The Blender Foundation have secured additional funding for the production of Durian in the form of a large grant of the Netherlands Film Fund. The impact is huge: “… This will allow us to extend the project with three months (end of june), cover up for much needed expenses (like voice actors, hardware, PR) and most likely even extra team members!..”. Congratulations guys! Now put down the champagne and get back to work!
I think everyone’s recovering from last week’s 2.5 alpha 0 release, but there are still some interesting updates.
The Freestyle Branch of Blender 2.5 has the Non Photo Realistic (NPR) renderer Freestyle built in. Freestyle allows you to render images in cartoon, brush-stroke, charcoal or any other style. The Freestyle integration blog offers regular updates on the state of development, and also some nice examples of the capabilities.
Irene Coremberg will be giving a presentation on the use of open source software for 3D designers or architects in Buenos Aires next Saturday.
Blender has reached its 25000th SVN commit – a measurement of development activity. Mike Pan comments on his blog.
Here something for all of you techie tinkerers to try when its released. In a presentation by Pranav Mistry on “several tools that help the physical world interact with the world of data”, Mistry says he’ll open-source the software behind SixthSense, to open its possibilities to all. I expect we’ll see some of these ideas interfaced with Blender in the future, we’ve already had others such as Wiimotes by Thomas Eldredge
Several people reported this: Cambridge University Qi Pan is developing software that will reconstruct textured 3D models from webcam video. A Linux and later a Windows downloadable demo should be available in a couple of months. The results are already quite amazing – check out the video inside.
Once again, a Blender graphic features on the cover of a scientific journal. (See also our post on Science Magazine)
Inkscape 0.47 has been released, and it has an *insane* amount of new/improved features. Cool job, guys!
