MakeHuman is the 'free (GPL), innovative and professional software for the modelling of 3-Dimensional characters'. It exports in Collada and .obj files, so it plays nicely with Blender. After more than a year, the team has released a major update. Please keep in mind it's still a Release Candidate, so some features such as characters, poses and icons are still incomplete.

Continue Reading 'MakeHuman 0.91RC1 Released' »

Do you want to know how to model a stylized fish? If you want to know how Pablo Vazquez, also known as venomgfx, creates a stylized model, now you can! At his personal blog, Pablo has published a tutorial showing some of his modeling technique. Continue Reading 'Modeling a Tiny and Toony Fishy Thing' »

It took some time to iron out encoding and hosting problems, but now Adam Procter has released his short animation Doljer, which was accepted into the UK filmvestival Filmstock in Luton earlier this year. Adam has also released a whopping 223MB of project files under a Creative Commons license (although I'm not sure which license exactly. Adam?).

Continue Reading ''Doljer' Released, Including .Blend Files' »

Blender artist Husam has won the third place in 3DTotal's Stylized Animal challenge "Hyena" with his hilarious picture of an hyena on a pogo-stick.

Continue Reading ''Hyena' - Winner of 3DTotal's Stylized Animal Challenge' »

A new forum is available on blender.org, for discussing the Blender Foundation Open Projects. There is already some interesting info there, like a message from Ton, explaining the reasons to choose Crystal Space for the Apricot project.

Continue Reading 'New Forum for Blender Foundation Open Projects' »

Some great work by Andy is now visible on the Peach blog. The focus of the post there is on the strand renderer and particle system. The article goes into a good amount of detail describing the process of setting things up. An enjoyable read.

Note: Do to site outages and a few individuals having problems with the .ogg file format I've mirrored smaller videos on google video for those interested.
Find them here:
Fur in OpenGL.
Fur in Final Render.

Continue Reading 'Peach Fur Examples' »

Chris Smailis (SmaTheGreek) is hosting two Blender classes in Athens, Greece tomorrow and next wednesday.

Continue Reading 'Blender Classes in Athens, Greece' »

Just a quick heads-up: the Blender.org servers (including download.blender.org, ElephantsDream.org, the Peach and Apricot sites) have been down since last night. We're not sure what's wrong as all the people with admin access are on holiday at the moment, but we're counting on some remote assistance tomorrow.

Update: huzzah! The sites are back!

I recently interviewed, VIA the Internet, the actor Chin from the Peach Project. He was a bit agitated during the interview so I only managed to get a short clip before he stormed off the set.

Continue Reading 'Interview with an Open Peach Movie Cast Member.' »

The Blenderart team is preparing their next Issue, which will be focused on "Cartoon Modeling and Game Engine". And as usual, they are calling for content.

Continue Reading 'Call for Content Blenderart #14' »

Vince McKelvie has created an interactive art installation in which riding a bike drives an animation.

Continue Reading 'Interactive Art: Bikatrope' »

Earlier this year, in the midst of the free rigs that were being released to the Blender community, we got this clever little gem submitted to us by Ruben Lopez. It's a very simple lower-body rig, but the controls for it are quite nice and it's an excellent resource, especially for Spanish-speaking Blender users.

Continue Reading 'Another Free Rig' »

Arondix Animations is preparing a series of Blender workshops in Groebenzell, Germany. The first one is on on Friday, December 14th. You may remember Arondix from their short 'Flupps' which we covered six months ago.

Continue Reading 'December 14th - Free Workshop in Groebenzell, Germany' »

Peach is delivering new Blender functionality almost every week, it seems! There's information on the new particle system on blender.org.

Continue Reading 'New Particle System' »

This is a follow-up to the article we posted a few days ago about a free Blender compositing tutorial available through an agreement between CG Channel and cmiVFX. The .blend file for that tutorial has been released! The demand for that tutorial has been the highest of any other tutorial on cmiVFX's on-demand player.

Continue Reading 'CG Channel/cmiVFX Tutorial .blend File Released!' »