Some days ago I got a copy of Animating With Blender – How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish on my mailbox, and I have just finished reading it.

Continue Reading 'Animating with Blender – Book Review' »

An Italian artist known as "e.perinelli" wanted to change his workflow to using open source tools.

One day he got the chance of doing 2 simple 10 seconds TV spots for an Italian shoes company, and though it was a good idea to test this workflow on a production environment.

Continue Reading 'Two italian commercials' »

Every now and then we happen to see Blender being used in an innovative way, from Desktop Publishing to (it seems) whatever you can think of.

The artist Bert Simons, for example, uses Blender in the process of making very cool papercrafts.

After some thinking, he decided to go a step further:

Continue Reading 'Cloning yourself with Blender' »

Wanna learn two very cool things with two short video tutorials?

Continue Reading 'Two Quick and Cool Video Tutorials' »

If you are a CG professional looking for a job, it is not that usual to see Blender in the requirements list. But maybe things are going to change…

Continue Reading 'Blender as a Job Requirement' »

Every month for the last few years, the great Shawn Kelly (senior animator at ILM and co-founder of Animation Mentor) has been sharing his knowledge with cool articles called just "Tips & Tricks".

Continue Reading 'Shawn Kelly free e-book' »

Blender user Marcelo de Gomensoro Malheiros have just released the first version of his vector texture plugin: Vectex.

Not sure of what this is good for? Imagine that you have a bitmap logo applied to, say, that cool wine bottle you just finished. But now you had this great idea of making an animation where the camera zooms out from a particular detail of the logo until the whole bottle is framed.

Well… if you haven't made an insanely huge bitmap for the logo, the results on that zooming won't be as good as you though of. This is where this plugin could be very handy.

Continue Reading 'Vectex: SVG Vector Texture Plugin for Blender' »

A while ago I had the chance of getting my hands on the ManCandy FAQ DVD, made by Bassam Kurdali. This is the first title of the "Open Movie Workshop" series, produced by Blender Foundation.

After watching about 7 hours of videos I have to say: this is a must have if you are serious about making rigging and animating with Blender.

Continue Reading 'Review: The ManCandy FAQ DVD' »

As you may remember, we have talked about the development of a cloth modifier for Blender before (1, 2).

Now we come back with this to let you know about the latest announcement from Daniel Genrich (a.k.a genscher): the code is now in SVN trunk! There are even two more videos showing what you can do with it.

So… what are you waiting for? Just go to GraphicAll.org, download the build and play with it! =)

*In the time of writing this, there was only Windows and Mac OSX builds available, but it's just a matter of time until we have builds for all Operating Systems.

Have you just pressed "Ctrl W" to save the final version of that cool new animation of yours? Ready to render?

But, wait, maybe you happen to have some computers over a network. If this is your case, it's a good idea to think about Yadra.

Continue Reading 'Yadra – Yet Another Distributed Rendering App' »

The pipeline including a video compositing program like After Effects and a 3D app is quite common among motion design professionals. More than just rendering the 3D content and importing it into AE or Shake, its often needed to use the camera data to get correct tracking.

Sometime ago, when presenting Blender to a friend who works extensively with After Effects, one of the first questions he asked me was if one could smoothly get the camera data from Blender into AE. After some research on this subject, the results were not very pleasing: there was no painless way of doing it.

Well… seems that things have changed!

Continue Reading 'Camera data export script' »

Are you just beginning the craft of animation? Struggling with learning Blender hotkeys?

Don't be afraid. Everyone has to start somewhere. =)

Continue Reading 'Don't give up!' »