Do you know what an animatic is? If you don`t know, let Sacha, from the Peach team tell you! In this interview started by Campbell Barton, Sacha tells us what an animatic is, and how they are managing the animatics for the Peach Movie.

Continue Reading 'Making the Peach Movie Animatic with Sacha' »

Microsoft XNA is a set of tools, complete with a managed runtime environment, provided by Microsoft that facilitates computer game design, development and management [wikipedia]. Virtual Realm, the "XBox 360 and XNA Game Programming Resources from Down Under" blog has posted a tutorial on how to use Blender together with Microsoft's Game Studio Express.

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Macouno has published a script to smoooooth your Blender objects. He writes:

This script is an alternative to the mesh smooth function in blender. The mesh smooth function in blender uses only vertex position. This script uses vertex normals, which is why it's called normal smoothing.

What do you think about cameras in Blender? Well, for K. G. Nyman the camera could be better, so he started to develop a script called BLenses, and now the script is available for download. This script makes the process of matching the actual lens focal length of a real scene, with a virtual scene in Blender, a lot easier. And it works for animations too!

Continue Reading 'BLenses: Real-World Camera and Scene Matching in Blender' »

Matt Ebb finally found some time to hack some new Blender code and, as always, the results are impressive. This time, he's been working on a reflection node and image based lighting.

Continue Reading 'Experimental: Reflection Node, Image Based Lighting' »

An artist called Marcos Caballero is using the Video Sequence Editor Blender to create some cool video transitions.

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We reported on TrueBones.com before - they sell motion capture files at a $1 a piece. Since last time, they've added another 20 free motion capture files for download. Check out our previous post on how to import these files into Blender.

The guys of Montage Studio just released another great video tutorial. This time the tutorial covers the basics of subdivision modeling, to create a simple character. Even for a basics tutorial, the video has some nice tips and tricks for this kind of modeling.

Continue Reading 'Video Tutorial: Modeling a simple character follow-along' »

Blender artist Daniel Salazar [ZanQdo] has put together an impressive demoreel of his work. It's one of the nicest showcases of Blender artwork I've seen. Check it out! [Right-click, save as - 55MB Quicktime].

While we're all waiting for Bassam to finish his fantastic Tutorial DVD, you may want to check out this walk cycle tutorial by Andrew West.
Continue Reading 'Tutorial: Creating a Walk Cycle' »

Ribmosaic is another RenderMan exporter for Blender, but this time with a different approach. Mosaic was conceived to integrate all Blender structure with the RenderMan attributes.

Continue Reading 'Ribmosaic Renderman exporter for Blender' »

Iranian Blender developer Hamed Zaghaghi has been working on some rather cool new functionality for the Blender game engine. Not only did he add 2D image filtering capabilities (like motion blur), he also worked on a patch to speed up the OpenGL display of the game engine.

Continue Reading 'Game Engine Development: 2D Image Filtering, Speedup' »

The training, provided by LearnITPro, will be an intensive four-day training course specifically designed for individuals who want a compact and informative introduction to 3d Graphics and Animation.

Continue Reading 'January Blender BootCamp being held in Florida' »

Here is another great model repository, now with a lot of car models. The DMI car 3d models are all available freely for download, in the LWO file format. That is fully compatible with Blender!

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The Peach team have posted a bunch of videos on their blog: one of the 'weekly meeting' that they have every Friday and four of Sacha, Enrico, William and Nathan showing some of their work. All files are available from YouTube/Google Video or as .ogg files (use VLC to play). Great stuff, I really appreciate that this project is so much more open about their creation process than Elephants Dream!

A Blender artist called Antonio Gessi, has published a very cool guide about the Fluid Simulator options. To make this guide even more interesting, all parameters are illustrated with animations. For instance, when he explains how the Domain option works, there is an animation showing how the fluid will behave at different resolutions.

Continue Reading 'Guide on Blender Fluid Simulator's Parameters' »