Get an "outsider's" perspective on a week in the life of the Peach project.

Continue Reading '"An Outside Perspective" on the Peach project' »

Olaf Arnold has created a compositing tutorial demonstrating how he achieved an electron microscope effect, in Blender, for an image rendered in Kerkythea.

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As you can see from my previous post, I'm starting to get media releases for SIGGRAPH 2008 and, well, it got me motivated to finally edit this piece from SIGGRAPH 2007. At SIG-07, I was frantically running around the exhibit hall on opening day with my camera, not sure of where to go to first, for about half an hour before the crowds were let in. The end result, I ended up with thirty minutes of raw tape that I just edited down to about three and half minutes. Hopefully you'll find it "tantalizing". ;-) OK, so I won't get an OSCAR for best documentary. The main idea is to give you a taste of the what it's like in the Exhibit Hall.

Continue Reading 'SIGGRAPH 2007 - Tour of Exhibit Hall' »

Nathan Letwory is integrating Blender and MySQL, which allows new ways of using Blender such as working with huge scene files or distributed/team work. If you though that is cool, wait for this: he has been invited by MySQL to present this at the MySQL Conference in Santa Clara on April 16! After the conference he'll be showcasing his work and for that he can use your help.

Continue Reading 'DbBlender at MySQL Conference, Santa Clara - Help Needed' »

The pipeline including a video compositing program like After Effects and a 3D app is quite common among motion design professionals. More than just rendering the 3D content and importing it into AE or Shake, its often needed to use the camera data to get correct tracking.

Sometime ago, when presenting Blender to a friend who works extensively with After Effects, one of the first questions he asked me was if one could smoothly get the camera data from Blender into AE. After some research on this subject, the results were not very pleasing: there was no painless way of doing it.

Well… seems that things have changed!

Continue Reading 'Camera data export script' »

The Alpha Channel School is preparing a Blender seminar in São Paulo this Saturday, January 12th.

Continue Reading 'Blender Seminar, São Paulo, Brazil, January 12th' »

(Chicago, IL) - ACM SIGGRAPH announced the return of FJORG! - the International Animation Contest at the upcoming SIGGRAPH conference in 2008. FJORG!, is an "iron animator" event in which 16 competing teams from around the world have 32 hours to create the most impressive character-driven animation of at least 15 seconds in length adhering to at least one of two themes and using at least one of 16 sound bites.

Continue Reading 'SIGGRAPH 2008 Announces 2nd International Animation Contest' »

From Tony:

I just finished putting together a little teaser video featuring some of the examples and tutorials that will be featured in my upcoming book, Bounce, Tumble, and Splash! Simulating the Physical World with Blender 3D . I thought some of your readers might be interested in checking that out. It should give people some idea of what they can expect from the book.

Continue Reading 'Bounce, Tumble, and Splash! Video by Tony Mullen' »

The No-Joke Topology Guide for Serious 3D Modelers, is an interesting guide on the organization of the topology we use for 3d modeling. For instance, do you know when the uses of n-gons are recommended? The author of the guide, called Megamorph, has organized the conventions on different modeling types like High Resolution modeling and Game Modeling. Continue Reading 'The No-Joke Topology Guide for Serious 3D Modelers' »

The gallery on blender has been updated for the submissions that came in through December! There's some strong work in there for this month with a good mix of subject matter. Go take a look!

If you ever want to create castles and stone walls or, you need to be able to create complex tilings of objects, then these two tools created by dudecon may be just what you need.

Continue Reading 'Masonry Wizard and Object Tiling scripts' »

Are you just beginning the craft of animation? Struggling with learning Blender hotkeys?

Don't be afraid. Everyone has to start somewhere. =)

Continue Reading 'Don't give up!' »

Three more Blender workshops have been announced:

• Kingsport, Tennessee, USA. Weekly, starting on January 9th.
• Porto, Portugal - Feb 2/3, March 15/16
• Pittsburgh, PA, USA. Weekly, starting on March 8th.

Continue Reading 'Three New Workshops' »

Boids particle systems can be set to follow basic rules and behaviors, something close to artificial intelligence. They're useful for simulating flocks, swarms, herds and schools of various kind of animals, insects and fishes.

Continue Reading 'Simulating Flocks, Herds, and Swarms using Experimental Boids Particles' »

This 9-minute short animation, created by Nicolás Alvarado, is nicely done and one of the more watchable short films done in Blender. Despite the less than stellar graphic details, the storytelling pulls you through to the end. And well, that's what a film is supposed to do.

Continue Reading 'Short animation "La cuenta"' »

Here's a nice timelapse video, created by tonkv, demonstrating several of Blender functions.

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Topiary is the art of creating sculptures in the medium of clipped trees, shrubs and sub-shrubs. MasterDomino has developed a method for this using the Gen3 tree generator script.

Continue Reading 'Topiary PDF Tutorial' »