Daniel Martinez Lara seems to be getting quite well into Blender. He has now made this simple but great leg rig. It uses very few handles (only around 2-3) without compromising the functionality even the slightest.

Continue Reading 'Leg Rig by Daniel Martinez Lara' »

Robert Schober (roboshobo) has done another music video using Blender. Nearly a year ago, we wrote about the ”Dear Valentine” music video he did.

This time around it’s “Machines” by the band Kiss Kiss. The music video has a nice little hunter vs. prey themed story, and the very nice rock music goes along well with its stylistic look.

Continue Reading '"Machines" - Music Video Made With Blender' »

Brecht is developing this new sub-surface scattering node. Though it’s still under development it yields quite nice results already, and it seems Brecht has a few ideas up his sleeve on how to improve it even further in the future.

Continue Reading 'SSS Node under Development' »

Howitzer has posted instructions on the Blender Artists Forums on how to optimize the Blender performance of old ATI cards using an old driver. This has been reported to work really well.

Continue Reading 'Boost the Performance of Old ATI Cards under Windows' »

In 3D World’s question of the month the question “How do I animate a raft adrift on the surface of the ocean?” was answered by Bassam Kurdali with a Blender tutorial. It is now free for download in .pdf form complete with sample files at different stages.

Continue Reading 'Blender Ocean Tutorial in Computer Arts Magazine' »

Have you ever tried tiling a texture, only to find that the lighting in the texture image is not uniform? Dark and light areas shows like a pattern throughout the tiles, ruining your image even though your edges might be seamless enough?

Continue Reading 'The Power of the High Pass Filter for Texturing' »

The company behind this chip has upon request received original renderers of Elephants Dream from the Blender Foundation. These were used to test the 2K video screening capabilities of their new JPEG 2000 decoder chip.

Continue Reading 'Elephants Dream Used to Test JPEG 2000 Decoder Chip' »

Blenderart Magazine is preparing for their 10th issue and they are looking for content. Sandra Gilbert sent in the following call for content:

It's time again to start thinking about articles, tutorials and images for Issue #10 of Blenderart Magazine. In this issue we are focusing on 'Organic Modeling'.

Continue Reading 'Blenderart Magazine #10 Call for Content' »

Imperitor wrote this nice grass tutorial on the Blender Artists forums. It goes through the process of making grass in Blender step by step in an easily comprehendible way. This is a good tutorial for anyone wanting to make grass in Blender, or someone new to the particle system.

Continue Reading 'Grass Tutorial' »

This deserves a headline here at BlenderNation.com for sure! Tim Ellis (also known as “sonix” on the forums) has done an incredibly photorealistic image for the Maxwell Rendering Contest. It was modelled in Blender, and rendered with the widely acclaimed Maxwell renderer. Competition was tough, many great entries were submitted, but Tim Ellis came out on top. He landed on no less than a clear 1st place!

Continue Reading 'Tim Ellis wins Maxwell Rendering Contest, Writes Tutorial' »

Matray, a French director, did this music video using some of the new features in Blender 2.43, especially the displacement modifier. Though Matray himself modestly considers this an unserious “test”, it’s really an art piece in my opinion. Very surreal and lovely style!

Continue Reading '"Meischeid" Music Video' »

Viralata has written two tutorials on his site using some of the new features of Blender 2.43 to achieve nice toon and sketch styled renderings. Are you tired of doing the same old photorealistic rendering? Try this out!

Continue Reading 'Toon/sketch rendering with nodes' »

Kitsu (also known as Kitsune) won the latest modeling challenge “Tentacles” on the well-known subdivisionmodeling.com forums. In his entry, he utilized Blender’s new sculpting feature very well, giving the finished model a great level of detail.

Continue Reading 'Blender User Wins Subdivisionmodeling.com Challenge!' »

Blender’s Video Sequence Editor (in short the “VSE”) is an old feature that has been used to edit Elephants Dream and also is used to edit in the Plumiferos project. After being almost forgotten for a time, the new focus made it take on as enthusiastic a development as the rest of Blender. Roger Wickes has written a section of the Wiki, in which he describes the use of the VSE in a very comprehensible way.

Continue Reading 'Wiki: Blender Video Sequence Editor' »

No 3D model is much without suitable textures. CG Choice Award Winner Stefan Morrell shows methods and tips on painting high-quality hard surface textures in this tutorial.

Continue Reading 'Hard Surface Texture Painting' »

BlenderGalactica.com is a website focused on the science-fiction universe of Battlestar Galactica. BlenderGalactica’s goal is to get the entire fleet of spaceships from Battlestar Galactica into downloadable packed .blends (many with textures as well).

Continue Reading 'The BlenderGalactica.com Project' »

Blender is used very much in low-budget amateur movies. “Ideality” is a good example of this, and its moment in the BlenderNation spotlight has arrived.

Continue Reading 'Blender in Amateur Movie “Ideality”' »

Some of you out there may already be familiar with this search feature, but for everybody else, it's just a hidden goldmine waiting to be explored. Google Patents searches within a library of currently 7 million patents. Almost all of these have more or less detailed drawings included. Perfectly suited as blueprints or references for 3D modeling!

Continue Reading 'More Blueprints!: Google Patents' »