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' »

Ted Gocek has developed a Blender to Renderman pipeline. His method is not for the faint of heart as he's using a host of (open source) tools to achieve his goal. Still, if you need Renderman then this may be useful for you.

Continue Reading 'Blender to Renderman Pipeline' »

With all the talk about new and future modifiers its logical that we should be able to animate them.

Continue Reading 'Animated Modifiers' »

Here's a great time-saving tool created by Vaclav Chaloupka. It's been created to allow fast searching of materials in a scene with the ability to easily replace them with another material. But, that's not all it can do.

Continue Reading 'Material Works script - Search & Replace materials, and more' »

Every now and then you stumble upon something that really is special and helps you to do something that, otherwise, would simply be an amazing pain in the you-know-where. This is one of those times.

Continue Reading 'Awesome Creeping Ivy Generator' »

Recently, we introduced The Structure of Man, a video series that covered drawing the human body. Now we've come across another excellent resource for learning the craft.

Continue Reading 'Learn Drawing Techniques' »

The recent article about the keystroke tool for video tutorials spurred my curiosity about the AutoHotkey scripting language. Looking further, it quickly became clear that there might be a way to remap keystrokes in Blender. I performed a couple of quick tests…

Continue Reading 'Remapping Keystrokes in Blender' »

How does your system compare to other systems when it comes to rendering your scenes in Blender? What's the best system configuration to optimize your rendering times? These questions, and more, have all crossed our minds at least once. Well, here's a way to begin to get some real-world information towards answering your questions.

Continue Reading 'Blender Render Benchmark v0.2' »

Video tutorials are great but, it's very difficult for authors to articulate every keystroke and mouse-click, along with performing everything else. Even when it can be done, it tends to make for longer tutorials because the author has to slow down.

Well, here's a tool for video tutorial authors that may prove to be quite helpful.

Continue Reading 'Tool to Display Blender Keystrokes in Video Tutorials' »

Blender is an amazing tool for 3D production and post-production but what about animation pre-production? Alot of projects begin by creating a website, installing a forum, a blog, a project management system such as DotProject and then kind of slap it all together. Although doable, I was gladly surprised that there is an open source creative commons licensed software that combines all of the features for pre-production into one software.

Continue Reading 'Celtx - Pre-production Software' »

No this is not another version of our beloved Blender, it is however a great tool for the color challenged. Though I'm not so bad as to mix plaids and stripes, I do not have a formal art education and I am a bit color challenged (just ask my teenage daughter). If you're looking to find complementary colors for your primary color or create a nice palate to work from, the ColorBlender tool will be a tremendous help to you.

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Here's a site with free character references. It's from Got3d - 3d Models and Textures. Each character is a high resolution, full body in front of a green screen, All sides are projected. There are also some free models made in light wave and 3Dmax that can be imported into Blender. Though the edge loops were a bit screwy but maybe that has something to do with the Blender import script.

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The German Institute for Robotics and Process Control has developed software that allows you to scan 3D objects using a very low-budget setup.

Continue Reading '3D Scanning with DAVID' »