When I was at the Blender Institute a few weeks ago, we didn't only talk about Peach, Apricot and Durian, but Ton and I also talked about the future of Blender. What are the major changes that are planned for Blender 2.50, and what will happen to Blender in the five years after that?

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Blender Master Shigeto Maeda reports on the graduation project of one of his students: Northern Lights.

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Good news for the German Blender community - a new PDF Magazine has been released! The first issue is 15 pages long and my first impression is that it's a well produced piece of work. Check out their website, or download the first edition (1.8MB PDF).

One of my favorite Blender Artists - VenomGFX - has posted a 'Making of' of his work 'Antonio'. Even if the image was made almost two years ago, this makes for some great reading. I never knew that listening to Vivaldi would help you make such great stuff - gotta try it, too!

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Ton's keynote at the Berlinale movie festival is now online. They use a *horrible* flash player (no pause, or scratch functions), and for some people it won't work. Still, it you get it to work it's worth your 20 minutes!

The video also contains 30 seconds of Peach - unedited, unfinished sound and with errors in the animation, but still. The Blender Institute has decided NOT to publish this separately and, to be honest, I'm very disappointed by that. The visitors of the Berlinale get to see movie material before we, the community who (partially) financed this project, do.

Update: *ahem* I think we err, killed their streaming server already. Please try again later ;-)

Update 2: I elaborated on my feelings below, in the comments.

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We always try to find really cool Blender outwork for you and the other gazillion BlenderNation readers out there. But yesterday, I ran into dodgydavec's 'Feathers McGraw's Dancing Hair'. It's an animation gone very wrong and I couldn't stop laughing out loud when I saw it!

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The Apricot project has started! The Blender Institute's second Open Content project, a game collaboration with the Crystal Space game engine, was started last week. The team, with members from Poland, Canada, Spain, Australia, USA and Germany gathered for their first workshops.

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(Submitted by Kisantal Tibor) Teenagers from a primary and a high school got together with two teachers in an animation camp in Hungary in last summer. Many of them have been dealing with 3D modelling and animation already. Until now they have been working together mainly for farewell movies for graduates wherein they created the special effects. In this camp they have decided to make an animation short about newt eggs with Blender.

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The call or content for issue #15 of BlenderArt magazine is out; this issue's topic is ‘Art of Animating'.

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Congratulations to the Arab Blender community for opening their new community home, ArabBlend.com [original, untranslated version]. It's a nicely designed site with lots of great content such as articles, tutorials and a gallery (which is a bit small at the moment, but there's some nice art there). Way to go, guys!

Two weeks ago I visited the Blender Institute in Amsterdam, where I had a chance to talk to the members of the Peach team (and a member of Apricot as well!). I taped my conversations with them and for the next week, we'll publish one interview each day. Today the eighth and final part: Brecht van Lommel, Technical Director.

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Yoyofargo has posted this gem of a tutorial on Blender Artists Forums. It describes a very original way of generating automatic camera shake to camera movements using softbody. I haven't seen anything like this method before, and it works beautifully!

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Two weeks ago I visited the Blender Institute in Amsterdam, where I had a chance to talk to the members of the Peach team (and a member of Apricot as well!). I taped my conversations with them and for the next week, we'll publish one interview each day. Today part seven: Campbell Barton, Technical Director.

Continue Reading 'Peach Interviews: Campbell Barton' »

Created in 1947, "Advanced Animation" has often been called the best "how-to" book on cartoon animation ever published.

Continue Reading 'Preston Blair's "Advanced Animation" (1st Edition)' »

Here's a cool pic for a Sunday morning: the entry to the HCR MINI-Challenge #12: Colossus by Erik Söderlund.

• WIP thread
• Voting thread with extra screenshots and entries by other contestants

Last week I visited the Blender Institute in Amsterdam, where I had a chance to talk to the members of the Peach team (and a member of Apricot as well!). I taped my conversations with them and for the next week, we'll publish one interview each day. Today part six: Andy Goralczyk, Art Director.

Continue Reading 'Peach Interviews: Andy Goralczyk' »

Would you like to find a lot of video tutorials about all kinds of cg tools? Well, that's the purpose of the Wikivid, which gather links to free tutorials available at the web. Their list is huge, and Blender is there!

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(Hi-res version here)

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