From Montage Studio this new DVD (currently only available in download form) is set to be part of a series of exercises that will walk newer users through modeling, texturing and animating in Blender.

Continue Reading 'Training DVD: Introduction to Character Creation Part 1' »

A new version of LuxRender, the unbiased open source render engine was released a few days ago. And this release presents a lot of new features.

Continue Reading 'LuxRender 0.5 released' »

Well if you’ve been around Blender for a long time, you may recall “The Official Blender 2.0 book put together by Ton and Carsten Wartmann several years back. I know that I wore out that book, and I still have it. Now Carsten has announced that the first copy of his new Blender DVD Tutorial has arrived. Hopefully there will be an English version in the future.

Continue Reading 'Blender DVD Seminar by Carsten Wartmann' »

Frank, a main character in the upcoming Apricot game, has been finalized. He’s rigged, textured and ready for some much needed animations. So the Apricot team have released him to the community and are looking to see what crazy animations everyone can come up with.

Continue Reading 'Apricot Animation – Community Input' »

SIGGRAPH 2008

Wednesday, 13 August, 8:30 – 10:15 am
Petree Hall C

In May 2008, the Blender Foundation released their second open-movie project: “Big Buck Bunny,” a funny and furry 3D short about a giant rabbit who gets even with bullying rodents. This session brings together the key people who created the movie and presents all the aspects of an open-source and open-content-based animation studio, and how this affects the creative process.

Continue Reading 'SIGGRAPH 2008 The Making of “Big Buck Bunny”: An Open-Source Evolution' »

The artist’s showcase is always a great way to see what other people are doing with Blender. If you like to show work during the Monday afternoon of the Blender Birds of Feather, contact Ton Roosendaal! (ton at blender org).

Note: Blender BoFs are free to attend, also without Siggraph ticket

I was intrigued about this animation by David Liger, it’s his first animation and I enjoyed the use of the cartoon edges. An avid Blender user, he created this piece in celebration of the birth of his son, Arsène.

Continue Reading 'Le Petit Papillon / The Little Butterfly' »

Here is a fantastic work from Promotion Studios. Great job guys!

James Neale (producer), Stefan Wernik (animation director), Matt Ebb (lighting/shading/td), Tristan Lock (lead modeller), Jeremy Davidson (lead animator), Kim Neale (matte painting), with Lee Salvemini (animator), Hamed Zaghaghi (ocean sim development), Enrico Valenza (assistant texture artist)

Continue Reading 'Lighthouse by Promotion Studios and Exopolis' »

Endi2 has made a great trio of timelapses demonstrating sculpting a head, retopologizing the resulting mesh and the mesh with a normal map applied in a GLSL enabled 3D view. I found the head sculpting video particularly good. Really they were all great to watch. Find the videos here.

Visit the cgtalk thread about the videos here.

There is a interesting article on ‘Big Buck Bunny’ from the render hardware perspective on a news letter regarding grid computing:

“Network.com provided the more than 50,000 CPU-hours of compute time needed to speed up the movie rendering process, sparing the project the need for its own computer infrastructure.”

“Even though the Blender team did not have the support of a big studio, they succeeded with the community support, an open source rendering software and an on-demand computing platform,” stated David Folk, group manager of Network.com marketing.”