There's going to be a new twist at this year's SIGGRAPH conference in San Diego. In addition to all of the other excellent events going on, there's going to be a intense 32-hour animation competition called FJORG! (pronounced "forge"… and, yes, the exclamation mark is part of the name).

Continue Reading 'FJORG! at SIGGRAPH' »

Right after the Plumiferos team came back from the Mar del Plata Film Festival where they showed their latest work, they posted their new trailer on their website. It was SO popular that within a few hours the server was overloaded. They now have a number of mirrors available so you can download it straight away.

Continue Reading 'New Plumiferos Trailer Online' »

The winners of Erwin Coumans' Rube Goldberg Device Contest have been announced. In case you don't know, the objective of this contest was to model A Rube Goldberg Device (or 'Incredible Machine') using Blender's Rigid Body physics. There were fifteen entries and I just finished watching a few – it's great fun!

While you can watch the results on YouTube, I recommend you download the .blend files and play them back on your own computer.

Continue Reading 'Rube Goldberg Device Contest Winners Announced' »

Here's a thread that I particularly enjoyed over at the BlenderArtists forums: ddwagnz has created a number of images, all featuring the well-known Mancandy rig by Bassam Kurdali. Mancandy is an amazingly flexible rig and if you haven't tried it yet, I think you should!

Continue Reading 'What Did YOU Do to Poor Mancandy? (Win a Prize!)' »

Coming in May of this year! From the Blender e-shop:

'Essential Blender', the next book from the Blender Foundation, is your official guide to learning the fundamentals of this open and free 3D software suite. The book can be used as a step-by-step guide for people new to Blender or new to the latest changes in Blender. This book is the ideal companion for the previous 2.3 Blender guide.

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Recently, we introduced The Structure of Man, a video series that covered drawing the human body. Now we've come across another excellent resource for learning the craft.

Continue Reading 'Learn Drawing Techniques' »

Well-known animator Daniel Martinez Lara from Pepeland.com has started experimenting with Blender, and he has already posted a way cool video-tutorial on using normal nodes in the compositor to achieve real-time lighting (the tutorial is meant to play without sound, in case you're wondering).

We were all excited to be contacted by Daniel and he was kind enough to answer a few of our burning questions about his work and how it involves Blender.

Continue Reading 'Videotutorial: Real-time Illumination with Nodes (with Interview)' »

With all of the excitement of the Blender.org's re-design, we forgot to mention that the gallery had also been updated to show new work for January. My apologies. Fortunately, a number of you did notice and made comments about it. For those of you who did not notice, those pictures are now in the Archive because the gallery been updated with February's Blender art! There's some really nice work in there for February. In particular, you might want to see that we have some nice compositing work in there and some really nice high-detail pieces. Go check it out!

It's that time of the year again: Curtis Smith is hosting the annual Blender F1 Challenge. The rules are the same as always: design the Formula One car of the future. It has to have an open-cockpit configuration and it must be modeled and rendered in Blender and/or Yafray.

Continue Reading 'The 2007 Blender F1 Challenge Has Started!' »

Here's a great resource of Blender's Game Engine games, demos, and tutorials that is a must-see for Game Engine enthusiasts.

Continue Reading 'Giant Listing of Game Engine Demos and Tutorials' »

If you're not satisfied with Blender's built-in chroma-keying notes or if you'd like to have more control over them, then check out this 11-minute videotutorial on color difference keying by Dave Weese.

Update (26/04/08): this tutorial is no longer available; please read 'Keying Hair in Blender' instead.

Continue Reading 'Videotutorial: Color Difference Keying with Nodes' »

A few weeks ago I posted an article called 'How to Produce a Good Video Tutorial' in which I summed up a few things that you should keep in mind when creating, well, a video tutorial. If you're more interested in working on written material, then check out this checklist on kingtuts.blogspot.com.

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The recent article about the keystroke tool for video tutorials spurred my curiosity about the AutoHotkey scripting language. Looking further, it quickly became clear that there might be a way to remap keystrokes in Blender. I performed a couple of quick tests…

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• Blender Rendering Engine Options
  "Gentleman, start your render engines. New renderers are available for Blender sporting features like 64-bit support, multi-threads, and XML scene format."

Continue Reading 'One Year Ago on BlenderNation' »

You may remember ResPower from a previous Blendernation article on distributed rendering. Its a service utilized by quite a few Blender artists. One you may be familiar with is Sacha Goedegebure's Man in Man. Now its great to hear that they support version 2.43.

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Yes! The Google Summer of Code 2007 has opened its doors and the Blender Foundation's application has been accepted. The GSoC, which sponsors students who develop new functionality for participating open source applications, has brought us new many new features in the past such as fluids, the sculpt tool and the modifier stack.

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How does your system compare to other systems when it comes to rendering your scenes in Blender? What's the best system configuration to optimize your rendering times? These questions, and more, have all crossed our minds at least once. Well, here's a way to begin to get some real-world information towards answering your questions.

Continue Reading 'Blender Render Benchmark v0.2' »