A new version of this nice script is out, here's a short changelog:

• Save/load parameters functionality have been added
• generation time significantly reduced (sometimes it works two times faster than v0.3)

You can download it here. If you don't know what it is all about read the full article.

… time to take a break and go on vacation. No, it's not about me being an alcoholic under stress, it's simpy the Big and Ugly Rendering Project team informing us that all the testing sessions and related services (support, website, etc.) are going to be put on idle for a little amount of time.

Continue Reading 'BURP! Oh, sorry… (B.U.R.P. Project Update)' »

This is the title of an interesting series of tutorials released by Daniel Sefton on his site, a "must" for all those racing-sim-developers-wanna-be being hardly tempted by Club SILO.

Continue Reading 'Tutorial: Create Your Own Racetrack!' »

The creator of the Blender Library script, Mariano Hidalgo, did it again, a new amazing script is ready to be downloaded from his site, it's name says it all: Materializer.

Continue Reading 'Materializer: Instant Random Materials in Blender' »

The last time I've written this kind of article (preview of a really promising game under development) that didn't had an happy ending (too bad, it was a really good looking game); three months later time to write something about Club SILO (CS from now on) has come and hopefully, since the game is in an advanced phase of development, this time we'll see the finished product (I feel a little like Tutankamon, I've to admit it).

Continue Reading 'Club SILO, Driving Sim Eye Candy' »

After trying out Gen3 I have to give a negative answer to this question, Gen3 is simply the better attempt to create a full-fledged tree generator for Blender since now and the one with the most complete (and complex) GUI, full stop. And it can only keep improving week by week.

Continue Reading 'Gen3, yet another tree generator?' »

IpoDrivers are one of the less exploited feature of the new ones packed in the previous version of Blender (2.40) although it could be a powerful tool and a real time saver when it comes to complex animations, this is mainly due to the difficulty in understanding what they really are, how they can be used and in which scenarios they are more handy.

Continue Reading 'Tutorial: Cartoon Eyes and IpoDrivers' »

This one was really an unexpected surprise; those of you guys who follow the development related mailing lists (Bf-committers and Bf-blender-cvs) know that the end of the Orange "affair" and the discussions about this year's Google Summer of Code proposal made the development slow down considerably, in this fermenting scene nearly noone noticed two small commitments from Ianwill (aka William Padovani Germano) which make the PyDrivers dream come true.

Continue Reading 'PyDrivers at Last!' »

Those of us who spend most of their community life wondering on Elysiun's forums in search of the latest news/infos/projects/tutorials have aknowledged for sure the change, now if you try to reach www.elysiun.com you'll be instantaneously redirected to the brand new Blenderartist.org forums; but don't worry, all the preciuos old contents will still be there for the joy of the nostalgic ones and the future generations of BlenderHeads.

Continue Reading 'Elysiun changes' »

A new version of the Blender PocketPC porting is available on the BlenderCE Blog, now modelling, texturing, lightning, rendering, animating, the raytracer and the radiosity solver are backed in, what's more load/save operations are finally possible.

Continue Reading 'BlenderCE: alpha version available' »

Since Yafray development seems to be frozen anyone got interested in finding a good external GI renderer to be used as a real alternative; actually there are a few options, most of them are in a early stage of development, only two of them are good for production level: the first is Pov-Ray, which can be used with Blender 2.41 thanks to RCRuiz's custom builds, the second one, which I'm using in my daily workflow, is Kerkythea, a commercial quality renderer which boasts a straightforward standalone GUI and different GI solvers.
Continue Reading 'Kerkythea v1.3.02 is out!' »

Recently I became interested in writing Python scripts for Blender (being the new maintainer of the Kerkythea exporter I needed to get a little training), I'm amazed by the control level supplied by the API, handling/creating objects/materials, modifying meshes/IPO curves, building/animating full scenes is almost straightforward (at least for any mid-level C/C++/Java/C# programmer), creating a script of average complexity is really a matter of minutes… at the pact of sticking to "Alt+P" scripts.

Continue Reading 'ScriptUI: Give your scripts a nice GUI the easy way' »

Guys at BlenderProjects.com chose a very original topic for their first contest which is being sponsored by directron.com, the challenge deals with toons in the style of 1950's or 1960's ones and focuses mainly on modeling and materials settings.

Continue Reading '50/60's styled toon contest' »

Welcome to the third appointment with Blender CVS development overview; since you are all probably used to this kind of article, I'll leave out all the cerimonials and go directly to the list of new features/improvements that the CVS official repository is actually storing.

As always, sit back and relax, the list is long to read ;-) Ready? Let's go then.

Continue Reading 'CVS: what's going on - Chapter III' »

Free software is a great thing as long as it enables us to keep our hands on tools that otherwise would be impossible to try/learn/use (mainly for economical resons), but sometimes free contents created for/with such tools are even more usefull since they supply us with something that can be used as a template for our projects; when those contents are high quality ones they become a great educational resource, and this is the case for CuteBear, a fully rigged character created by Tommy Helgevold (aka Joongle) and released on elYsiun for the pleasure of all the animators-wanna-be around here.

Continue Reading 'Fully rigged character for free (as in free beer)' »

GarageGames, producers of the Torque Engine, opened recently a project page on projects.blender.org for the Python exporter targeting their product.

For those of you that don't know it the Torque Engine is what was used to build such great commercial games as Dungeon Siege I, Dungeon Siege II, Tribes II, Auto Assault, Starsiege and many many more for both PC and Xbox.

Continue Reading 'Torque Engine exporter from GarageGames' »

Fast issue this time, just a few words to report that recently subdivisionmodeling.com added Blender on its Reviews section banners area and on the Software review section with a quick'n'nice introduction about 2.41 written by Patrick Noland.

It's always a pleasure to see Blender advertised on websites not strictly connected to it, expecially when they have a huge community made up of real pros.

Those of you who were there in Amsterdam attending Blender Conference 2005 will remember Marc and Serge Umé's participation about Blender and SFX in Feature Film; for those who missed it these two guys from Digital Graphics were there to illustrate how they used Blender in the Visual FX production workflow of "Friday or another day", a full length movie by Yvan Lemoine. Now they're back with a new work, powered by Blender of course!

Continue Reading 'Digital Graphics strikes back' »