I have a bunch of Google Alerts that scan the web for Blender related stuff. Last week they informed me about pokedstudio, a British design studio. I really liked their work so I contacted Jon and asked him to tell us a bit about his work and how Blender fits in.

Continue Reading 'Blender and pokedstudio' »

Tired of using scripts? Tired of crazy setups for Sub Surface Scattering? Look no further than Blender's built in Compositor Nodes! This novel approach by Mike Pan (mpan3) uses Blender's Compositor to create a highlight mask based on the Z render pass.

Continue Reading 'SSS Rendering with Nodes' »

Video tutorials are great but, it's very difficult for authors to articulate every keystroke and mouse-click, along with performing everything else. Even when it can be done, it tends to make for longer tutorials because the author has to slow down.

Well, here's a tool for video tutorial authors that may prove to be quite helpful.

Continue Reading 'Tool to Display Blender Keystrokes in Video Tutorials' »

Update: I just received word that the  e-Shop is back in business.

The Blender.org e-Shop is still running on the 'old' server which used to host the www.blender.org website: the XServe. After moving the shop to a new server the admin team found out that it was experiencing technical difficulties. Because of that, the shop has been shut down as of last Sunday. In fact, the entire blender3d.org domain has been deactivated, so some rewrites (like mediawiki.blender3d.org) have also ceased to work. Use the blender.org links instead - they'll still work.

The team is working on a solution and we expect the shop to be back any day now.

Over the last few weeks we have received information of a few remarkable Blender movie projects that are being worked on around the world. This week we'll be highlighting some of them in our 'Blender International Movie Week'. Today part one: Mexico, where Oscar Alvarado is working on the short animation movie 'Murnau the Vampire'.

Continue Reading 'Blender International Movie Week - Murnau the Vampire (Mexico)' »

Blender is an amazing tool for 3D production and post-production but what about animation pre-production? Alot of projects begin by creating a website, installing a forum, a blog, a project management system such as DotProject and then kind of slap it all together. Although doable, I was gladly surprised that there is an open source creative commons licensed software that combines all of the features for pre-production into one software.

Continue Reading 'Celtx - Pre-production Software' »

This tutorial by Eugene is an excellent overview of the new node material system. If you are just getting started with nodes or are a bit confused on how it all works then definitely try out this tutorial.

Continue Reading 'Material Nodes Tutorial' »

Clean3D has created a fun little rigged character to experiment with.

Continue Reading 'Mouse Rig' »

We've had tons of posts on this website, but on a blog the past is easily forgotten. I thought it would be fun to take a look at what happened one year ago on BlenderNation and in the Blender community in general by starting a 'One Year Ago' column that we'll post each week.

Continue Reading 'One Year Ago on BlenderNation' »

Jassar has won the 3rd prize in CGArena's Winter Challenge. The mission was to create an image that gives you 'the feeling of winter', and I think Jassar did a great job. Congratulations!

Continue Reading 'Blender Entry Wins 3rd Prize in CGArena Winter Challenge, Includes Tutorial' »

A new Plumiferos trailer will be shown at the prestigious Mar Del PLata Film Festival in Argentina this Saturday. With the international industry and stars AND part of the Plumíferos crew attending, it looks like it'll be a memorable event.

Continue Reading 'March 10th: Plumiferos at 22nd Mar del Plata Film Festival, Argentina' »

Kernon has been steadily creating new videotutorials. And even though he's a writer here at BlenderNation, he's either too shy or too modest (I'm voting for the latter one) to publish about any of them! Anyway, here's his latest tutorial: creating glint effects in Blender with Halo effects. The method allows for exact placement of glints in your images.

Continue Reading 'Video: How to Create Glint Effects in Blender' »

A new option has appeared in the camera settings window in Blender 2.43: 'Shift'. Allan Brito explains how to use it to fine-tune your camera position.

Continue Reading 'Camera Shifting in Blender 2.43' »

Brendon Murphy [Meta-Androcto] has released a 'meta material library' in which he has collected over 480 materials and textures and he's planning for 160 more. It is a monster collection of several material libraries that have been released so far and it's well worth checking out.

Continue Reading 'Meta Material Library Released' »

We receive regular reports of people or companies who are selling Blender on eBay. What should we, as the Blender community, think of this? I'll explore some of the do's and don'ts of this practice in this article and I'll suggest a course of action if you run into one.

Continue Reading 'Selling Blender on eBay' »

Article submitted by Olm-z:

When Nintendo got out its latest machine, the Wii, some of us where to think that the real innovation was not in the console itself, but in the bew controllers (Wiimote and Nunchuk) that use a clever and ready to use set of accelerometers and for the Wiimote, a special pointing system with IR cam and leds ….

So lots of people started to hack and reverse engineer the controller way to communicate with the Wii and developing drivers for Win, Mac an Linux … (all things that are accessible here: http://www.wiili.org).

Continue Reading 'Using the Wiimote in the Blender Game-Engine' »

Its an incredible time to get into Blender, especially with all of the available learning resources. Lets look at one of these resources. A head modeling training DVD from Jonathan Williamson (aka:mr_bomb) that covers every aspect of modeling the female head. You may remember Jonathan's head and ear modeling videos well this is a leap above that and we'll take an insiders look at what can be found on this excellent resource.

When we first heard about this DVD we pinned Jonathan down to ask him a few questions under the spotlight.

Continue Reading 'Review: Modeling the Female Head' »