Ton just posted the following dates on the Peach blog:

• May 17 or 18: Release of Blender 2.46
• May 20th: DVD Arrival, shipping
• May 30 or 31: Internet release of Big Buck Bunny

If you always wanted to know, what was going on at the Blender development commits, now you can!

Continue Reading 'Follow Development Commits in Real-Time' »

Sterling Roth [mexicoxican] started a challenge over at Blender Artists: what can you make with just 10 cuboid shapes? This very limiting rule is opening up a *lot* of creativity.

Continue Reading 'Weekend Fun: Cube Modeling Challenge' »

My previous Giant Spider post turned out not to be done in Blender after all, so I set out to find one that was. I found a videotutorial by 15 year old Daniel Reynolds, who explains how to align a spider animation with live action footage and then uses After Effects to composite it.

Continue Reading 'Giant Spider Compositing with After Effects' »

John Merrill reports to us that about two weeks ago "I was made aware that a video from my Blender portfolio has been mistaken for evidence of the paranormal. The video in question depicts a UFO sighting followed by an appearance of the cryptozoological monster El Chupacabras. Apparently someone found this video on my youtube page and sent it to journalist and ufologist Jaime Maussan claiming it was filmed outside of London, England in late 2007. Maussan has been airing this video on his own television show, and on others, as well as screening it at private lectures for several months."

Continue Reading 'Blender Video Mistaken for UFO Sighting' »

Michael Tieleman aka. Freakydude, has re-release an updated version of his Little Fella rig.

Continue Reading 'Re-release: little_fellaX rig.' »

Russian Animator Shiva3D posted this awesome animation. This is the kind of stuff that I imagine the Blender Institute's next project will have: SciFi, Robots, explosions, smoke, pointless impressive stuff. Love it.

Update: I thought this was made in Blender, but that was not the case. Bummer. Anyway, we can do better than that, right? ;-)

Continue Reading 'Itsy Bitsy Spider?' »

The Blender 2.46 RC4 has been released, only for windows. Along with the RC4 release, a message posted at the weekly meeting from the Blender developers, report a one week delay until the final release.

Continue Reading 'Blender 2.46 RC4 (windows only) and ToDo list for 2.46 stable' »

As you may know, nothing escapes our attention (you there! stop picking your nose, it's disgusting!), and here's my latest catch: over the last few weeks I've been tracking a Korean site which diligently translates all our articles.

So, here you go: suddenly YOU're on BlenderNation, too! You're doing a great job - thanks. It would be great if you could introduce yourself in a comment below.

Like many other apps, Blender does not work well with Arabic or other right-to-left written languages. ArabBlend writer Islam Abofarha explains how to work around this.

Continue Reading 'Using Arabic Scripts With Blender' »

JiriH has created this nice squash and stretch ball rig to give beginners an introduction to rig animation. However, note that the rig only works for Blender 2.46 RC and hopefully the final 2.46 release as well.

Continue Reading 'Squash&Stretch Ball Rig' »

The visual effects capabilities of Blender are constantly growing by leaps and bounds. A major milestone for this relentless progress will be the integration of true volumetrics in Blender. It's on the horizon…

Continue Reading 'True Volumetrics in early development for Blender' »

An Italian artist known as "e.perinelli" wanted to change his workflow to using open source tools.

One day he got the chance of doing 2 simple 10 seconds TV spots for an Italian shoes company, and though it was a good idea to test this workflow on a production environment.

Continue Reading 'Two italian commercials' »

From April 11th to the 17th of this year, a veritable boatload of people from all facets of the television, film, and radio production world descended upon Las Vegas to attend the National Association of Broadcasters Show. I was there for 3 days of the conference and got to experience and learn all kinds of interesting things. And yes, there were even some things there related to Blender! Fair warning: I forgot my good camera, so please forgive the blurry, low resolution camera phone images.

Continue Reading 'NAB Show 2008' »

Yes! Blender 2.46 RC3 is available to download, and it looks like a stable release is very close.

Continue Reading 'Blender 2.46 RC3 available to download' »