Colimo is a tool for making real-time changes to final renders from Thea render, using a Blender-Thea-Colimo pipeline. It sports some really impressive feature, such as the ability to change colours and textures of objects, and have not only the objects themselves update in real time, but any GI reflections, glossy reflections and refractions update too.
Thea Renderer user will be able to use Colimo with the soon to be released Thea Render 1.1.
Links
Mitsuba, the physics based, open source (GPL) renderer, has just released a new version. Some of the new features include python integration, spectral rendering, material modifiers, scene portability and better documentation.
CryDev has released their CryENGINE 3 SDK to the public with various license models ranging from free with limited commercial use to also 2 commercial license models. For those who might not know it, it is an extremely well developed and powerful game engine which is used for the popular Crysis game series.
This SDK besides the CryENGINES has enough tools to also fully develop new games from scratch – not just mods.
Read more in the following:
slowmoVideo is a slow motion video editor that allows for slowing down footage by large factors, calculating intermediate frames using optical flow. It’s currently avaliable for linux, and you’ll need an nVidia card to try it out.
slowmoVideo downloads and sources
Do you own Copic markers? Do you need a simple, fast and easy to use sketching tool, which simulate in a realistic way the various marker tips, color wetness and offers the Copic color palette? Autodesk released a commercial full featured and and a limited and free Sketchbook Copic edition. The interface is very clean, non obtrusive, the drawing engine is fast. While the free edition only offers a basic set of colors and rudimentary drawing tools – this resembles also only what I would use in real life such as marker paper, markers and a straight edge.
The software works on OS X and Windows.
If you need a fillet tool, check out this Python script by Dealga McArdle:
Links
Learn how to animate bones with XNA.
You want to insert your 3D model into a webpage – you don’t want to use pre rendered GIF sequences or plug-ins visitors have to download? Say “Hello” to X3DOM. They just released the 1.2 version which takes the current HTML5 web development into consideration such as CSS3, webfonts, Flash, and WebGL. Greatly this makes it also usable with Blender 2.5x. It uses the canvas tag, and allows to use textures, which can be animated, lights, mouse interaction, collision detection and other interactions.
With so many different external render engines and many new arising, it can be confusing as to which you should use. Testing each individual engine can be time consuming and sometimes confusing for the less experienced so blender-artist
JoseConseco has created a short but comprehensive comparison between the a few engines; Cycles, Mitsuba, Nox and Yafray.
BSurfaces, Eclectiel’s new Blender modeling add-on is released to the public.
