Christian Storay has released Blender Commander, a GUI for Blender's command-line interface. It's not open source, but free to use - as this is just an exercise I can understand that he doesn't want to release the code (yet?). At this moment, it's Windows-only but a Linux version has been planned.

Continue Reading 'Blender Commander Released' »

TopMod is pretty slick and complete open source modeling application with a unique workflow. It is officially available for Windows and OSX. But a Linux version is available. Quite a few tutorials are available. I recommend taking a look at the video tutorials.

Continue Reading 'TopMod' »

dav_ recently announced the release of a simple toon character and rig on Blenderartists. He describes it as having basic controls and says that it is a work in progress. Because it is a work in progress, dav_ would like to hear any feedback you may have.

Continue Reading 'Basic toon character rig available' »

From Markus Kothe

The other day a was searching the internet for some skydomes to use for easy and nice reflections and AO light. When I didn't found any I liked I said to myself…

"Why don't I make some myself? Blender should be capable of that"

Continue Reading 'Skydome Maker' »

Quick3D is a Java applet for displaying interactive 3D objects on a webpage. It reads 3DS objects which can be easily exported from Blender. Who's going to create the coolest example with this applet?

Continue Reading 'Quick3D - Free Embedded 3D player' »

Version 0.46 of the open-source vector application has been released, and it has a pretty strong set of new features. I've used this program a fair deal myself, and I have to say that this update (or application in general) is a must-have. Do take your time to download and experience inkscape for the first time if you haven't used it before, or enjoy the new features if you're a more experienced user.

Continue Reading 'Inkscape 0.46 released' »

Blitz3D is a "simple yet powerful environment for game creation - simple, because its based around the popular and easy to use BASIC programming language; and powerful, thanks to a highly optimized underlying 2D/3D engine." (marketing blurb from their website). It's now easy to use it together with Blender thanks to Diego's Exporter.

Continue Reading 'Blitz3D Exporter' »

Dryad lets you intuitively create beautiful trees for your virtual world or game.

Continue Reading 'Dryad Tree Generator' »

Blender user Marcelo de Gomensoro Malheiros have just released the first version of his vector texture plugin: Vectex.

Not sure of what this is good for? Imagine that you have a bitmap logo applied to, say, that cool wine bottle you just finished. But now you had this great idea of making an animation where the camera zooms out from a particular detail of the logo until the whole bottle is framed.

Well… if you haven't made an insanely huge bitmap for the logo, the results on that zooming won't be as good as you though of. This is where this plugin could be very handy.

Continue Reading 'Vectex: SVG Vector Texture Plugin for Blender' »

Nimbus is an experimental cloud generator system. Its far from complete and states that its still under development. The interesting thing is the python script for Blender that could make creating cloud shapes with particles more easily.

Continue Reading 'Nimbus cloud rendering engine' »

Even though recently Tangent space normal map baking was added as a feature to the next version of Blender. This functionality is only available in special builds. I know many use only the official 2.45 build for production purposes. With that in mind you'd be without Tangent space normal map baking. Its possible you missed a solution provided at Blenderartists.

Continue Reading 'Tangent space baking via Nodes' »

Anyone who works with Flash should find this interesting. Blender user Dennis Ippel has created a script which can convert Blender objects in Flash ActionScript 3.0 objects. This allows the creation of realtime-3D rendering within Flash (which is more typically used to render two-dimensional vector imagery). For more information, visit the exporter's official page, or its wiki entry.

Continue Reading 'Blender > ActionScript Exporter' »

Have you just pressed "Ctrl W" to save the final version of that cool new animation of yours? Ready to render?

But, wait, maybe you happen to have some computers over a network. If this is your case, it's a good idea to think about Yadra.

Continue Reading 'Yadra - Yet Another Distributed Rendering App' »

MakeHuman is the 'free (GPL), innovative and professional software for the modelling of 3-Dimensional characters'. It exports in Collada and .obj files, so it plays nicely with Blender. After more than a year, the team has released a major update. Please keep in mind it's still a Release Candidate, so some features such as characters, poses and icons are still incomplete.

Continue Reading 'MakeHuman 0.91RC1 Released' »

Version 0.9 of Indigo is available for download. Indigo Renderer is a free physically-based ray tracer.

Continue Reading 'Indigo Renderer 0.9 Released' »

Pencil recreates the traditional style of animating on your computer. And it does so in the grand open source way!

Continue Reading 'Pencil 2D animation software' »

MaPZone, a Windows-based procedural texture editor, makes the bold claim of being the "most powerful texturing tool ever". Well…they've certainly made the effort to live up to the claim. What do you think?

Continue Reading 'MaPZone: "The Most Powerful Texturing Tool Ever"' »

Here's another gem from Matt Ebb on exporting 3D curves, specifically to 3DS Max.

Continue Reading 'Exporting Blender's 3D Curves' »