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'' »

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.

The texture node system is a project to integrate a node-based texture generator into Blender.

Continue Reading 'New Feature in development: texture nodes' »

The HandsOn project of the Department of Media Technology at the Helsinki University of Technology is researching optical tracking and 3D user interfaces for modeling and animation. They make heavy use of Blender to test new concepts in user interaction in virtual 3D environments, and have published videos of their work so far.

Continue Reading 'Blender meets Minority Report: Helsinki University of Technology' »

An updated version of William Reynish' UI analysis (25 pages, PDF) is now available.

Continue Reading 'William Reynish' UI paper' »

Gunter Hannig aka zapman has written an excellent in-depth review of Carsten Wartmann's 'Blender DVD Seminar'.

Continue Reading 'German 'Blender DVD Seminar' Reviewed' »

Pawel Cislo has written a tutorial on the modeling process of his model 'Jaguar MK2'. Otávio "tatasoka" has translated it to Portuguese and hosts it together with the original English version.

Continue Reading 'Tutorial: Making of Jaguar MK2' »

The first Colombian Blender event (as far as we're aware) is coming up on November 13th! The 12-hour 'Dia Blender' has free entry to the workshops, shows and conferences.

Continue Reading 'Dia Blender - Bogotá, Colombia, November 13th' »

Here's a cool demonstration of Daniel 'Pepeland' Martinez Lara's Blender setup and of the new grease pencil feature. A preview of the video that he's editing is available as well - done in Max and Maya, not Blender. Funny stuff though :)

The three winners of the British 'Dare to be Digital' contest have been nominated for the prestigious BAFTA award (British Academy of Film and Television Arts). One of them is the Blender production 'Boro-Toro'. If you liked the game, you can help them increase their chances of winning and getting Blender into the spotlight at the BAFTA. Read on to see how.

Continue Reading 'Boro-Toro nominated for BAFTA award' »

Mal from CanDo Interactive is hosting a Blender game engine contest. The deadline is March 16th, and there's a nice lineup of prizes.

Continue Reading 'Game Engine Competition' »

Two Blender presentations are planned for SIGGRAPH Asia 2008, which is from December 10-13: 'Migrating and Integrating Blender into your Pipeline' by Victor Yap, and 'Blender Education and Certification' by Tony Mullen. Details on Blender.org.

The Guerilla CG Project has published an initial set of extremely useful and well-produced videotutorials, demonstrating general CG techniques. The videos are produced by acclaimed animators: Andrew Silke (Happy Feet, Scooby Doo, Cane Toad), Glen Moyes (famous Blenderhead! - coming soon), Greg Petchkovsky (Farscape, Crocodile Hunter, House of Flying Daggers) and Jake Hempson (character artist at THQ - also coming soon).

Continue Reading 'The Guerilla CG Project: Free Professional Video Tutorials' »

A scientific poster from a team at the French Condensed Matter Theoretical Physic Lab has won an award by the American National Science Foundation (NSF). Congratulations, guys!

Continue Reading 'Blender scientific poster wins NSF award' »