If you're feeling a bit down today and are looking for a "pick me up", then you need a dose of Nathan, who gives us a spirited tour of the Blender institute.

Continue Reading 'The Happy Blender Institute Tour' »

I'd kind of decided to stop singing songs of praise for Elephants Dream, but this is a story I think I should share with you: Elephants Dream made it into '3D World's greatest independent animated 3D shorts: 1997 to 2007'.

Continue Reading 'Elephants Dream in 3D World Magazine's 'Indie 50'' »

Well, it appears that Blender may have reached another milestone in the pursuit of 3D clouds!

Continue Reading 'Alan's Cloud Generator (beta)' »

Remember Gecko Animation? Jonathan Lax decided he wanted to give something back to the community and so he's published a free character rig of their mascotte, Richie the Gecko.

Continue Reading 'Richie the Gecko - Free Rig' »

Every month for the last few years, the great Shawn Kelly (senior animator at ILM and co-founder of Animation Mentor) has been sharing his knowledge with cool articles called just "Tips & Tricks".

Continue Reading 'Shawn Kelly free e-book' »

Do you have an ATi videocard and has Blender become unusable on Windows? Nathan Letwory has found that downgrading your drivers could be the answer.

Continue Reading 'ATi Slowdown Explained' »

Rule #1: Don't talk about The Brecht van Lommel Fan Club. Eh.. wait a moment..

Andy Goralczyk showed an early teaser for his Creature Factory DVD last October at the Blender Conference in Amsterdam. The audience was wowed but the project remained a bit of a mystery for the rest of the community. Until now - Andy has posted the BConf video on YouTube. Enjoy!

Continue Reading 'Creature Factory DVD Teaser Posted' »

Here's an excellent tutorial by Yorik van Havre for modeling a High Rise Building

From Yorik:
"This tutorial is a general but step-by-step introduction to quick architecture modeling with Blender. It is focused primarily on architects who never really used Blender but know some 3D and who want to see how Blender can be used for their particular work.

Continue Reading 'A (first) introduction to architecture modeling with Blender' »

You've rendered your scene and everything looks great! But, of course, there's usually more work to be done to really push the rendered results to something that can truly be called "finished". The subject of post-processing could fill volumes of books and many online resources often leave you with more questions than answers. Here's a tutorial on Tone and Gamma Corrections that should help to answer some of those questions.

Continue Reading 'Improve the Quality of Your Renders using Tone and Gamma Corrections' »

As we have over 1,400(!) posts on this website, I've been looking for ways to make readers (especially new readers) more aware of the wealth of information that we offer. After some tinkering we now have two new functions: first, a tabbed box on the homepage that presents the latest posts in our most popular categories. Second, the 'related posts' now also shows a thumbnail for each post.

Continue Reading 'Site Changes' »

This 15-minute short film is packed with so many reasons to like it. The level of graphic detail is well-suited to the style of animation and storyline…really good stuff.

Continue Reading 'Animated Action Comedy - "Da New Guys: For The Winnings"' »

Here's a short story of one of those things that make me proud: the interview 'The Future of Blender' has been translated into six languages! This happened completely spontaneously, without any action from our side. I can only conclude that Open Content really works, and that DotSub.com is an initiative that fits Open Content like a glove.

While I'm finishing this, I notice an email from gumanoed who mentions that the Russian Blender community have translated BlenderArt Magazine #12 into Russian. Awesome.

Matt Ebb, one of the lead artists on the Elephants Dream project, has been busy creating commercial illustrations using Blender.

Continue Reading 'Cheesasaurus Rex (commercial illustration) for Kraft' »

Hazrul Tajuddin reports on three Blender presentations that were given in Malaysia at Universiti Malaysia Pahang, Universiti Malaysia Terengganu and Universiti Malaysia Kelantan.

Continue Reading 'Three Blender Presentations in Malaysia - Report' »

What? Are you still tracing your bitmaps?!

Continue Reading 'Auto-Tracing!' »

That's right! Tony Mullen's 'Introducing Character Animation with Blender' has been translated to Japanese.

Continue Reading '3Dキャラクタアニメーション Blender(DVD付) (大型本)!' »

Dryad lets you intuitively create beautiful trees for your virtual world or game.

Continue Reading 'Dryad Tree Generator' »