JiriH has created this nice squash and stretch ball rig to give beginners an introduction to rig animation. However, note that the rig only works for Blender 2.46 RC and hopefully the final 2.46 release as well.

Continue Reading 'Squash&Stretch Ball Rig' »

Version 0.46 of the open-source vector application has been released, and it has a pretty strong set of new features. I've used this program a fair deal myself, and I have to say that this update (or application in general) is a must-have. Do take your time to download and experience inkscape for the first time if you haven't used it before, or enjoy the new features if you're a more experienced user.

Continue Reading 'Inkscape 0.46 released' »

Fabien Weibel has made this great and detailed tutorial of how to make an atomic bomb (or any other massive) explosion. The result looks really good so don't miss this intermediate/advanced level tutorial!

Continue Reading 'Tutorial: Animating a Nuclear Explosion' »

Yoyofargo has posted this gem of a tutorial on Blender Artists Forums. It describes a very original way of generating automatic camera shake to camera movements using softbody. I haven't seen anything like this method before, and it works beautifully!

Continue Reading 'Automatically generated camera shaking' »

Interesting new displacement map/baking features are under development. Seamlessly baking normals from a high-resolution object onto a low poly version of the same object is one of the highlights along with being able to bake in camera, world, object or tangent space.

Continue Reading 'New Displacement Map Baking Development' »

If you want to expand Blenders Add-menu with your own custom objects, this tutorial teaches you how to use simple Python scripting to do just that. The tutorial goes through the process of adding a custom plane to the Add=>Mesh-menu.

Go on and read the tutorial.

You all may remember the message about Ohloh beta from back in October 2006. Well, the people at Ohloh have worked hard to improve their site, and many new cool features have been implemented that makes it very nice to compare open source projects to each other. And the Ohloh metrics for Blender show steady growth and no signs of slowing down!

Continue Reading 'Update on Ohloh metrics for Blender' »

Glossy reflections and refractions in the internal renderer has been wanted by lots of users for a long time. Now development of a new patch doing this is shaping up. Matt Ebb (broken) is developing this patch with the assistance of Brecht, the developer of the Sub Surface Scattering in Blender 2.44. The results so far are very interesting.

Continue Reading 'Glossy Reflections/Refractions' »

Tolobán (Jorge Rocha) has recently posted a thread in the tutorial section of the Blender Artists Forums. He describes how to properly model basic clothing and how to do Softbody simulation with it. The advanced level tutorial is divided into parts (posts) and is still a work in progress, but what has already been posted is very educational!

Go to "Softbody clothes that work (warning, lots of images)"

Can you see the difference between a fake and a genuine smile? This small test on the BBC Science and Nature website lets you test yourself with 20 different persons smiling. This is not just a fun psychology test – for an animator it's a little gem of reference material.

Continue Reading '"Spot the Fake Smile" Quiz' »

Martin White the nominee of the 2005 Suzanne Award for the Best Animation Artwork has completed his 20min film entitled: The Goat, The Boy And The Sun.

Martin has been inspired to make 3d animated films since seeing the animated film Tron as very small child. Today with tools available pretty cheap for the masses, Mr. White finally had the chance to make something out of his life.

Continue Reading '"The Goat, The Boy and The Sun" by Martin White' »

Congratulations to the winner of the 2007 Blender F1 Challenge! Out of no less than 55 contestants, the voters have voted Joel Hewitt the winner of this year's F1 Challenge.

Continue Reading 'Blender F1 Challenge Winner Announced!' »

It is finally time to vote for the winner of the 2007 Blender F1 Challenge. No less than 55 contestants participated this time, so there is quite a run for the 1st prize (A Blender Logo T-Shirt, Animusic 2 DVD, “Introducing Character Animation with Blender” book by Tony Mullen with a Sybex logo T-shirt).

Continue Reading 'Blender F1 Challenge Voting Has Begun!' »

Mike Smick wrote to us regarding a Blender class he'll be teaching.

Nothing big, but I'm teaching a 2 part 3 hour (6 hr total) Blender class in Kansas City on July 18 and July 19. It's through a community class summer program of University of Missouri Kansas City. It's called "Introduction to 3D graphics using Blender."

Continue Reading 'Blender Class in Kansas City, Missouri, USA – July 18 and 19' »

Ricardo Graça has made this no less than 6 min short, which is quite an achievement. He made it all by himself and spent about 2 years working on/off to complete it. "Nós somos assim" is Portuguese and means "That’s what we are".

Continue Reading '"Nos somos assim" – Brazilian short' »

Campbell Barton (ideasman42) has come up with a new method of achieving NPR (Non Photo Realistic) renderings with a sketchy look. This method differs from many others in that it is not that much a post or 2D based effect, but an actual alteration of the geometry itself using Blender’s modifiers.

Continue Reading 'NPR rendering with modifiers' »

As we all know, Blender is open for customization as it is open-source. Rarely though do we actually see any projects customizing Blender much, but here is one example: NeuroVR editor.

Continue Reading 'NeuroVR Editor, Built in Blender' »

There seems to be some spring cleaning and rearrangement around Blender these days. An announcement regarding projects.blender.org has been made by Ton Roosendaal.

Continue Reading 'Projects.blender.org SVN Migration' »