Over the last few weeks I've been quietly making a few technical changes to the site. For those of you who are interested in such things, I did a short writeup of my actions. If you couldn't care less about web technology, I'm still interested in hearing if you think the site's speed has improved!

Continue Reading 'Some Website Optimizations' »

Last week I invited all of you to design a new BlenderNation header and we received quite a few excellent entries. Today I made my first selection: it's the banner by Gustav the Mushroom. I selected it because it fits very well in the site design and I like the clean, mathematical 3D look. Congratulations Gustav! Your image will be on the site until next week.

Continue Reading 'Design the BlenderNation Header - First Result!' »

We regularly invite Blender artists to design a header graphic for us so that we can have a new look every month or so. I thought it would be nice to change the rules a little and run a 'BlenderNation Header Contest'.

Continue Reading 'Design the BlenderNation Header' »

Fresh Blender News, Every Day… BUT NOT TODAY!

Yesterday morning, the database RAID server that hosts BlenderNation crashed and our ISP has been working frantically to get everything back online. At the moment, we're still missing about two weeks worth of content but we should get that back later today. More information will follow..

SIGGRAPH 2007 has recognized the media coverage by BlenderNation of Blender development and CG news by approving us as an official media company to cover any of the events at this years show.

Continue Reading 'BlenderNation to officially cover SIGGRAPH 2007' »

After working on BlenderNation every single day for the last year and a half, it's time for me to take a break. My personal live is quite busy at the moment: I bought a new house that I'll need to work on, my own company is doing very well and last but not least, I'm going to be a father in October! :) Sometimes it's just too hard to also spend 1-2 hours a day on running BlenderNation so I decided I could use a 'vacation' from running this website.

Continue Reading 'I'm on Vacation!' »

• Linux vs. Windows
  In this corner, weighing in with NTFS, Microsoft's flagship product, Windows XP! And in this corner, weighing in with ext3, staying the course with open source, Linux! Who will be victorious in the battle of the decade, nay, the century! MPAN3 pits them together to see who renders the fastest.

Continue Reading 'One Year Ago on BlenderNation' »

Maybe you've seen the Téo & Téa Banner on the homepage of BlenderNation during the last week. This is off-topic, but I'd like to explain why it is there.

Continue Reading 'What's up With the Teo & Tea Banner?' »

• Blender to 3Delight Export Script
  3Delight is a fast RenderMan-compliant renderer featuring multi-threading, ray tracing, global illumination, motion blur, depth of field, programmable shaders (RenderMan Shading Language support), quality antialiasing, and antialiased multi-depth shadow maps.

Continue Reading 'One Year Ago on BlenderNation' »

• Blender Rendering Engine Options
  "Gentleman, start your render engines. New renderers are available for Blender sporting features like 64-bit support, multi-threads, and XML scene format."

Continue Reading 'One Year Ago on BlenderNation' »

We've had tons of posts on this website, but on a blog the past is easily forgotten. I thought it would be fun to take a look at what happened one year ago on BlenderNation and in the Blender community in general by starting a 'One Year Ago' column that we'll post each week.

Continue Reading 'One Year Ago on BlenderNation' »

In an effort to keep the site spam free I re-queued all the comments in the database into our spamfilter today. It suspected 179 messages to be spam, but they were all genuine (which means the spamfilter was pretty good in the first place!). I did have to approve all of them though and as a result, a few hundred extra notification mails have been sent out. Sorry for that!

Today I got confirmation of my bank that my creditcard limit has been raised so I could finally place the order for our Fundraiser on www.oxfamunwrapped.com!

Continue Reading 'BlenderNation Fundraiser: Donation Done!!' »

Already more than three weeks have passed since we finished our BlenderNation Birthday Fundraiser so it's time for an update. The status so far: the money (€ 2,995,-) was transported from PayPal to my private account within one week. So far so good. But then there was a bit of an unexpected complication: my creditcard is only good for € 2,500,- per month! Feeling pretty stupid that I hadn't thought of that before, I have now requested an increase in my spending limit which I expect to receive next week or so. Once it's in, the classroom, goats and alpaca's are good to go!

I'll keep you posted,

Bart

That's right. To celebrate BlenderNation's first Birthday, rather than giving BN something, let's give a whole school to those who need it.

WE MADE IT: $3650 RAISED IN FOUR DAYS!!

Don't stop giving yet; read the update at the bottom of this article.

Continue Reading 'BlenderNation Birthday Present: A Whole School' »

If you're reading this, then we're either: celebrating new year (or preparing to, depending on our timezone), or recovering from it ;-) But don't let that stop us from wishing you an excellent 2007! May all your feature requests be granted and all your Blender projects be even better than last year!

Yesterday I was posting a new event (a Blender demo in Baton Rouge) to the Event Calendar and I was wondering if people actually notice new events showing up there. So let me ask you: do you read the Event Calendar and do you notice when new stuff appears in it? Is it a useful part of the website? Any suggestions for improvement?

Continue Reading 'Question: How Does the Event Calendar Work for You?' »

We have few announcements to make: we have two new team members, did a software upgrade on the site and I'll be away for a few weeks. Read on for the details!

Continue Reading 'BlenderNation News' »