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.
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)!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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).
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.
Animator and Blender user Oscar Alvarado has new project called “Chibi World” that is based on the adventures of a bunch of adorable little characters. You can take a look at the teaser video (direct link) to see some of his animated work, or you can visit the Chibi World site for some other goodies like avatars and wallpapers.
The CVS builds are probably more popular than ever given that there are dedicated build threads (1), build sites (1,2), and the ability to compile Blender yourself. Given this, it’s always nice to see people diving head first into the newest tools and showing the rest of us what we can look forward to in the next release.
