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' »

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.

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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.

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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.