Brecht is developing this new sub-surface scattering node. Though it’s still under development it yields quite nice results already, and it seems Brecht has a few ideas up his sleeve on how to improve it even further in the future.

Continue Reading 'SSS Node under Development' »

Here's one of the nicer Blender games I've seen in a while: Max-xion by p00f. It's a bit of a mashup of several games such as Astrosmash, Breakout and Asteroids. A great way to waste away a few hours at work while waiting for the weekend ;-)

Continue Reading 'Game: Max-xion' »

One of the more interesting patches to be added to the tracker recently is the "Cast" patch, submitted by Willian Padovani Germano (also known as "ianwill"). Willian explains that the patch adds a "Cast" mesh modifier, which casts a mesh into certain pre-determined shapes (such as spheres).

Continue Reading 'Cast(? or Spherify? or Cubeify? Oh My)' »

A few months ago, I spotted a French book called 'Blender et POV-Ray - La 3D en toute liberté' on Amazon.com. After looking around in the French community I found Michaël Thelliez who was prepared to check the book out for us, so I ordered him a copy. Here's his report.

Continue Reading 'Review: 'Blender et POV-Ray'' »

Somebody that I've only been able to identify as "Oto the Cleaner" has provided the community with a good tutorial that is useful for any new 3D artists among us (edit: I have since learned that "Oto's" real name is Antonio Campos.  Thanks, Francisco!). The tutorial covers basic image projection theory, UV unwrapping, texture creation using the Gimp, and more.

Continue Reading 'Blender/Gimp Texturing and Unwrapping Tutorial' »

I'm one of those that has yet to experiment with the Blender Game engine. But if you are one of those people that are on the edge like myself and need some help to get started. These tutorials are a great start.

Continue Reading 'Game Engine Fire Tutorial' »

Last Sunday, Blender developer Nathan Letwory [JesterKing] has become the proud father of a son, Rasmus. He was born on 15:55 in Turku, Finland, weighed 3680g and was 51cm long. Both mother and Rasmus are doing great; Nathan is already growing extra muscles from carrying and comforting the baby.

Welcome, Rasmus! Please *do* leave your father a little time to finish the pyNodes :)

Howitzer has posted instructions on the Blender Artists Forums on how to optimize the Blender performance of old ATI cards using an old driver. This has been reported to work really well.

Continue Reading 'Boost the Performance of Old ATI Cards under Windows' »

I'm sure you all remember the Blender 3D Model Repository, run by Andrew Kator. You may even remember its fate and how a new repository took its place. The story didn't end there, unfortunately.

Continue Reading 'Blender Model Repository Trouble' »

Recently, a small software company announced that they will be releasing their 3D modeling app as an open source project and turning it over to the community because the company is no longer able to develop it. Am I talking about Blender? Nope, not this time. Moray, a shareware 3D modeler for Windows that supports POV-Ray 3.5 was recently acquired by Persistence of Vision Raytracer Pty. Ltd (the makers of POV-Ray) from SoftTroncs (the makers of Moray). Persistence of Vision has announced their intentions to release the whole project under an OSI-approved open source license.

Continue Reading 'Moray: Another Commercial 3D App Goes GPL' »

No, really this time. Daniel Lara Martinez from Pepeland School has created another Blender resource. And this time its a Blender setup with icons designed to emulate the Max or Maya interface.

Continue Reading 'Maya / 3DS Max Layout with Icons' »

In 3D World’s question of the month the question “How do I animate a raft adrift on the surface of the ocean?” was answered by Bassam Kurdali with a Blender tutorial. It is now free for download in .pdf form complete with sample files at different stages.

Continue Reading 'Blender Ocean Tutorial in Computer Arts Magazine' »

Matt has done some work to attempt to emulate 3DS Max functionality in Blender. This functionality is parametric objects.

Continue Reading 'Parametric Objects in Blender' »

Have you ever tried tiling a texture, only to find that the lighting in the texture image is not uniform? Dark and light areas shows like a pattern throughout the tiles, ruining your image even though your edges might be seamless enough?

Continue Reading 'The Power of the High Pass Filter for Texturing' »

There is no better way to learn Blender than stepping into a simple project. And this tutorial will let you do just that.

Continue Reading 'Penguin Modeling Videotutorial' »

Google has spoken - five students working on Blender projects will be sponsored this summer. The winning projects are all great upgrades for Blender. Read on for more details.

Continue Reading 'Google Summer of Code: And the Winners are…' »