Check out Shawn Kelly’s lastest animation tips on Animation Mentor’s new Tips & Tricks blog. In his first entry, Shawn talks about workflow and process. The blog complements a Tips & Tricks column written by Shawn Kelly, Animation Mentor cofounder and senior animator at ILM, that’s published in the monthly Animation Mentor newsletter.

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Just wanted to send a big hello to all you Blender Nation folks! I had the opportunity to meet Ton Roosendaal last year at Siggraph. While we were talking, I remember mentioning that with the power of open-source communities like yours, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the world was stunned by a true blockbuster film someday, created by people collaborating in their garages all over the world.

Continue Reading 'Note from Shawn Kelly, cofounder of Animation Mentor and senior animator at ILM' »

I’m happy to announce that Eunice Park of Animation Mentor will be writing for BlenderNation about the industry and as a liaison to AnimationMentor.com. She will be giving us first hand information such as news letters , tips and tricks from Shawn Kelly and others at Animation Mentor.

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Here is a great tutorial created by Michael Jones, showing how to model a female head. It’s not a time lapse, actually the whole tutorial has more than one hour of video!

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This animation by Jorge Rausch is short, at only 33 seconds long but a very funny gag. Also check out his Negrito Returns. I don’t know what he’s saying, but it’s commical just the same. Jorge shows that he has a good sense of timing and well placed arc movements in the animation.

Continue Reading 'Dunga The Caveman' »

Apollos has two well written tutorials for using nodes on his site. You can check them out at at BlenderUnderground

Gaute Neslein Korsnes wrote to tell us about a Norwegian blender community site. Blender3d.no.

It’s certainly fun to see all these Blender sites popping up around the world.

I was just looking at the site stats, BlenderNation is viewed in 215 countries and territories.

macouno is running an informal contest. Something that’s just for fun, and the rules are loose.

“This week I received something rather nice in the mail. An absolutely gorgeous prototyped print of the original Petunia model from the guys at www.shapeways.com and I can’t stop looking at it. It’s rather nice to have a figure you can actually hold. But I decided I’ll give it away!”

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We all know very well the great tutorials from Montage Studio. And now they are offering some free models to download as well! The first one is a male body model.

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This extensive tutorial set, created by the renowned Blender artist Andy Goralczyk, teaches artists how to craft a fully finished 3D animated scene. Tracking the evolution of an idea from creation to final render – and beyond. The result of the tutorials is an epic 90 second trailer.

Continue Reading 'Blender DVD training: Creature Factory by Andy Goralczyk' »