Last night the Blender Institute had a small party to celebrate the end of project Apricot, or 'Yo Frankie!'. The team did a presentation of the game and aswered questions about its creation (video of the presentation included on their blog!). We all had a lot of fun playing and trying to make the characters do crazy things ;-).

Continue Reading 'Yo Frankie! Premiere party, walk-through video' »

I ran into two free e-books on Python programming the other day. They are both great assets if you want to do some scripting for Blender:

• Dive into Python [GNU Free Documentation License]
• Invent your own computer games with Python [Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0]

Update: make that TEN ELEVEN free Python books!

• Free Python Programming Books(Thanks, bebraw!)
• A Byte of Python(Thanks, sanne!)

Promotion Studios have finished a new commercial which include some cool Blender fluids.

Continue Reading 'Blender fluids used in TV commercial' »

Mike Pan has published a nice series of photos of the Blender workshop in Vancouver, BC, last Sunday. From the looks of it, everyone had a great time!

Mike writes:

We finally pulled it off! (Okay, maybe not spetacularly) The first ever Blender get-together in Vancouver, Canada was a lot of fun.  The turn out was better than I had hoped, and majority of the people attending are very competent at Blender.

Terry Wallwork reviews 'Bounce, Tumble, and Splash!: Simulating the Physical World with Blender 3D'

Tony Mullen's been at it again releasing another Blender book this time on using Particles, Physics, Softbodies, Blender Game Engine and Fluid simulation features in Blender 2.46.

Continue Reading 'Tony Mullen's – Bounce, Tumble and Splash – Book Review' »

Update: after trying this feature for only a couple of hours, it was already turning into a big mess. I found it impossible to follow the discussions or to easily see what the latest comment was, the email notification broke down and the nice, clean look of the site was completely gone (see this screenshot – brrrrr). Thanks for everyone for helping me test this, but it's bye-bye threaded comments :-)

Blender was awarded one of the "Best of open source productivity apps" by InfoWorld.com "Blender is a consummate example of the influence and opportunity for open source."

Don't forget to leave InfoWorld a comment while your checking out thier award.

If you don`t want to wait for the implementation of the Wavelet Turbulence for Fluid Simulation algorithm, a developer is already working on something similar.

Continue Reading 'Realistic smoke in Blender' »

Lile Hanson has created an excellent tutorial on using the new GLSL preview feature. He shows you how to combine different layers, by painting them onto your model in Texture Paint mode using the paint brush. This is similar to masking two photos in Photoshop. I've been wanting this feature for a long time and it's great to see it implemented in Blender.

Continue Reading 'Tutorial, Texturing a Head with GLSL' »

I just noticed the three year birthday sign at GraphicAll. Congratulations to everyone involved at Graphicall, and thank you for providing such an ouststanding resource outlet.

Until recently the Blender art gallery has not been updated. So, I decided to do a bit of investigating, and find out what is going on with the minor update.

Continue Reading 'Blender Art Gallery' »

Shapeways is an online 3D printing company, you may have read about Bart's past involvement with them. In this interview, they show off some of the objects that were made by contestants using Blender and their 3D printer for their SIGGRAPH contest. I also managed to get Sacha to pose with his "Man in Man" statue which I think you'll enjoy.

Continue Reading 'SIGGRAPH 2008 Shapeways interview' »

The Mexican city of Guadalajara is being invaded by a small army of funny looking TENTAhooDs. Sightings are posted on a weblog, and if you manage to find one it's yours!

Continue Reading 'Cute paper art made with Blender' »

Last night I went to Amsterdam and met Ton Roosendaal of the Blender Foundation / Blender Institute and Pablo Vazquez of the Apricot/Yo Frankie! project, Carsten Wartmann of BlenderBuch fame (and an old NaN colleague), and Frank van Beek, who is one of the founders of NeoGeo and an old NaN colleague. I still have a headache!

Beware: this movie is 26 minutes long :)

Continue Reading 'Apricot, Blender, Beer & Thai Food' »

Nils Thürey, who brought fluid simulation to Blender, has done it again! He's co-author of a paper titled 'Wavelet Turbulence for Fluid Simulation', an algorithm which creates stunning smoke effects. Even though the algorithm is not implemented in Blender yet, the code is already available. Check out their site for some stunning videos!

Continue Reading 'Realistic Smoke Coming to Blender?' »

I'll be visiting the Blender Institute later today and I hope I'll have a chance to talk to some of the people in the Apricot team. As they're in the last days of the project I'm sure they'll be busy enough, but I might just be able to squeeze a few minutes of attention out of them. What are your burning questions for them?

Update: thanks for all your input! I'll try to get the video up later today.

One of this years Emerging Technology on display at SIGGRAPH, is a user interface that expands on the mouse and tablet concept. With this technology, there are different types controls that you use to manipulate the various objects on your screen. These control objects are sensed by the "tablet", they are neither electronic or wired to the tablet. I'm not quite sure how this will fit into the pipeline, but I was fascinated by the technology.

Continue Reading 'SIGGRAPH 2008 Emerging Technology' »