The Blender Foundation issued a press release at SIGGRAPH yesterday with information on Blender 2.5 and its relation to Durian. For the first time ever, an expected release date was included!

Continue Reading 'Blender 2.5 'unveiled' at SIGGRAPH, expected release date announced!' »

Like all open projects by the Blender Foundation, project Durian will be partially financed pre-selling the movie, it's assets and extensive documentation and (video-) training material on DVD. If you pre-order before september 15th your name will also appear in the movie's credits!

The Durian blog now has a cool live sales-thermometer to see how they're doing. Did you order a copy yet?

Links

• Durian blog announcement
• Blender E-shop

Ton Roosendaal received an honorary doctorate in technology at the Leeds Metropolitan University yesterday. Here's a short first interview with him.

Ton Roosendaal will be receiving an honorary doctorate at the Leeds Metropolitan University in the UK later today for his work on Blender. A streaming video of the entire ceremony (direct link for Windows Media Player here) will start at 11am UK time (GMT+1) and is expected to last for two hours. As it will cover multiple persons, we can't predict when Ton will be on.

More details and photographs will follow later today.

Update: Ton was the first graduant to speak. His part is over now.

Update: 07-16-09 4:11PM CEST: Added pictures – Tim

Update: 07-17-09: More pictures added. Video registration of the entire event. Ton makes his appearance around 22:30.
Continue Reading 'BREAKING – Ton Roosendaal to receive honorary doctorate today' »

The Blender Store or 'E-Shop' has just had a major makeover. Now its looking more pro than ever!

Continue Reading 'Blender Store Makeover' »

Ben Dansie (of Montage Studio,) has made a very impressive demo reel for his Durian Project application(Ben is one of the few artists who made the Durian team!) Check out the video now! Continue Reading 'Ben Dansie's Durian Demo Reel' »

YoFrankie is still very much alive! Campbell Barton just posted an update on the YoFrankie Blog.

Continue Reading 'YoFrankie 1.1 Released' »

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' »