John Merrill reports to us that about two weeks ago "I was made aware that a video from my Blender portfolio has been mistaken for evidence of the paranormal. The video in question depicts a UFO sighting followed by an appearance of the cryptozoological monster El Chupacabras. Apparently someone found this video on my youtube page and sent it to journalist and ufologist Jaime Maussan claiming it was filmed outside of London, England in late 2007. Maussan has been airing this video on his own television show, and on others, as well as screening it at private lectures for several months."

Continue Reading 'Blender Video Mistaken for UFO Sighting' »

Michael Tieleman aka. Freakydude, has re-release an updated version of his Little Fella rig.

Continue Reading 'Re-release: little_fellaX rig.' »

by Roland Hess

While we all know that Blender doesn't need to prove itself anymore, it's nice to see things like this. It appears the Blender is being used by the evaluation department at PC World Australia for benchmarking and comparing new processors.

Continue Reading 'PC World (Australia) Using Blender for Processor Evaluation and Benchmarking' »

"It’s finally here. GameBlender - ARToolKit demo contains camera tracking in GameBlender’s virtual scene, as it is shown in Little man video. To get it working, you need to install Texture plug-in and PyARToolKit module. (I’ve sorted out some bugs in Texture plug-in, so I suggest to download actual version)."

Continue Reading 'Camera Tracking Using the Game Engine' »

Can you code 24 hours non-stop? Hackontest is a new Google-sponsored 24-hour programming competition between different open source projects. Its goals are to enhance Free Software projects according to user needs and to make visible how enthusiastically open source software is being developed.

Continue Reading 'Hackontest is a new Google-sponsored' »

Andy and Sacha will be talking at CGOverdrive in Singapore, Asia's biggest
Computer Graphics conference.

Continue Reading 'Sacha Goedegebure, Andreas Goralczyk Speaking at CG Overdrive.' »

Ollie Johnston died of natural causes on Monday April 14, 2008 in Sequim, Washington.

"Ollie was part of an amazing generation of artists, one of the real pioneers of our art, one of the major participants in the blossoming of animation into the art form we know today," said Roy E. Disney.

Continue Reading 'Ollie Johnston, last of the Disney "Nine Old Men" died at age 95' »

Eric Bilodeau, a producer/director from Canada and his team, have just finished the Sci-Fi / Horror feature film, Hunting Ground, in which they used Blender, as the software for all thier 3D effects.

Continue Reading 'Hunting Grounds' »

From Ben Hodges: "I'm just writing to help spread the word about this year's Trainings on Open Source Multimedia Instruments or TOSMI. TOSMI is a part of MEDIA, the European Union's support programme for the European audiovisual industry and is designed to introduce media professionals to the benefits and possibilities of an open source pipeline in audio-video production.

Continue Reading 'TOSMI 2008' »

Recently, I had one of those pleasant accidental finds while I was doing a search on the Internet looking for a solution to to a Blender animation issue I had. You know how it is, you start with a BlenderArtisit.org or Google search, click on the appropriate link, then while at that linked page you see something else, not related to what you want, and suddenly, after several more cliqued links, quite some time has passed. Sometimes you get a nice find, such as this animation based on the movie character Rocky.

Continue Reading 'Interview with Allan Liddle' »

After presenting two courses in Cape Town, Allan Liddle (AnyMation on the BlenderArtists forum) will be presenting an "Introduction to Blender" course in Johannesburg, South Africa. This course will cover all the basics of Blender and will enable a person to do modeling, materials and texturing, lighting, rendering, animation and basic compositing. The idea would be to get a person skilled up in Blender to the point where he/she can generate their own animation material, which they can then composite with video footage.

Continue Reading 'Blender course in Johannesburg, South Africa' »

"This year, we experimented with the program timeline providing one
week for students to discuss project ideas with their mentors and then
a single week to submit applications. We have heard feedback from the
community that it would be beneficial to provide more time for
students to submit their applications, so we've done just that.

Continue Reading 'Google Summer of Code, Deadline Extended to April 7, 2008' »

The Google Summer of Code deadline expires tomorrow, March 31, at 5:00 PM PDT

April 14 the granted students will be announced by Google.

(Chicago, IL) - ACM SIGGRAPH announces Ed Catmull, a pioneer in the entertainment and film industry and co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios, as one of the featured speakers at SIGGRAPH 2008, the 35th International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques.Catmull, President of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, has played a major role throughout the past 30 years in the invention of some of today's most fundamental computer graphics practices used widely across the motion picture industry. He is one of the original architects of the RenderMan rendering software system, which has been used to create blockbuster animated hits such as Toy Story and Finding Nemo, as well as 44 of the last 47 Visual Effects nominations to the Academy Awards®.

Continue Reading 'Pixar Animation Studios Co-Founder Chosen as a SIGGRAPH 2008 Featured Speaker' »

Andrey M. Izrantsev (aka bdancer) has started developing an integration between V-Ray and Blender. He is dividing the project into two phases; exporter and full integration. They are now at phase 1 and the exporter is ready for download.

http://blender.lugr.ru/

[Editor note - the name of the developer was corrected 3-29-08]

(Chicago, IL) - ACM SIGGRAPH officially announced the opening of submissions for FJORG! - the International Animation Contest taking place at the upcoming SIGGRAPH conference, 11 through 15 August 2008 in Los Angeles, California, USA.

FJORG! is an "iron animator" event in which competing teams from around the world have 32 hours to create a 15-second, character-driven animation while adhering to at least one of two themes and facing multiple distractions. The online submission system is now open and submission and uploaded materials are due by 7 May 2008. Submissions are open to the public.

Continue Reading 'SIGGRAPH's International Animation Competition Opens to Public' »

If you're feeling a bit down today and are looking for a "pick me up", then you need a dose of Nathan, who gives us a spirited tour of the Blender institute.

Continue Reading 'The Happy Blender Institute Tour' »

Here's an excellent tutorial by Yorik van Havre for modeling a High Rise Building

From Yorik:
"This tutorial is a general but step-by-step introduction to quick architecture modeling with Blender. It is focused primarily on architects who never really used Blender but know some 3D and who want to see how Blender can be used for their particular work.

Continue Reading 'A (first) introduction to architecture modeling with Blender' »