Well Tony Mullen’s at it again with another book and I can’t wait to see the results and add this to my collection.
Mastering Blender is part of Sybex’s “Mastering” series, and as such takes an in-depth, fairly advanced look at its subject. Mastering Blender is geared to intermediate and advanced Blender users who really want to get the most out of Blender.
Blender, the free alternative for professional-quality 3D animation is a complex program to learn, but once users become familiar with its power, they begin to seek more from it. Â This book is the first of its kind to explore the more advanced features of Blender so that you can get the most out of the software. You’ll take your Blender skills to a whole new level with the featured in-depth coverage of intricate uses for Blender’s modeling, texturing, animation, and visual effects tools in a professional environment.
Vitorbalbio has posted a few of his Blender Game Engine works over at Blenderartists.org. The quality of the work is amazing, using a lot of the newer features and tools of the game engine. There’s some nice pictures to look at, and the main piece, entitled ‘Ruinas’, can be downloaded as a .exe to view and explore for yourself in realtime.
UPDATE 01-19-09Â Â Chris just sent me a new link for the site
A number of readers have been asking about the Blender Materials site being down. Christian aka paratron tells me that his ISP pulled the rug from under him; they deleted his site due to excessive use but did not warn him about the pending disruption, telling him instead after the fact. He’s in the process of changing it over to another sever
The schedule for the GDC 2009 (The Game Developers Conference) includes a session about using the Blender Game Engine for Rapid Prototyping.
‘Art of Community’ is a new book currently being written by Jono Bacon. Its a book detailing the many areas of communities which follow ‘Every software project, online site, or company’ and how to build a strong community. The book is relevant to Blender as Ton Roosendaal has recently contributed some interview content.
You may recall an article last November about Blender being used for the Intel Core I7 rollout.
Now there is some benchmarking by Intel using Blender 2.47
Phil McCoy of Project London has recently uploaded a new video clip featuring special effects shots from the Project London film, showing the live action footage and 3D animation composited together!
Cestmir Peltan (Cestmir on BA) has just finished an interesting little animation. It nicely demonstrates the physics baking and fluid simulations Blender is capable of these days in a very professional looking animation.
Similar to the ghosting feature found with Armatures, this script makes several ghosted layers of an animation. Its explained best as ‘a method to have some sort of ghost image of an animation at keyframes defined by the user’
