Lile Hanson has created an excellent tutorial on using the new GLSL preview feature. He shows you how to combine different layers, by painting them onto your model in Texture Paint mode using the paint brush. This is similar to masking two photos in Photoshop. I've been wanting this feature for a long time and it's great to see it implemented in Blender.

Continue Reading 'Tutorial, Texturing a Head with GLSL' »

(submitted by Jordan Harris) Knowing a lot about a piece of software is one thing, but being able to explain it clearly and concisely through a tutorial is another.

William Chamberlin has recently released a fabulous tutorial on creating a realistic render of LDraw bricks. (LDraw is a virtual  library of 3D LEGO parts) It's well-written and easy to follow, so check it out.

Continue Reading 'Making Photo-Realistic Lego Bricks in Blender' »

Recently, we posted about a Blender head modeling tutorial on cgarena. Well it looks like the author has completed the ear tutorial to accompany it.

Continue Reading 'Ear modeling tutorial' »

What is a Wixel?

Continue Reading 'Wixel clouds' »

Juan Pablo Bouza has just released a new and very detailed character rig using his latest version of BlenRig (BlenRig 2.0). You might remember him as the creator of a past animation, 'The Dance of the Bashful Dwarf'.

Continue Reading 'Male BlenRig – ZEPAM' »

Ashish recently emailed us to point out a great step by step head modeling tutorial, by Carlos R. Bisquertt, done completely in Blender. It has been published by CGarena and can be found here.

Continue Reading 'Head modeling tutorial' »

This is a pretty good step by step tutorial on modeling a soccer ball in Blender. There is one possible change I'd make to the tutorial.

Note: This tutorial is great for a simple prop in the background. But it doesn't stand up in accuracy. Upon reviewing the tutorial further and receiving comments this is indeed not a completely accurate representation of a soccer/football. For a video demonstrating how to create an accurate version see here.

Continue Reading 'Modeling a soccer ball' »

This post is a review of the Body modeling DVD created by Jonathan Williamson of Montage Studio. If you don't know about Jonathan Williamson or Montage Studio I recommend browsing our past posts here at Blendernation or checking out montagestudio.org. They have a blog they keep up to date on the latest happenings at the studio.

In this review, I'll do my best to touch on each topic covered on the DVD, so the reader can get an understanding on whether or not this DVD is for them, as well as describe the quality of the content.

Continue Reading 'Review: Modeling a Female Body' »

This is an older modeling tutorial, but some might not be aware of it. The tutorial goes over modeling the engine, setting up a system of constraints to animate the model and even setting up a simple particle system to simulate the engine exhaust.

Continue Reading 'Modeling a thrust vectoring engine' »

From Montage Studio this new DVD (currently only available in download form) is set to be part of a series of exercises that will walk newer users through modeling, texturing and animating in Blender.

Continue Reading 'Training DVD: Introduction to Character Creation Part 1' »

Endi2 has made a great trio of timelapses demonstrating sculpting a head, retopologizing the resulting mesh and the mesh with a normal map applied in a GLSL enabled 3D view. I found the head sculpting video particularly good. Really they were all great to watch. Find the videos here.

Visit the cgtalk thread about the videos here.

I wanted to write a quick note to let everybody know that my advance copies of "Bounce, Tumble, and Splash! Simulating the Physical World with Blender 3D" have arrived, and I'm very excited with how they've turned out! I've taken a few snapshots and posted them here on Flickr to give people a sense of what the book looks like on the inside: Continue Reading 'Update on Bounce Tumble and Splash by Tony Mullen' »

If your in the process of learning Blender, John R. Nyquist has created a series of videos on tips in using Blender. You can check them out at YouTube.

Here is a great tutorial created by Michael Jones, showing how to model a female head. It's not a time lapse, actually the whole tutorial has more than one hour of video!

Continue Reading 'How to Model a Female Head in Blender' »

Apollos has two well written tutorials for using nodes on his site. You can check them out at at BlenderUnderground

This extensive tutorial set, created by the renowned Blender artist Andy Goralczyk, teaches artists how to craft a fully finished 3D animated scene. Tracking the evolution of an idea from creation to final render – and beyond. The result of the tutorials is an epic 90 second trailer.

Continue Reading 'Blender DVD training: Creature Factory by Andy Goralczyk' »

Just a quick note on the release of a new Blender book about architectural visualization from one of our editor's, Allan Brito. The book is called "Blender 3D Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery".

Continue Reading 'Architectural Visualization Book' »

Here is a great tutorial on how to do camera tracking in Blender, using the Voodoo camera tracker. The Voodoo software can estimates camera parameters, like position and rotation and reconstructs a 3d scene from image sequences.

Continue Reading 'Camera tracking tutorial with Blender and Voodoo' »