Remember the 'Slimers' commercial by Promotion Studios? James Neale talks about the project's pipeline and Blender's role in it, how they rebuilt Blender to run on their 64 bit quad-cores machines with 8 gig ram (closed source apps, eat your heart out! ;-) and about trademarked Nickelodeon slime properties. A very cool read.

Bassam Kurdali, author of the the Mancandy FAQ CD will be presenting a demo of Blender at the Software Freedom Day.

Continue Reading 'Blender Session at Software Freedom Day, Boston- Sept 20 2008' »

Blender's Collada import and export scripts haven't been updated in a while. Hiroki Utsunomiya provides an update.

Continue Reading 'Blender Collada 1.4.1 Importer' »

In the next 2 months it looks like the Big Buck Bunny project will be getting a lot more publicity. Ton has had a lot of invitations for festivals and conferences etc, due to the successful release of the BBB project.

Continue Reading 'BBB conquers the Netherlands' »

Exporting rigged and animated models from Blender to Papervision3D is now possible thanks to an update of Cast3D, a 3D animation framework library for Adobe Flash in ActionScript3. (Check out this example).

Continue Reading 'Animated Blender Models in Papervision3D' »

The quality quality of entries was fantastic, and the competition was fierce.  Its a pleasure to announce the Blender World Cup winners for 2008…

Continue Reading 'The Blender World Cup 2008 winners are…' »

Blender was featured in last week's episode of Click – 'the BBC's flagship technology programme'. Kate Russel talks about Big Buck Bunny, Elephants Dream and how to get started with Blender.

Continue Reading 'Blender on the BBC' »

(Article submitted by Emil Kjaehr, Public Relations Manager of the Game Development Camp)

When high school students from all over Denmark gather at Aalborg University to develop computer games it is likely to be the world's largest arrangement of its kind. About 50 young men and women are using a part of their summer vacation to learn more about idea development, animation, programming, and not least, cooperation – from Pablo Vasquez and others.

Continue Reading 'Computer game camp in Denmark – with a little help from Pablo!' »

STUDIO XX, Feminist art centre for technological exploration, creation, and critique, is hosting their own Open Game project from October 2008 to June 2009 in Montréal, Canada. The program is built entirely around Blender. They're still looking for participants!

Continue Reading 'Open Game project in Montréal, Canada' »

I caught up with Shawn and Carlos again at this year's SIGGRAPGH in Los Angeles. We discuss some changes and milestones at AnimationMentor as well as what it's like to work at a big studio. I did the interview just outside the Expo, in a common area, and well, that always leads to some interesting background noise. You'll hear Fjorge members screaming "Fjorge" as they wonder the halls.

Continue Reading 'Interview: Shawn Kelly and Carlos Baena of AnimationMentor' »

William Chamberlin has a great set of earth models on his site. He describes his creation process in a 20-page tutorial.

Continue Reading 'Tutorial: Building Earth in Blender' »

Awesome artwork by Soenke Maeter from Germany. Soenke writes:

I created this one for the BWC2008. The composition is something i payed special attention to. It's rendered with Blender2.47 internal render and some postpro with Photoshop.

(Click on the thumbnail to enlarge). Original threads on CGSociety and BlenderArtists.

Over the last weeks, we saw three new releases of Blender magazines: the Italian, Russian and German versions. Enjoy!

Continue Reading 'Three new international community magazines released' »

Article submitted by mangojambo. Cicero Moraes, aka Cogitas3D, is an amazing blender professional, working with Blender since 2005, making architectural visualization, animation and spots for TV. He is always participating in the Brazilian community, helping people at the forums, doing speeches for poor people at the public schools in Brazil. Now he did a free Portuguese Blender E-Book and his texts is really easy to understand.

Continue Reading 'Free Portuguese Blender E-Book for newbies' »

Community member Farsthary from Cuba (famous for his volumetrics and smoke work) found his home wrecked after the hurricane Gustav passed. He and his family are fine, but they're out of electricity and they have a lot of reconstruction work to do. You can support him by sending a donation. Bank account details are on his blog.

Update: I just tried to send some money, only to find out that Cuba is currently under embargo – you cannot send money there, at least from the Netherlands. The bank couldn't tell me if this affects other countries as well :-/

Continue Reading 'Chronicles from the Hurricane' »

Hello folks… It is that time of year again! The 2008 Blender conference is slowly creeping up on us. This means that once again we're looking for Blender made animations to show everyone at the annual Blender Animation Festival.

Continue Reading 'Need Blender Made Animations for the 2008 Conference.' »

Totally Blended is hosting over 20 videotutorials that may be of use if you're learning Blender. I watched a few and quite enjoyed them, although they're sometimes just as funny/crazy as the website's design and font ('woaaahhhh…. I'm really tired, okay – here we go', 'ah sorry, that was just me adjusting my chair' ;-).

The new book 'Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish' by Roland Hess will start shipping on September 26. He just released the accompanying animation titled 'The Beast'.

Continue Reading 'Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish' »