Second edition, Full Color!

Playing with 3D games technology

Blender is the first of the 3D packages to integrate a game engine as well as tools for editing game-logic and creating interactive animation. This book is the ultimate guide for artists interested in exploring this part of Blender.

This fully revised and updated second edition has been written with Blender 2.48, and covers all improvements for game creation thanks to the Open Game Yo Frankie! project.

The Blender GameKit starts with an extensive section for people who are new to 3D – explaining all basic concepts – or new to Blender; with a full introduction to the interface. Then it shows in step-by-step tutorials the fun of creating models, adding motion to them, and how to turn them into simple games. Experienced 3D artists will appreciate the more complex game demos, the character animation tutorials, the introduction to Python, a tutorial with the Frankie character, and the advanced reference section.

The CDROM contains several playable and editable Blender game demos, created by renowned artists from the Blender community. It also contains all the files needed for the tutorials and Blender V2.48, for all platforms.

Special discount for early orders! Book expected to ship December 15, 2008.

• Full Color printed, 320 pages
• Edited and updated by Carsten Wartmann
• Design and DTP by Samo Korosec
• Produced by Ton Roosendaal, Blender Foundation
• Book revenues will be fully used to support Blender projects.

This came in just this morning – if you live in Sao Paolo and you don't have plans for this afternoon then here's a nice chance to hook up with some Blenderheads.

Continue Reading 'TODAY: Free Blender workshop, Sao Paolo, Brazil' »

Dimitris Christou has recently posted a bunch of new video tutorials on Vimeo which are worth checking out. They cover a large range of different topics, from basics in the game engine to modeling a gun.

Continue Reading 'Ten (10) Video Tutorials' »

A rapid succession of Blender news for your pre-weekend enjoyment!

Continue Reading 'Rapid Fire' »

You can now pre-order "The Blender Gamekit 2nd Edition! Continue Reading 'Preorder "The Blender Gamekit 2nd Edition"!' »

The Brazilian Blender book, Blender 3D – Guia do Usuario was released again with a revised and expanded third edition. Now the book has 552 pages covering most of the basic aspects of Blender.

Continue Reading 'Third edition of the Brazilian Blender Book Released' »

Daniel MArtinez Lara (psl/pepeland) has just uploaded a couple of videos showing how to use Blender's sculpt tool for animation using blend shapes.  The results look quite promising!

Continue Reading 'AniSculp technique – using the sculpt tool for animation' »

Spot anything slightly familiar on planet-positive.org ?

Oliver Perfumo has made a nice demo reel worth checking out. It features his work from the past 3 years, set to a pretty catchy song. The T-Rex sequences are particularly impressive.

Continue Reading 'Demo Reel : Oliver Perfumo' »

The Japanese Blender community is planning a party on Saturday, November 29th.

Continue Reading 'Blender Party Nagoya Japan, Nov 29' »

ResourceSpace is a web-based, open source digital asset management system, with a twist: it will dynamically render previews of Blender files, making it a great solution for Blender Asset Management. It's based on PHP/MySQL so you'll need to have access to a webserver if you want to use it.

Continue Reading 'ResourceSpace: Open Source Asset Management for Blender' »

The Excellence Center in Free Software of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain), has created an on-line course of 20 hours to teach the use Blender. The course starts at February 23rd, and costs €60 for students/€100 for everyone else.

Continue Reading 'On-line Spanish Blender course' »

CGChallenge have announced their 23rd challenge, themed 'Steampunk Myths and Legends'.

Steampunk is the application of advanced steam age technology to a modern or science fiction setting.

This challenge asks you to render traditional myths and legends in the steampunk style using elements of gears, springs, brass and steam power. Re-imagine legendary characters from some of the world's most ancient stories, such as a steam-powered minotaur, or a Zeppelin-mounted Thor, hurling lightning bolts from the sky.

I could think of a few Blender artists that should enter straight away ;-) Go on then, make us proud!

Here's something we don't *nearly* write enough about on BlenderNation: the Aqsis RenderMan compliant renderer, and the MOSAIC plugin that allows Blender and Aqsis to work together. Eric Back has just published a very cool sample of what kind of quality you can achieve with these systems – check it out.

Oh! And these guys are aiming at rendering a small part of Big Buck Bunny as well, "the perfect project to really push MOSAIC's integration with Blender and its ability to efficiently export a large animation.". Awesome.

Continue Reading 'Blender to RenderMan: Aqsis/Air Depth-Mapped Occlusion using multiple light rigs' »

Tamito Kajiyama (T.K.) has created some test videos with Blender using the Freestyle renderer and he has come up with some great results!

Continue Reading 'NPR rendering with Blender/Freestyle' »

Zac Duff won an internship at Good Game, a TV show in Australia, and Blender played a big part in his workflow. A prototype of the game will be released later this week. Zac reports.

Continue Reading 'Blender used in Australian 'Good Game Game'' »

Yep, that's right. The shiny new Apricot DVDs are ready and are now at the Blender Institute, arriving today from the printing factory.

Continue Reading 'Apricot DVDs Ready!' »

Earlier this week the German Blender magazine 'Blenderzin' had his (her?) its first birthday. Congratulations!

For German readers, it might be worth knowing that they also have a German Blender weblog on their website.