Yep, that's right. The shiny new Apricot DVDs are ready and are now at the Blender Institute, arriving today from the printing factory.

Continue Reading 'Apricot DVDs Ready!' »

Big Buck Bunny is the winner of two awards:

- The MovieSquad Audience Award (kids of 8-12 voted in the HAFF school program)
- The HAFF Audience Award (festival visitors voted, with over 40 nominations)

Continue Reading 'Two Awards for Big Buck Bunny At The Holland Animation Film Festival' »

According the the Yo Frankie site, the game will be delayed 1 week due to a serious bug in the game engine.

Continue Reading 'Yo Frankie! Delay' »

Ton just announced that the Apricot DVD Master is ready and should go to the printer today:

Just a short note! DVD is done, we’re still doing some tests, and we need Campbell for final blessings, but tomorrow it will be ready to go to the DVD reproduction factory!

Printing takes 2 weeks, shipping will happen during weekend of 1-2 november, customers will then get the copy within 1 (europe) or 2 (rest of world) weeks. Exciting!

Its release time for version 2.48! This is a game engine heavy edition, with a large amount of BGE updates and new tools. There's also plenty of non-game related updates and tools to keep everyone happy.

Continue Reading '2.48 Released!' »

Ton Roosendaal of the Blender Foundation has announced this year's Blender Conference schedule. An exciting mix from "Artificial Intelligence Nodes module inside Blender for expert modeling, texturing, animating and rendering" to Advanced Blender tips and tricks with Bassam Kurdali, Andy Goralczyk, and others. It looks to be an exciting event this year.

October 24, 25 & 26

The Yo Frankie! DVD is not out yet, but if you want to learn more about the logic used in the BGE, there is already a great page at the Blender Wiki, explaining a lot about the structure of the game.

Continue Reading 'Yo Frankie! Game engine logic explained' »

There's been a lot of posts lately about the Crystal Space version of Yo Frankie, but its time again for some more BGE updates. The first technical demo is now up for testing!

Continue Reading 'Yo Frankie! BGE Tech Demo up for Testing!' »

The Mac Gamer just published a long interview with Chris Plush and Campbell Barton, "two long haired, clever fellows working on the development of the open source game Yo! Frankie". An interesting read with lots of background information on the project!

During last month's premiere of Yo Frankie! I was in for a bit of a surprise. Clearly I hadn't been paying enough attention, but about halfway down the project the decision was made to create two versions of the game: the Blender Game Engine Edition (BGE) and the CrystalSpace Edition (CSE).

Continue Reading 'Yo Frankie! First Crystalspace builds available' »

In the next 2 months it looks like the Big Buck Bunny project will be getting a lot more publicity. Ton has had a lot of invitations for festivals and conferences etc, due to the successful release of the BBB project.

Continue Reading 'BBB conquers the Netherlands' »

(Article submitted by Emil Kjaehr, Public Relations Manager of the Game Development Camp)

When high school students from all over Denmark gather at Aalborg University to develop computer games it is likely to be the world's largest arrangement of its kind. About 50 young men and women are using a part of their summer vacation to learn more about idea development, animation, programming, and not least, cooperation - from Pablo Vasquez and others.

Continue Reading 'Computer game camp in Denmark - with a little help from Pablo!' »

It would appear the Yo Frankie! site has changed. Many were greeted with a nice graphic showing that something was indeed changing on project site, now it has completely transformed.

Continue Reading 'Yo Frankie! Somethings Changed' »

Last night the Blender Institute had a small party to celebrate the end of project Apricot, or 'Yo Frankie!'. The team did a presentation of the game and aswered questions about its creation (video of the presentation included on their blog!). We all had a lot of fun playing and trying to make the characters do crazy things ;-).

Continue Reading 'Yo Frankie! Premiere party, walk-through video' »

Last night I went to Amsterdam and met Ton Roosendaal of the Blender Foundation / Blender Institute and Pablo Vazquez of the Apricot/Yo Frankie! project, Carsten Wartmann of BlenderBuch fame (and an old NaN colleague), and Frank van Beek, who is one of the founders of NeoGeo and an old NaN colleague. I still have a headache!

Beware: this movie is 26 minutes long :)

Continue Reading 'Apricot, Blender, Beer & Thai Food' »

I'll be visiting the Blender Institute later today and I hope I'll have a chance to talk to some of the people in the Apricot team. As they're in the last days of the project I'm sure they'll be busy enough, but I might just be able to squeeze a few minutes of attention out of them. What are your burning questions for them?

Update: thanks for all your input! I'll try to get the video up later today.

There's only 20 days left of the Apricot project (Yo Frankie!). Venomgfx (Pablo) has posted a new blog on the Apricot site regarding the plans for the final few weeks.

There's also a call for documentation/tutorial ideas to be included on the DVD, along with a list of ideas already thought up by the team for us to get excited about, so get on over to the blog and let them know what you'd like to see!

Continue Reading 'Final 20 days of Apricot' »

Issue 106 of 3D World is themed around free and open-source software. Editor Jim Thacker sent us a few opening spreads and as a bonus, he threw in the full article they published on Big Buck Bunny in issue 103. I love these guys ;-)

Continue Reading 'Big Buck Bunny, Apricot in 3D World Magazine' »