouard Tisserant contacted us about a commercial presentation that he made with Blender. The animation is simple but effective; it explains the technical concepts behind a Linux based backup and restore system.

Continue Reading 'Blender Commercial Video: Share Control' »

Alvaro Luna Bautista sent us a detailed article about the state of Yafray. He touches on the struggle of the team to keep development going during the last year and he provides a detailed list of the upcoming features. It all looks very promising – I hope they'll be able to get a stable release out soon!

Continue Reading 'YafRay Next Generation' »

We were contacted by Anja, the manager of the Blender.org E-shop today. She told me that they now have three new products available in the shop: a PDF version of the 2.3 Guide, the French 'La 3D Libre avec Blender' and *gasp* new stickers! Nothing too shocking, but if you're looking for a way to support the Blender Foundation, why not send yourself a little gift?

Continue Reading 'Blender.org E-shop: New Products' »

For the last few years, the Blender Foundation has been partly financed by subsidies from the European Union. The subsidy rounds are called 'Framework Programmes', and the deadline for project proposals for the seventh Framework Programme is nearing. Ton Roosendaal sent in the following article in search of ideas and assistance for this next round.

Continue Reading 'EU have a dream? Blender in 2012!' »

In Blender 2.42a some might find it difficult to get a realistic look to hair. Well help is available in the form of a mini-tutorial from Aidan.

Continue Reading 'Hair/Fur Tutorial' »

Ton has posted an announcement on blender.org about some of the work that's currently going on behind the scenes. There's new hardware being installed, blender.org gets a complete makeover and the final 2.43 release has been planned.

Continue Reading 'Blender.org Redesign, 2.43 Release Announced' »

BlenderGalactica.com is a website focused on the science-fiction universe of Battlestar Galactica. BlenderGalactica’s goal is to get the entire fleet of spaceships from Battlestar Galactica into downloadable packed .blends (many with textures as well).

Continue Reading 'The BlenderGalactica.com Project' »

Here's our regular collection of Blender appearences in the media. This time, magazines from Australia, France and Spain. Remember: if you spot Blender in the press somewhere, be sure to let us know!

Continue Reading 'Quicklinks – Blender in the Media' »

Already more than three weeks have passed since we finished our BlenderNation Birthday Fundraiser so it's time for an update. The status so far: the money (€ 2,995,-) was transported from PayPal to my private account within one week. So far so good. But then there was a bit of an unexpected complication: my creditcard is only good for € 2,500,- per month! Feeling pretty stupid that I hadn't thought of that before, I have now requested an increase in my spending limit which I expect to receive next week or so. Once it's in, the classroom, goats and alpaca's are good to go!

I'll keep you posted,

Bart