Archive for the 'Miscellaneous' Category



Elephants Dream at AdobeA few days ago, an interview with an Adobe developer for Flash Video was published in video.onflex.org, which is a blog about Adobe Flex and the future Adobe Apollo. The video shows the future capabilities of Flash video, like HD resolution and hardware acceleration. But what it has to do with Blender? Well, one of the videos used in the demonstration is Elephants Dream!

Continue Reading 'Elephants Dream in Flash HD demo' »

IconParc promo animation

base_comp_00248.pngKonrad Haenel contacted us about a beautiful promotional animation he helped produce alongside Felix Böhm for IconParc GmbH. The video was produced to show off at trade fairs and on the IconParc GmbH website. The animation is entirely produced in Blender!

Continue Reading 'IconParc promo animation' »

mando.jpgHave you heard of the Stanford bunny? How about the Utah teapot? And how does a Mandrill primate, found in the tropical rainforests of southern Cameroon, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and Congo have anything to do with the history of computer graphics and animation?

Continue Reading 'A Critical History of Computer Graphics and Animation' »

Classic Blender Articles.

quickstart02.jpgDave (Blendedplanet.com) has posted some classic Blender articles from the now defunct 3D artist up at Blendedplanet. Its quite a blast from the past.

Continue Reading 'Classic Blender Articles.' »

ati_drivers.jpgHowitzer has posted instructions on the Blender Artists Forums on how to optimize the Blender performance of old ATI cards using an old driver. This has been reported to work really well.

Continue Reading 'Boost the Performance of Old ATI Cards under Windows' »

mayamax.jpgNo, really this time. Daniel Lara Martinez from Pepeland School has created another Blender resource. And this time its a Blender setup with icons designed to emulate the Max or Maya interface.

Continue Reading 'Maya / 3DS Max Layout with Icons' »

param_mod_star.pngMatt has done some work to attempt to emulate 3DS Max functionality in Blender. This functionality is parametric objects.

Continue Reading 'Parametric Objects in Blender' »

History of RT!

rt.jpgI 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!' »

Selling Blender on eBay

ebay.jpgWe 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' »

candyskellsmall.pngThis 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' »

Blender Math

math.pngWhile 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' »

mine.jpgMore 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.' »

graphcalc.pngSteve 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!

jah.pngNot 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' »

Blender Trash

blenderTrash kopie.jpgOkay, 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' »

eye32_thumb.jpgHave 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.

Post Your Render Times

180px-Thinkgeek_binary_clock.jpgI 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' »

BeagleIn 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"' »




About

You are currently browsing the BlenderNation weblog archives for the 'Miscellaneous' category.

Longer entries are truncated. Click the headline of an entry to read it in its entirety.