I had a lot of fun reading yesterday's comments on the 'Hidden 3DS Max Display Mode' - thanks, everyone! :) Although it's not widely known, the RT button DOES have a function. I had a chat about it with Ton Roosendaal and he wrote the following article:

The "rt" button in Blender is there for developers to allow debugging or to hide testing. This value is by-definition not saved in (or read from) a Blender file, so you have to set it each time when you start Blender.

Continue Reading 'History of RT!' »

We receive regular reports of people or companies who are selling Blender on eBay. What should we, as the Blender community, think of this? I'll explore some of the do's and don'ts of this practice in this article and I'll suggest a course of action if you run into one.

Continue Reading 'Selling Blender on eBay' »

This amazing rig demonstrated by Bassam at the Blender Conference is available for testing. Bassam plans to release a new version of Mancandy with each release of Blender. Thus ensuring that the latest goodies are included in the rig.

Continue Reading 'New Mancandy Available for Testing' »

While working with Blender it's easy to forget what a math processing powerhouse it really is. It's all hidden behind buttons and windows, but behind the screens there's a LOT of calculus going on. I ran into an article called 'Blender’s Orientation Matrix' by Luma (the makers of the game Club Silo) which kind of puts things in perspective again.

Continue Reading 'Blender Math' »

More proof that Blender makes an excellent commercial tool. Zac Duff (Greenlig@blenderartists) utilized Blender to create a 7.5 minute animation for an Engineering company. The animation while not full of special effects like hair or softbody dynamics does show the range of flexibility and how Blender can be used within a commercial project.

Continue Reading 'Commercial work: animation for an Australian mine.' »

Steve Alvis wrote us about using Blender to import data from Graph Calc, a free graphing calculator for Windows and Linux which can be used to graph 3d functions.

Steve writes:

You are not only limited to Cartesian coordinates, but you can use polar coordinates too. The 3d graphs can export to DXF which are compatible with blender. You just have to remove doubles in the edit mode to make it look right.

Nice tip - thanks Steve!

Not Blender news, but think of Jahshaka as Blender's cousin. As an open source project Jahshaka was part of the Open Source Pavillion at Siggraph with us. Jahshaka is a realtime editing and effects system supporting Linux, OsX, Irix and Windows, and is certainly an up-and-comer in the open source graphics/film community. They certainly got plenty of attention at Siggraph, so I expect nothing but good things coming from the team.

Continue Reading 'Jahshaka V2 Startup Screen Finalists' »

Okay, this post is going to be a bit silly but I had a laugh when it happened to me so I guess I'll share it with you!

Continue Reading 'Blender Trash' »

Have you ever wondered where the Blender logo came from? Or even why our beloved program is called Blender? Joeri Kassenaar gives us a history of the Blender logo (along with some interesting history of Blender itself).

As far as Suzanne goes, the almighty Wikipedia answers all! It's an interesting parallel that Blender got its name from a song titled "Blender", and that Suzanne got her name from a monkey in a movie, who's soundtrack (you can hear a clip in this link) had a song titled "Susanne." Okay, so not exactly parallel.

I saw a thread by Gunnar (gunnarstahl) on the BlenderArtists forum and thought it would be something worth doing so we could 1) Have a lot of fun seeing how different specs handle the same scene and 2) maybe getting some worthwhile information on what really makes rendertime diminish.

Continue Reading 'Post Your Render Times' »

In the collective conscience of the Blender Nation there will always be great works that show that Blender can do the job, and do it well. Today lets take the time to view a animation triumph not only for Blender but for a well-known dog and the Rebellion!

Continue Reading 'Blender Animation Classics - "Beagle"' »

Here's a thought that has been nagging me lately: how come that there are virtually no commercial activities around Blender? A product with more than 250.000 users should be able to attract some entrepreneurial attention, right?

Continue Reading 'Where Are the Blender Products and Services?' »

by Federico "Lox" Lucignano

I know what You're thinking, I'm anything but illiterate ;-)

While surfing the web trying to waste my precious spare time (it's an hobby of mine) I fell on something funny: the "BlenderHeads Around the Globe" Frappr online service!

Are you tired of feeling like the only Blender User in your town/city/country/continent/planet (sorry actually no space positioning system available, complain about it at Nasa.com :-P)? Well go and search for another BlenderHead near you.

Continue Reading 'Welcm t Frappr' »

Sonix points out on Elysiun that Honda has posted heaps of freely available DXF models of 20 products (cars, racing bikes and even a robot) on their website.

Continue Reading 'Official Honda DXF Models Available for Download' »

After posting 'Blender for PocketPC revived' earlier this week, Joel Schlosberg asked me about the history of the Blue Alien character. I talked to Ton and did some digging on the internet and I can now proudly present you the shortened biography of our blue friend :)

Continue Reading 'A Short Bio of the Blue Alien' »

A few days ago I reported that using Blender 2.40 was problematic on Macs with NVidia hardware. The Blender developers had reported this issue and Apple has supplied a bugfix in the graphics drivers in the 10.4.4 update that became available today. I tested Blender and it now works like a charm.

Continue Reading 'OS X 10.4.4 update' »