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 ;-)
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
