The last five team members have just been announced by the Blender Foundation! All team members and their portfolios are presented on the 'About Durian' page now as well.

Continue Reading 'Final Five Durian Members Announced!' »

Two great Durian updates just came in: they've received almost 150 submissions - 100 more than for Big Buck Bunny. I guess that participating in a Blender Open Project is gaining more and more attention in the CG world!

Continue Reading 'Durian update: 150 submissions, and DivX is main sponsor' »

We had numerous reports of a product called '3DMagix' which is just a rebranded version of Blender that sells for $47.

For all the Googlers who are looking for 3DMagix: Blender is free, open source software. So save your money, and download Blender for free - it's completely legal!

Continue Reading '3DMagix: re-branding and selling the free software Blender' »

A quick reminder for Blender artists who are interested in joining the Durian Open Movie team: the call for participation closes on June 10th.

If you can recall a previous article, the Blender Game Engine is currently undergoing huge developments led by Entertainment Arts Research. Here's a 'brief' update of some of the new things we're seeing appearing currently, plus a more recent demonstration video of Yo Frankie.

Continue Reading 'BGE Updates + New YoFrankie Video!' »

From blender.org: "After tests with English subtitles - which didn't work at all - we decided to produce [the Venom's Lab DVD] with 2 audio tracks, Spanish and English.". That is a most excellent decision guys! It will make the DVD much, much, much more useful for everybody. PLUS we get to hear Venom's cool English/Spanish accent as a bonus :)

(PS: if you haven't seen it yet, check out the cool Venom's Lab trailer)

An international group of Blender Maya users are working on their own version of Big Buck Bunny. Their story:

The Story will be based of the BBB movie. The squirrel is possessive, and wants to get rid off all other animals from the forest by making traps to get rid of his first arch enemy, The Bird, who doesn’t care about what the squirrel think and get on with his daily life.

Continue Reading ''Against Another' - Community movie project based on Big Buck Bunny' »

It's finally here!  The Blender Foundation's next open movie, the Durian Project, has been announced and it's looking awesome.  Check out the Durian Project now!

Continue Reading 'Durian Project Announced!' »

The Blender Foundation has announced a new training DVD called 'Venom's Lab!' by Yo Frankie! team member Pablo Vazquez.

Continue Reading 'New Training DVD: Venoms Lab!' »

The Blender Foundation have just published their latest download statistics. Without even including some file sharing sites there were over 3.4 Million Blender downloads last year!

Here's an interesting bit of news: someone converted the model of Big Buck Bunny to Maya.

Continue Reading 'Big Buck Bunny character converted to Maya' »

It may come as a bit of a surprise that not everything about Blender is Open Source - the logo and the brand name 'Blender'. This is not uncommon for Open Source projects - the Mozilla Foundation and TYPO3 association (I'm an avid TYPO3 user) both do something similar with their brand and logo. The Blender Foundation have now published a set of proper guidelines for the use of the Blender logo.

Continue Reading 'Blender logo usage guidelines' »

After the exceptional results from the CGenie Survey we reported on in February, CGenie has interviewed Ton Rosendaal about his views on the survey and the future of Blender.

Continue Reading 'CGenie Survey - Followup Interview' »

The results of Campbell's YoFrankie level design contest are now online. The first, second and third place entries are certainly very nice and worthy of their prizes.

Continue Reading 'YoFrankie Level Design Contest Winners!' »

Campell Barton (Ideasman42) has started a new contest in the wake of the successful release of Yo Frankie. The aim of the contest is to develop a new level for the game, and there's prizes up for grabs for those who do best!

Continue Reading 'Yo Frankie - Level Competition' »

The Institute for Network Cultures has invited the core developers of Blender to Amsterdam for a 'Blender sprint'.

Winter Camp is an event, organized by the Institute of Network Cultures and will take place 3-7 March ‘09 in Amsterdam. A dozen networks (each of which has 5-15 people) have been invited to work on their specific current topics. The Winter Camp will be a mix of presentations and work spaces with an emphasis on getting things done.

Continue Reading 'Blender 2.5 Winter Camp' »

Great news!  Ton posted an update about Blender 2.5 and it's sounding great!  (Thanks to Tim Suess for the head's up!)  Here's a little snippet of the report:

Continue Reading 'Blender 2.5 Progress!' »