Great news on those using Poser, there is movement on Poser Tools 2 for Blender 2.5x. Great forum entry on its progress and features and goals.
Poser Tools for Blender 2.5 Blender3D
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Category Archives: Toolbox
Kinect / Brekel BVH import to Blender 2.57b
Need cheap motion capture – got a Kinect, you can use Blender for that. The following video is made by Nigel Ward, who video taped one of his pupils with a Kinect and transferred the motion data via BVH into Blender and attached it to a Biped armature. It seems to be a smoothly working process, while fast movements still can be skipped. The BVH data definitely needs some clean-up afterwards but when you are on a budget and or only need a to record simple motions, this can be an attractive option.
This might be in particular interesting because the current GSoC includes a new Blender internal tool-set to clean up and work with BVH motion imports. You can see how it currently looks at this link Vimeo URL.
EVERMOTION released free unbiased renderer NOX
Evermotion, a well known and respected 3D content provider, has released an unbiased renderer NOX. They opened the beta to the public. It is free for private,educational, as well as commercial use. This is a standalone render system similar to LuxRender. To participate and download the beta you need to create a free account and evermotion.com.
Ramen Compositor Lives On
Some of you may remember Ramen, a standalone, node based compositor with a promising set of features, that unfortunately ceased development a little while ago. Thankfully development on the project has resumed (but is now closed source) and some new features including tracking have been added. Version 0.8.15 is now available for 64 bit linux, with windows 64 bit releases on their way.
Laplacian Lightning Generator Blender 2.5
Do you need a Lightning generator? Too complex? Then you should check out this new cool Add-on for Blender 2.5 called The Laplacian Lightning Generator .
It is a Blender addon to help in creating lightning and electrical effects. Though the script cannot yet create those beautiful ‘dancing-arcs’, it can create decent looking lightning in a reasonable amount of time with a good amount of user-control. The generator simulates real physical effects and can be used for Laplacian phenomenon beyond lightning.
Machstudio pro 2 : free GPU realtime animation and rendering system
Machstudio 2 pro is a very attractive looking realtime render and animation system for those who can use the power and style of GPU based shading systems. Think about it as Blender GLSL shading on steroids. It offers extreme powerful tools such as realtime Ambient Occlusion, programable shaders, HDR lightning, Screen Space Global Illumination, render passes, individual light to object linking, Depth of Field, Real-time displacement mapping using hardware tessellation, reflection and refractions, and others. It also features a very intuitive to use character animation system including NLE timeline. Best of it is that it was released as free.
Mitsuba Renderer 0.2.1 Released
After a rather long pause, Mitsuba Renderer has just been updated with an good list of new features and improvements.
Creating 3D Printed Models with Blender and Shapeways
LuxRender 0.8 Released: More Power, Less Noise !
After 4 release candidates, the new stable version of LuxRender (GPL, unbiased, physically based rendering engine) is finally out : Luxrender v0.8 !
Blend Swap Hacked
Matthew and his crew from Blend Swap had a bad weekend as they found out their site was hacked.
