A new book about Blender has been released in Brazil. The book "Modelando personagens com Blender 3D", which could be translated to: Character Modeling with Blender 3D.

Continue Reading 'New Brazilian Blender Book, about character Modeling' »

"This year, we experimented with the program timeline providing one
week for students to discuss project ideas with their mentors and then
a single week to submit applications. We have heard feedback from the
community that it would be beneficial to provide more time for
students to submit their applications, so we've done just that.

Continue Reading 'Google Summer of Code, Deadline Extended to April 7, 2008' »

Here's some link-love to the Blender community in Iran. They offer two versions: one in Arabic  Persian and one in English (which has different content). Good job, guys!

[edit by Tim 033108 1038 GMT-8]

The Google Summer of Code deadline expires tomorrow, March 31, at 5:00 PM PDT

April 14 the granted students will be announced by Google.

At blender.org we are updating the sections of the site that list professionals, artists, communities and educational sites related to Blender.

The guidelines for the sections are as follows

Continue Reading 'Submit sites for inclusion in the Blender.org artist, professional, educational, and community listings.' »

Oooh, I love Doctor Who! I recently came across a modest Dr. Who model repository called 'BlenderWho' (a Tardis, the Seal of Rassilon and a whole bunch of Daleks) so I just HAD to share it here ;-) Does anyone know when the next season will begin, by the way?

(Chicago, IL) – ACM SIGGRAPH announces Ed Catmull, a pioneer in the entertainment and film industry and co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios, as one of the featured speakers at SIGGRAPH 2008, the 35th International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques.Catmull, President of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, has played a major role throughout the past 30 years in the invention of some of today's most fundamental computer graphics practices used widely across the motion picture industry. He is one of the original architects of the RenderMan rendering software system, which has been used to create blockbuster animated hits such as Toy Story and Finding Nemo, as well as 44 of the last 47 Visual Effects nominations to the Academy Awards®.

Continue Reading 'Pixar Animation Studios Co-Founder Chosen as a SIGGRAPH 2008 Featured Speaker' »

Andrey M. Izrantsev (aka bdancer) has started developing an integration between V-Ray and Blender. He is dividing the project into two phases; exporter and full integration. They are now at phase 1 and the exporter is ready for download.

http://blender.lugr.ru/

[Editor note - the name of the developer was corrected 3-29-08]

A new version of the MOSAIC exporter script is coming, and to show what this new release will be able to do, a few test renders were published on the Blender Artists forums. And they are quite impressive!

Continue Reading 'RenderMan tests with MOSAIC exporter' »

Well-known animation tutorial provider CartoonSmart.com have recently added Blender to their list of supported products. Their first Blender tutorial is a two-hour introduction to Blender's interface, modeling and rendering. Priced at $15, this great quality video is really a bargain. As I was preparing to review the two-hour tutorial they made quite an unexpected move!

Continue Reading 'Blender Basics Videotutorial by CartoonSmart' »

Rogério Perdiz is an animator from Portugal. After 19 months and 7 days of work on his animation 'Orion Tear', he has now published it. It's an impressive piece of work, and even more so if you realise this was all done by one man.

Continue Reading 'Short Animation: Orion Tear' »

David Ward (we featured his animations here last week) has published a 19-minute video-tutorial on adding and eyebrows to your characters in Blender.

Continue Reading 'Making Eyebrows in Blender' »

The sole purpose of this post is to make y'all jealous!

Continue Reading 'Big Buck Bunny VIP Invitashun – I Has It!' »

From joe's Secret Lab comes this interesting tutorial on how to create models in Blender using a "digital clay" method. Those of you interested in alternative methods of modeling will certainly not want to miss this!

Continue Reading 'Metaballs as Digital Clay' »

Blitz3D is a "simple yet powerful environment for game creation – simple, because its based around the popular and easy to use BASIC programming language; and powerful, thanks to a highly optimized underlying 2D/3D engine." (marketing blurb from their website). It's now easy to use it together with Blender thanks to Diego's Exporter.

Continue Reading 'Blitz3D Exporter' »

With so many new features constantly being added to Blender, it's time to polish up the visuals on the Features Pages at Blender.org.

Continue Reading 'Help Needed Updating the Features Page at Blender.org' »

Glenn Melenhorst is creative Director at Iloura (Charlotte's Web, House of Flying Daggers, The Bank Job). He has been working on an amazing little game called DukDuk!, all done in Blender. We talked to him about his project.

Continue Reading 'DukDuk! A Blender Game' »

The granddaddy of all Blender contests, the Blender F1 Challenge, has entered its eighth round! If this is the first time you hear about it: this contest uses the term 'F1' very loosely: the ONLY design criterium required is that all entries must make use of an open-cockpit configuration common to contemporary Formula One cars. So far, the results have always been both surprising and inspiring.

Continue Reading 'Blender F1 Challenge 2008 Has Started' »