Look out everyone, we are on the verge of the next great Blender release. After the CVS freeze shortly after our last report, the cvs has been filled everyday with bug fixes. The freeze means that nothing new should be added, but there are on occassion a few commits that are just a little more than bug fixes.

Continue Reading 'February CVS Report: During The Freeze' »

Recently, Jason “Groo” Van Gumster (Fweeb) announced on BA that he had been working with cmiVFX on a 3 hour training DVD for Blender entitled “Advanced Fluid Dynamics In Blender.” Thanks to cmiVFX, BlenderNation got a look at the DVD. Read on to see if we help you answer the question, at $60 USD, is the video worth it?

Continue Reading 'Review: Advanced Fluid Dynamics In Blender DVD' »

Need some real looking explosions for your next cinematic masterpiece?  Then this is the site for you.

Continue Reading 'Detonation Films: Effects Stock Footage' »

Jon McKay (Ammusionist) has posted a pdf on BA about creating an eyeball.  Been there, done that you say?  Think again.  Jon breathes new life into creating an old favorite.

Continue Reading 'Tutorial: Building A Better Eyeball' »

We posted a while back about a script for bringing in chemical structures that are in the standard pdb (protein data bank) format into Blender. After several months Malte Reimold (intermalte) has updated the script.

Continue Reading 'Chemical Structure Import Script Updated' »

With the availability of release candidate 1, we're getting that much closer to the final release of the much anticipated Blender 2.43.

Continue Reading '2.43 RC1 Released' »

Mark Theriault has written a neat script for Max users to take Blender fluid sims and bring them into Max.

Continue Reading 'Blender Fluids To Max Format Script' »

**Looks like we got this one wrong and I personally blew it. It seems that BMR hasn't moved, but is just off-line temporarily. The site I link to here is a private site NOT BMR. Sorry for the mis-information, we got a bit confused! I sincerely apologize to katorlegaz.com for all the trouble I've caused. From Andrew Kator:

While we appreciate the attention to our models from this post, I must point out (as has Bill) that our site is *not* the new BMR. At the top of the models page, above the licensing: "The Blender 3D Model Repository has moved, with a new version of the community archive hosted by new owners. Please change your bookmarks accordingly." The community archive, meaning an archive of models created by people other than us, has moved. Unfortunately, the "new" BMR was hacked in early December. The last public communication from the new owners was that they would try to have the new BMR back ASAP. From our past experience from hosting the BMR, it is not a simple process to keep hackers and other problems at bay. I am sure that when the new BMR is back online, it will be better capable of handling the communities needs.

Continue Reading 'Erroneous: Blender Model Repository Moves' »

Let's face it, a good material can make even a cube look amazing. This tutorial will show you how to make just such a material.

Continue Reading 'Tutorial: Ice Material' »

You might recall the one small step for Blender which was the incorporation of MentalRay support in a build by RCRuiz. Well now comes the giant leap of Blender2MentalRay 0.0.3.

Continue Reading 'Blender2Mentalray v 0.0.3' »

About ten days ago (on December 12th) Microsoft released it's Microsoft Robotics Studio (which is free for non-commercial use and $400 USD for commercial). What's really neat is that there is an add-on with Blender support.

Continue Reading 'Use Blender With Microsoft Robotics Studio' »

The Blender 2.43 release is getting closer everyday, and even with the clock counting down to release, huge advancements are being made to the Blender code. This time, Ton has done an image refactor (committed to the CVS Dec. 20th) and Brecht has given us the much asked for Multiple UVs and vertex colors (committed to the CVS Dec. 21st)!

Continue Reading 'CVS: Image Refactor + Multiple UV/Vertex Colors' »

I don't know about you, but using the stride bone can a burdensome process for most. Luckily, the upcoming version of Blender (likely to be released in late December or early January) has a new solution that is far easier to set up and may be your new favorite animation tool.

Continue Reading 'CVS: Walk Cycle Modifiers' »

After yesterday's post about Piovra, several great comments were posted discussing other alternatives to distributed rendering.  There are of course other options, probably more than enough to make an educated decision on what's best for you or your company.  So let’s take a look five others submitted by BN readers that might peak your interest!

Continue Reading 'More Distributed Rendering Options' »

Blender is no stranger to the world of distributive rendering.  There are several simple python scripts as well as Dr. Queue that can do the job for Blender (here's the Windows user manual for Dr. Queue by the Rovorm team).  But one has been silent for the past 2 years… until now.

Continue Reading 'Piovra Renderfarm Project Updated' »

Several months back, blenderage posted a mini tutorial showing how to use a smoothing groups-like technique to get better detail from low poly models.  Game makers, you might want to see this if you haven't already.

Continue Reading 'Tutorial: Better Detail From Low Poly Models' »

alt_ligury has posted a really nice tutorial on how to do a realistic portrait. Not only is the tutorial made really well, but the result is amazing (see inset).

Continue Reading 'Tutorial: Realistic Portrait' »

We've posted about BMAE before, Ron Walker's script that allows you to set the size and location of objects in Standard and/or Metric values. But with Ron's latest code changes, updates and added eye candy, it's worth mentioning again.

Continue Reading 'Script: Blender Mesh Attribute Editor v1.1' »