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 Javaâ„¢ 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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