Article submitted by Chris Want. Student Jingyuan Huang (aka yukishiro) has been working hard on her Google Summer of Code project "Blender Light Paint using Spherical Harmonics", an interactive tool for artists to create, modify, and preview image-based lighting environments specified by HDR light probe images.

Continue Reading 'GSoC Light Paint, Stage 1' »

Marco Rapino is doing the coolest experiments with Blender. Last time, he linked his N95's accelerometer to Blender. Today, he shows how to do real-time laser or object tracking using nothing more than a webcam, a laser pointer and a pen.

Continue Reading 'Object and laser tracking in Blender' »

The Blender Foundation released Blender 2.49a earlier today. Ton Roosendaal writes:

Testing is an art… as usual a release shows the real issues! A lot of work has been done to tackle the reports in AO render, Game Engine and Sequencer especially.

Links

• 2.49a Bugfixes overview
• Download Blender 2.49a

Pablo Vazquez writes:

New Blender's event system is working like a charm, with realtime updates, and non-blocking tools. Check this video to see how I can playback an animation, while modeling, tweaking the interface, materials, rendering, everything realtime.

Marco Rapino has created a Python script to use the N95's accelerometer data in the Blender game engine.

Continue Reading 'Nokia N95 accelerometer in Blender' »

Blender 2.49 has just been released. This is a fully-loaded upgrade of Blender including many game engine improvements (video textures, real-time dome rendering, a Bullet physics upgrade, an improved Python API and a hand full of overall speedups), the long awaited texture nodes, direct painting of textures on your 3D objects, improved boolean operations, JPEG2000 support and Etch-a-ton, a sketching technique for rigging. Full details are in the *excellent* releaselogs. Many thanks to everyone who's involved in this release!

Links

• Blender 2.49 release log
• Download Blender 2.49

Maillists, forums and Twitter are buzzing about the imminent release of Blender 2.49! The new splash screen is by Clemens Granjon.

Curious about how the current builds of Blender 2.5 look? Mfoxdogg has published a number of video tours. Remember: 2.5 is still in early development - it's not even nearly finished or available for download yet, and many things can still change.

Continue Reading 'Blender2.5 Tour VI' »

Joseph Eagar has started a new weblog on the progress of the new BMesh implementation. BMesh aims to be a well-maintainable mesh implementation that allows for more powerful and stable mesh editing tools in Blender.

Continue Reading 'BMesh Status' »

Here's Martin 'theeth' Poirier's presentation on Blender 2.5 development during the Libre Graphics Meeting 2009. 35 minute video, well worth watching. Enjoy!

Blender 2.49 RC3 has just been released. Like last time there are no release notes, so we can't tell you what's been fixed, which can't be very motivating for testers and bug reporters… Anyway - enjoy!

The Blender Foundation just released Release Candidate 2 for version 2.49. There don't seem to be any RC2 specific releasenotes yet, so I can't tell you anything about it ;-) Also not all builds for all platforms are available yet - these will probably be added as soon as possible. Still - good luck testing!

Links

• Release information
• Download

Continue Reading 'Pyppet - real-time character control with sound and gamepads' »

Customised production is hot at the moment. A new service allows you to design the print on your own shoes - powered by Blender. ProMotion Studios (Jellibots, Beer Rig, Kajimba, Slimers, Lighthouse ) have done it again!

Continue Reading 'Online 3D shoe design with Blender' »

Loonsbury has created a Python script that calculates the costs of printing your designs in 3D at Shapeways. Even if you don't use Shapeways it's an interesting script because it'll calculate the volume of any closed surface. It comes with some nice features such as a manifold check (checks if the object has a closed surface), polygon counter and changeable material prices. More information on the Shapeways forum.

The GSOC 2009 has been announced and with some exciting improvements for Blender. It looks like that if all goes well we may be seeing some significant speed enhancements.

A BIG thank you to Google for supporting Blender again!

Continue Reading 'Blender - Google Summer of Code 2009' »

You can help the MakeHuman team by creating model morph targers with their new script, makeTarget.

Continue Reading 'Help MakeHuman' »