Industry-Leading Open Format for the Exchange of 3D Assets Supporting New Compliance Opportunities; OpenCOLLADA Support for 3ds Max & Maya; Dassault Systemes Announces Broad Support for COLLADA, Integration with Google, EA, Blender & Yumetech

Continue Reading 'The Khronos Group Announces Significant COLLADA Momentum at SIGGRAPH 2009' »

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!' »

We've mentioned this before, but I think it's important enough to mention it again: the Blender 2.5 overview page contains everything you need to know about 2.5 except the release date. It is regularly updated so it's a great source of information.

Christiaan Bakker [AniCator] presents a clever script to size and orient a 3D skybox around your game engine scene.

Continue Reading '3D Skybox in the Blender Game Engine' »

Google O3D is an open-source web API for creating rich, interactive 3D applications in the browser. Gerhard Völkl has created a script to export Blender content directly to it.

Continue Reading 'Blender Exporter for Google O3D' »

Dalai Felinto has been working on a Game Dome project for the last several months.
Dome Mode in Blender Game Engine.

This feature allows artists to visualize their interactive projects within an  immersive dome environment. In order to make it an extensible tool, we are supporting Fulldome, Truncated domes (front and rear), Planetariums and domes with spherical mirrors.

Continue Reading 'Blender Games in the iDome' »

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