Hamed Zaghaghi has been developing these features and they're currently being reviewed by Ton. The results look very promising.

Continue Reading 'Sun, Sky/Atmosphere, and Aerial Perspective features in development' »

Development continues full speed ahead on 2.5. Thankfully keeping us informed some developers have been posting youtube videos of new additions/works in progress as they happen. We thank you for this.

*Note: These are early interface development videos. Consider them as such.*

Continue Reading '2.5 Development Demos available on youtube' »

Nathan Letwory is integrating Blender and MySQL, which allows new ways of using Blender such as working with huge scene files or distributed/team work. If you though that is cool, wait for this: he has been invited by MySQL to present this at the MySQL Conference in Santa Clara on April 16! After the conference he'll be showcasing his work and for that he can use your help.

Continue Reading 'DbBlender at MySQL Conference, Santa Clara - Help Needed' »

Boids particle systems can be set to follow basic rules and behaviors, something close to artificial intelligence. They're useful for simulating flocks, swarms, herds and schools of various kind of animals, insects and fishes.

Continue Reading 'Simulating Flocks, Herds, and Swarms using Experimental Boids Particles' »

When using multiple lamps, it is often evident that the light boundaries give a banding effect. Using Cubic correction of the diffuse values, the light boundaries are blended, providing significantly improved results.

Continue Reading 'Smoother Diffuse Shading in Development' »

Weightpaint uses a hardcoded range for visualizing weights. To allow users to have more accurate visualisations for what color represents what value, you can now edit a custom range for weights. Also, current Modifiers are a linear stack in Blender and are applied sequentially. With Multi Modifiers, you will be able to mix the results with a weight group.

Continue Reading 'New Custom Weight Range Visualization and, Multi Modifiers' »

Ton Roosendaal presented the first architecture sketches for the upcoming Blender 2.50 during last week's Blender Developers meeting. He talks about things such as the new Model/View/Controller model and the new event handling model, both of which will make it much easier and cleaner to write new Blender functionality. There's a *long* report on this meeting on the wiki.

Continue Reading 'First Architecture Sketches of Blender 2.50' »

Peach is delivering new Blender functionality almost every week, it seems! There's information on the new particle system on blender.org.

Continue Reading 'New Particle System' »

Development continues on Blender this latest new feature includes improved baking options.

Continue Reading 'New Object-to-Object and Normal Map Baking Options' »

Matt Ebb finally found some time to hack some new Blender code and, as always, the results are impressive. This time, he's been working on a reflection node and image based lighting.

Continue Reading 'Experimental: Reflection Node, Image Based Lighting' »

Iranian Blender developer Hamed Zaghaghi has been working on some rather cool new functionality for the Blender game engine. Not only did he add 2D image filtering capabilities (like motion blur), he also worked on a patch to speed up the OpenGL display of the game engine.

Continue Reading 'Game Engine Development: 2D Image Filtering, Speedup' »

The Peach project is already giving Blender a new Tool! It`s the Mesh Deform Modifier. This is a very cool new tool, which allows us to deform a mesh object, using another object. The modifiers works like the Lattice tool, but we can shape the deforming object with almost any kind of shape.

Continue Reading 'Mesh Deform Modifier' »

A new modeling system is in development for Blender, called B-Mesh. If you are curious about the new capabilities of the B-Mesh, ZanQdo was kind enough to produce a great video showing a preview of the system.

Continue Reading 'B-Mesh Video Preview' »

The Plumiferos team has made their version of Blender, called PlumiBlender, available to all.
Continue Reading 'PlumiBlender available at Graphicall' »

Tom Musgrove was interviewed by Computer World recently. Its an interesting read.

Continue Reading 'Q&A: Tom Musgrove Discusses Blender Development' »

Some of you may remember this post. It ended up being lost when we had some hosting issues. I'm reposting it for those that may have missed it and for reference for those that are interested.

Continue Reading 'Siggraph 2007 Papers' »

The Blender 2.45 release, which we posted about earlier, is now official! Remember that this is a bugfix release. Having said that, it should still make your life a little-bit easier.

Continue Reading 'Blender 2.45 Officially Released' »

It looks like Blender 2.45 has been quietly making its way to download.blender.org. There's no official announcement from the Blender Foundation about this release yet so we can't give you any further info. Also, things may still change. But if you're having a dull weekend go ahead and enjoy!