Microsoft's Open Source support has recently contacted the Blender developers regarding their file format support. Groklaw picked it up and wrote an interesting piece on it.

Here's a short tutorial that'll explain how to create some rather realistic twirling smoke.

Continue Reading 'Creating Twirling Smoke' »

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."

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

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

Like many other apps, Blender does not work well with Arabic or other right-to-left written languages. ArabBlend writer Islam Abofarha explains how to work around this.

Continue Reading 'Using Arabic Scripts With Blender' »

The visual effects capabilities of Blender are constantly growing by leaps and bounds. A major milestone for this relentless progress will be the integration of true volumetrics in Blender. It's on the horizon…

Continue Reading 'True Volumetrics in early development for Blender' »

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' »

From April 11th to the 17th of this year, a veritable boatload of people from all facets of the television, film, and radio production world descended upon Las Vegas to attend the National Association of Broadcasters Show. I was there for 3 days of the conference and got to experience and learn all kinds of interesting things. And yes, there were even some things there related to Blender! Fair warning: I forgot my good camera, so please forgive the blurry, low resolution camera phone images.

Continue Reading 'NAB Show 2008' »

In recent months, 3D model repositories such as TurboSquid have been served with DMCA takedown requests for 3D models of a variety of commercial and military vehicles based on trademark infringement for the vehicle names. This came to a head near the end of March when Lockheed Martin issued a takedown order for models of a B-24 bomber modeled by John MacNeill. TurboSquid complied, but now the Electronic Freedom Foundation has stepped up in MacNeill's defense, issuing an open letter to Lockheed's licensing agency in an effort to get his models back up.

Continue Reading 'EFF Goes to Aid 3D Modelers' »

"Two treasure-hunting teens sneak into an abandoned military base looking for a rumored gold cache. Once inside, they accidentally activate a top secret relic of the Cold War - a huge mobile weapons system bent on protecting the base from all intruders. Cut off from every exit, the pair must fight to survive."

Hangar No. 5 is an action-packed short film featuring Talan Torriero from Laguna Beach and Charity Shea from The Best Years. Produced by Northwestern University undergraduate students, Hangar No. 5 was shot during October 2007 around the Chicagoland area. The film will premier in June 2008.

Continue Reading 'New Hangar No. 5 Trailer' »

This script allows the user to quickly create various types of screw fasteners.

Continue Reading 'Bolt Factory Script' »

Satoshi Yamasaki (yamyam) is the operator of the Japanese blender.jp community site. His Blender book for beginners was published last month.

Continue Reading 'New Japanese Blender Book: 'Hajimete no Blender'' »

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' »

The projects that will participate on the Google Summer of Code 2008 have been announced, and again Blender was awarded with 6 projects!

Continue Reading 'Blender awarded 6 GSoC projects' »

"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.' »

Recently reported, the Powua renderfarm is offering rendering time on their servers as prizes for their animation contest.

Continue Reading 'Last Chance for Submission into Powua Animation Contest' »