Here's a resource you may know about already, but still definitely worth a mention! The Blender Open Material Repository is a site with over 200 native Blender materials available for download. Subjects range from typical (Car Paint) to the downright bizarre (Brains).

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Blender's ambient occlusion renderer produces wonderfully lighted scenes at the cost of LONG rendering times. Mike Pan has created a setup in the Blender node editor that will reduces rendering times by a factor of 60 while still giving very acceptable results.

Continue Reading 'Ambient Occlusion with the Node Editor Revisited' »

An artist called Enrico Cerica has published a very interesting article, showing how he created the image for his Magic Bullet project. Which is a hyper realistic image produced with Blender and YafRay.

Continue Reading 'Making of "Magic Bullet"' »

Luís Belerique is hosting three introductory Blender workshops in Porto, Portugal in October and November.

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CrazyBump creates displacement, normal and even fake occlusion maps from 2D images. It's free, fast, sports a nice and clean interface, and makes an excellent tool to quickly take your textures to the next level.

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Only six weeks ago we spotted a bunch of Blender screenshots in the French Microsoft knowledgebase. Today, we have something better: Microsoft.com turns out to be hosting two copies of Elephants Dream to showcase their VC-1 video codec. Is the software giant starting to appreciate the benefits of Open Content?

Continue Reading 'Elephants Dream on Microsoft.com' »

Cellstorm has been collecting all kinds of Blender-related information in a FreeMind MindMap, which he has now published online.

Continue Reading 'Humongous Blender Resources MindMap' »

How Blender features can be compared with other 3d apps? If you always wanted to know that, an article published by Benoit Saint-Moulin at the TDT 3D compares the features of all major 3D apps, and Blender!

Continue Reading 'Blender Compared to Other 3D Apps' »

Sometime tonight, Project Peach has met its first goal: selling 1,000 copies before October 1st. Congratulations guys!

Which one is the best render for Blender? Sunflow? YafRay? Indigo? Or Blender Internal? An artist called Hannu Kuisti, asked himself the same question. He was wondering, which render would suit best the needs for architectural visualization, and made a few tests with all those renders.

Continue Reading 'Testing Different Renders' »

Remember the Blender party at the Pink Cow in Tokyo recently? (unfortunately we lost the post in the database-crash). One of the events was a VJ show by Blender artist Ekakiya and this show is now available on YouTube. Prepare yourself for an amazing ten minutes of video!

Continue Reading 'Ekakiya's VJ Show, Pink Cow, Tokyo' »

Here's your Sunday Blender chore: vote for Blender at 'Free' page of the Wired Geekipedia. I don't think it will actually accomplish anything, but it would be nice to see Blender at the top of the list ;-) (For the record, we started with 119 votes)

Update: there are two entries for Blender: 'Blender', and 'www.blender.org'. Please vote for the first one.

Another great example of Blender Art! Now it`s a short movie called Sisike and Matoko, which was produced by Sebastian Lessig. This movie was produced as the graduation project, for Sebastian education in Media Designer Audio and Video.

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After four (FOUR) months without updates, the Gallery on Blender.org has finally been updated. There were some really great submissions and it took quite some time for us to get through them all. A big thanks goes out to Daniel 'ZanQdo' Salazar for helping out with the updates.

Continue Reading 'HUUUGE Update to Blender.org Gallery' »

The Suzanne Awards team is working on a series of short videos that will announce the video clips and they need your help. Download the rigged robot character and submit your animation before Monday, October 1st.

Continue Reading 'Help Make the Suzanne Awards Announcements for October 12th' »

Do you remember the short movie Cosmic Balance? An article about this project was published here a few months ago. Well, the development team of this project, Studio Die Versilberte Eitelkeit, just published some really cool Python scripts, used for the production. All scripts are available for download.

Continue Reading 'Some Useful Python Scripts' »

The Blender 2.45 release, which we posted about earlier, is now official! Remember that this is a bugfix release. Having said that, it should still make your life a little-bit easier.

Continue Reading 'Blender 2.45 Officially Released' »