macouno is running an informal contest. Something that's just for fun, and the rules are loose.

"This week I received something rather nice in the mail. An absolutely gorgeous prototyped print of the original Petunia model from the guys at www.shapeways.com and I can't stop looking at it. It's rather nice to have a figure you can actually hold. But I decided I'll give it away!"

Continue Reading 'Win a plastic Petunia!' »

This extensive tutorial set, created by the renowned Blender artist Andy Goralczyk, teaches artists how to craft a fully finished 3D animated scene. Tracking the evolution of an idea from creation to final render - and beyond. The result of the tutorials is an epic 90 second trailer.

Continue Reading 'Blender DVD training: Creature Factory by Andy Goralczyk' »

News release from Oscar Alvarado of Mexico:

"This is an animated short film inspired by Mexican folklore and people's cult to death. "Llorona" is a typical folklore song that speaks about a pretty woman. In the plot of this film "Llorona" is called "La Viuda" and the story tells how this character went crazy abut the death of her man called "El Catrin".

Continue Reading 'Llorona Project' »

As I had said in a previous article, you can animate all you want, but if you don't have a good story to tell, you can have the best animaton in the world and hardly anyone will care. I came upon this animation on Vimeo the other day and it gave me a good laugh.

Continue Reading 'Floating Point' »

Just a quick note on the release of a new Blender book about architectural visualization from one of our editor's, Allan Brito. The book is called "Blender 3D Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery".

Continue Reading 'Architectural Visualization Book' »

Here are some amazing architectural walk throughs by Yorik and Maria from Brazil.

"This is a big work Maíra and me just finished… It is a series of 7 walkthrough animations for shopping mall is in Brazil. We made the whole job in about 1 month and a half, mainly because many things are repetitive and
could be copied from one to the next one, but also because we used Respower for rendering, and we were able to optimize much each animations so rendering was blazing fast.

Continue Reading 'Architectural Walk Throughs' »

It's time again to start thinking about articles, tutorials and images for Issue # 17 of Blenderart Magazine.
In this issue we are focusing on the ‘Lights! Camera! Action!’.

We are looking for tutorials, “making of” articles, and projects of interest that focus on either special techniques or tools that are used in the finals stages of a project.

Continue Reading 'Call for articles, tutorials and images for Issue # 17 of Blenderart Magazine.' »

I think that as an animator that while we all struggle to perfect our craft, one of the hardest things to do, is to come up with a good, complete storyline. What I've noticed over the years is that as Blender and it's community has matured, the story's are improving as well. As in this animation from Munich, Germany based Arondix Animations.

Continue Reading 'An Animation from Arondix Animations' »

BlendMaster pointed me to this site of a home brewed render farm made from small IKEA filing cabinet. It has an insane 24 cores, running at 2.4 Ghz each with 48 GB of ram. Pretty ingenious method. It's a Linux system using Dr Queue for render distribution.

Continue Reading 'Home Brewed 24 Core Render Farm!' »

Fweeb reported back in April about how TurboSquid had been served with DMCA takedown requests for 3D models. Well good news from the EFF regarding the B-24

Continue Reading 'B-24 Liberated!' »

Well this animation looks like it may be the first animation of a Big Buck Bunny character since the DVD release. It is from Myn.Pheo.

It looks like we are going to start seeing more of these BBB animation, so I thought that I would try and do a Friday round up each week as they come in to us.

Continue Reading 'An Animation Using a Big Buck Bunny Character.' »

My son Jonathan is graduating High School this evening and, well, I didn't anticipate this ahead of time so I don't have any articles prepared for the moment. The graduation is followed by an all night Grad party at which I'm also a chaperon, through the wee hours. So, I'll be back with a few articles late Friday. In the meantime, I'm proud of his accomplishments and wanted to share it with you, the community. I hope you don't mind me taking a liberty on this site.

Continue Reading 'My Apology and a celebration!' »

The research group ASTRA, part of the Vision Lab of the University of Antwerp, has constructed a computer "made completely from consumer hardware and contains four NVIDIA 9800GX2 graphics cards, each containing two GPUs."

Continue Reading 'Render Farm in a Box' »

Well, I guess this is JS week, I saw his breakdown of his animation in BlenderArt Magazine #16 and was curious about it. Very impressive JS. So I'd thought I'd let you all know about it just in case some of you hadn't had the chance to read BAM yet.

BTW, Guarav, Sandra & crew, outstanding issue on #16, and BAM is 2 1/2 years old now.

Continue Reading 'Tape-à-l'oeil by JS' »

"In this issue we take a look at some of the techniques used to create spectacular effects in Blender. With several areas covered such as water, smoke, fire, hair and even realistic skin, you are guaranteed to find a new technique/or tool for your next project.

So grab your copy today."

Continue Reading 'BlenderArt Magazine Issue #16, “WOW! Factor” released' »

Adam Theo wrote to tell us about his weather education series. It's very well laid out and I like the use of Blender for the 2D graphics. I also learned a thing or two about weather, mainly, beware of visiting Florida.

"Wanted to let the Blender community know of a project I'm doing in Blender. It is a short-length weekly educational series that teaches about the weather and the science of meteorology. It is starting off online (all episodes available for free streaming and download), but I am pushing hard to get it on television stations and directly in classrooms.

Continue Reading 'Weather and the science of meteorology educational series.' »

Here are two excellent time lapse modeling sessions from JS and Jonathan Williamson. I like thier choice of music too!

"In our spare time JS and I have sat down and recorded two new time lapses.
Timelapse (sped-up) videos are one of our ways of demonstrating our work flow to others.

Continue Reading 'Time lapse modeling from J.S' »

Karl wrote:

To celebrate the release of Blender 2.46 and Big Buck Bunny (okay, and as an excuse to play around with Blender's cool new features!), I've ported Andrew Silke's well-known "Generi Rig" to Blender. Generi is a very popular Maya rig that's regularly entered into animation competitions such as 11 Second Club, and now Blender users have access to him too! :)

Continue Reading 'Generi Model and Rig Ported to Blender' »