From April 11th to the 17th of this year, a veritable boatload of people from all facets of the television, film, and radio production world descended upon Las Vegas to attend the National Association of Broadcasters Show. I was there for 3 days of the conference and got to experience and learn all kinds of interesting things. And yes, there were even some things there related to Blender! Fair warning: I forgot my good camera, so please forgive the blurry, low resolution camera phone images.

Continue Reading 'NAB Show 2008' »

In recent months, 3D model repositories such as TurboSquid have been served with DMCA takedown requests for 3D models of a variety of commercial and military vehicles based on trademark infringement for the vehicle names. This came to a head near the end of March when Lockheed Martin issued a takedown order for models of a B-24 bomber modeled by John MacNeill. TurboSquid complied, but now the Electronic Freedom Foundation has stepped up in MacNeill's defense, issuing an open letter to Lockheed's licensing agency in an effort to get his models back up.

Continue Reading 'EFF Goes to Aid 3D Modelers' »

The Blender Foundation Certified Trainer (BFCT) Program has been officially launched. The 12-member review board for the program has put a lot of effort into getting it off the ground and we're ready to see how well it will work. If you teach or train people in Blender, get your application materials together, because we're accepting applications now!

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The gallery on blender has been updated for the submissions that came in through December! There's some strong work in there for this month with a good mix of subject matter. Go take a look!

Earlier this year, in the midst of the free rigs that were being released to the Blender community, we got this clever little gem submitted to us by Ruben Lopez. It's a very simple lower-body rig, but the controls for it are quite nice and it's an excellent resource, especially for Spanish-speaking Blender users.

Continue Reading 'Another Free Rig' »

This is a follow-up to the article we posted a few days ago about a free Blender compositing tutorial available through an agreement between CG Channel and cmiVFX. The .blend file for that tutorial has been released! The demand for that tutorial has been the highest of any other tutorial on cmiVFX's on-demand player.

Continue Reading 'CG Channel/cmiVFX Tutorial .blend File Released!' »

The gallery at blender.org has been updated for November. There are lot of great entries this month, particularly character designs. Go check it out and decide which ones you like best!

And it's been updated on time, too! There are some really strong pieces in there this month. Go take a look and pick out your favorite!

Also, there have been a couple grumblings here and on the forums by people who submit their work, but sadly do not get it accepted into the gallery. It is unfortunate that all submissions can't be accepted to the gallery and it is a tough task to try picking out a few of the very best submissions each month. However, here are a few tips that might help you get your work accepted:

Continue Reading 'Blender.org Gallery Updated - September' »

After four (FOUR) months without updates, the Gallery on Blender.org has finally been updated. There were some really great submissions and it took quite some time for us to get through them all. A big thanks goes out to Daniel 'ZanQdo' Salazar for helping out with the updates.

Continue Reading 'HUUUGE Update to Blender.org Gallery' »

While we were teaching at Red Hat High, Sam Brubaker (Rocketman) decided that he was going to release the .blend file to his animation, Infinitum, under a Creative Commons license. Infinitum won the 2006 Suzanne Award for "Best Animation, original idea, or story". He has chosen the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommericial license 3.0.

Get the Infinitum .blend file (right-click and Save As). Have fun!

Last week, the second Red Hat High technology camp ended. You may recall that we reported around this time last year about 3 members of the Blender community traveling to Raleigh, North Carolina to teach at the first ever Red Hat High technology camp. This year, we had 4 Blender instructors from the community, and based on the incredible work produced by students last year, we had a better idea of what to expect. We decided to put greater emphasis on animation this year and the students rose to the challenge, blowing all of us away.

Continue Reading 'Red Hat High 2007' »

It's that time of year again: we need an excellent Blender Demo Reel to impress participants at this year's SIGGRAPH conference. This is pretty much the world's most important 3D exhibition, and as reported on blender.org, there will be a Blender presence on the exhibition floor. If you're interested in having your work considered for this, keep reading.

Continue Reading 'SIGGRAPH 2007 Demo Reel Call for Content' »

A little while ago, I received a copy of Mobile 3D Graphics: Learning 3D Graphics with the Java™ Micro Edition from Thomson Course Technology, a publisher of a variety of technology and graphics-related books. Being eager to delve into the subject myself and knowing that there two chapters of the book devoted to the use of Blender for mobile 3D applications, I was very interested in seeing what the author, Claus Höfele, had to offer on the subject. As it turns out, the answer is "quite a bit."

Continue Reading 'Book Review: Mobile 3D Graphics by Claus Höfele' »

Katorlegaz.com, the good folks who hosted the original Blender Model Repository, has released all of the 3D models on their website under a Creative Commons license. From the site:

All of our 3D models are now Creative Commons, and related web pages have been updated to reflect the new licensing. Special thanks to all who donated to cover legal expenses from when we hosted the BMR.

There are a large variety of models under a number of different categories. Who knows? You might just find a model that you need for one of your projects there. It's great to see that despite the legal headaches that they've had to go through, Andrew and Jennifer are still willing to contribute to the community. Big thanks to them!

Roughly 6 months from their first workshop offering, Hand Turkey Studios will be holding two Blender training workshops this month on consecutive weekends. Both classes are considered 'Basics' level classes, though they do build upon each other and even offer a few tricks that more experienced users would find helpful. Continue Reading '2 Blender Workshops in Richmond, Virginia' »

Bob Holcomb is holding another compositing contest on blenderartists.org called "WHAT WAS THAT!?!?!" Prizes for this challenge include Ron Brinkman's The Art and Science of Digital Composition for first place and the Blender Fluids Training DVD from CmiVFX for second place. This challenge involves using supplied video footage, so be sure to check out the discussion thread on blenderartists.org for complete rules and how to get the video file.

The contest deadline is 1 August 2007. Good luck everyone!

First, before saying anything, please allow me to publicly apologize for the extreme delay in updating the gallery on Blender.org. I slipped up and missed the March update and for that I'm sincerely sorry. I won't let that happen again. That said, there have some really great submissions in the last two months! The gallery has been updated and you can see how much good work is coming out of our community. The current gallery page has work from April and here's a direct link to the March gallery. Which ones are your favorites?

Yesterday a new distribution of Linux that's designed for media production was released: Ubuntu Studio. Unlike the distribution it's based on, Ubuntu Studio is not a "Live CD" distro. Rather, it's designed to run close to the metal and take as much advantage of your hardware as possible. It sports an impressive list of bundled applications for audio production, graphics creation, animation, and even some video. Of course, Blender 2.43 is prominently included.

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