A while ago I had the chance of getting my hands on the ManCandy FAQ DVD, made by Bassam Kurdali. This is the first title of the "Open Movie Workshop" series, produced by Blender Foundation.

After watching about 7 hours of videos I have to say: this is a must have if you are serious about making rigging and animating with Blender.

Continue Reading 'Review: The ManCandy FAQ DVD' »

Towards the middle of last year I was contracted by Natcoll (An educational publisher) to write a book that introduces school students to Blender. After much hard work the book is now printed and is being sold to schools around the world.

Continue Reading 'Blender in classrooms' »

Created in 1947, "Advanced Animation" has often been called the best "how-to" book on cartoon animation ever published.

Continue Reading 'Preston Blair's "Advanced Animation" (1st Edition)' »

Pavel Siska wrote to tell us "This is a Czech (country which I come from)book about Blender 3D, it is basic book for beginners and covers all topic… I am sure it is pretty interesting, because this is first Czech book about Blender…"

With the new particle system coming out likely in the coming Peach release, we all probably want to learn more about how it works. So I've put together a collection of links to learn the new system. If you come across any resources yourself, let us know and we'll add them to the list.

Continue Reading 'New particle system learning resources' »

Roland Hess (aka harkyman), editor and lead author for “The Essential Blender” and creator of the BlenderPeople crowd simulation project, has been busy with yet another promising project…“The Beast”.

Continue Reading '"The Beast" - animated short/book project by Roland Hess' »

Remember that training DVD we talked about? Well not only is it now shipping. But Montage Studio also has made it, and the previous modeling a female head DVD available in downloadable versions.

*warning mild nudity*

For more information read the blog post on Montage Studio.

I can tell you this is an excellent DVD. I have seen much of it already and it goes into great detail. Jonathan does a good job of going through the process and giving plenty of step by step info on his workflow so you can easily follow along.

Continue Reading 'Modeling the Female Body DVD available for preorder' »

Neal Hirsig, a professor at the prestigious Tufts University, has created an online course to teach students to use Blender. The course is available to all for free on Hirsig's website.

Continue Reading 'Tufts University Online Blender Course' »

This is a follow-up to the article we posted a few days ago about a free Blender compositing tutorial available through an agreement between CG Channel and cmiVFX. The .blend file for that tutorial has been released! The demand for that tutorial has been the highest of any other tutorial on cmiVFX's on-demand player.

Continue Reading 'CG Channel/cmiVFX Tutorial .blend File Released!' »

Poland has a large and active Blender community, and now Kamil Kuklo and Jarosław Kolmaga have written the first Polish Blender book. It is now available for ordering.

Continue Reading 'Polish Blender Book: 'Blender. Kompendium'' »

Spanish publisher Anaya Multimedia has translated Tony Mullen's 'Introducing Character Animation with Blender' into Spanish.

Continue Reading ''Animación de Personajes con Blender'' »

The crew of Blenderart magazine is organizing a special project, about the Blender material node system. They want to create a material node set-up "cookbook". If you have a cool node set-up, this may be your chance to publish a tutorial at Blenderart!

Continue Reading 'Blenderart Special Project: Material Node set-up 'Cookbook'' »

3Dtutorials has a Fluid Simulator tutorial available from Stephen Meli (Lord of the Rings Junkie).

Continue Reading 'Fluid Simulator Tutorial' »

A new book called "Starter Kit Blender", has been recently published by Pearson/Campus Press.

Continue Reading 'New French Blender Book "Starter Kit Blender"' »

Cellstorm has been collecting all kinds of Blender-related information in a FreeMind MindMap, which he has now published online.

Continue Reading 'Humongous Blender Resources MindMap' »

Remember the 'Color Difference Keying with Nodes' by David Weese? Well, David has now produced an hour long DVD teaching you the secrets of successful keying.

Continue Reading 'Blender SFX Workshop DVD 'Greenscreen Nightmare!' Released' »

Olivier Saraja wrote to inform us of the fact that 'La 3D Libre avec Blender' is now in its second edition. It has been fully updated to be compliant with Blender 2.44.