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' »

A very interesting texture generator written in Java. The program has an brush/bristle creation tool that makes complex pattern creation easy.

Continue Reading 'Semicuro pattern/texture generator' »

Blender is no stranger to the world of distributive rendering.  There are several simple python scripts as well as Dr. Queue that can do the job for Blender (here's the Windows user manual for Dr. Queue by the Rovorm team).  But one has been silent for the past 2 years… until now.

Continue Reading 'Piovra Renderfarm Project Updated' »

Chris wrote to us about his service Polorix.net, a free file hosting service for Blender users.

Continue Reading 'File Hosting for the Blender Community' »

A few months after the test release of Indigo 0.6, the free unbiased render engine is now final and available for download.

Continue Reading 'Indigo 0.6 Final Released' »

We recently posted about the MakeHuman preview video. Now you can try it out yourself with the just-released MakeHuman 0.9.0 for Windows, which is available now for download.

*Update:  Mac version now available.

Continue Reading 'MakeHuman 0.9.0 Released' »

Getting help with Blender is often arduous task. Between books you can't afford, forum posts that go ignored, and online tutorials that were written on autopilot, where's a beginner to go for quick answers? This may not be news to many, but there is a collection of public Blender chatroooms where Blender users can get help and friends can meet. Before I continue, props go out to Florian Mayer (who went by “name” in chat) for giving me the idea behind this article.

Continue Reading 'Getting Started in Blender IRC' »

Dedalo-3D, the makers of MakeHuman (an open-source, stand-alone software program for modeling of three-dimensional humanoid characters) recently posted two items on their website that are worth a look.

Continue Reading 'Fake SSS In Blender and MakeHuman Pose Preview' »

As Blender continues to grow, so does the community. One way to make new users (and even casual visitors) feel more welcomed is to recognize the problems they may have in translating their experiences with other 3D applications to the Blender experience. It can be a very frustrating experience that can often cause potential new "converts" to simply give up.

Well, we can't just sit back and let that happen, can we?

Continue Reading 'Blender welcomes Lightwave Users' »

Virgilio Vasconcelos was kind enough to drop us a line on something he found, something that could be interesting for new Blender users coming from Maya: a hotkey translator.

Continue Reading 'Maya to Blender Hotkey Translator' »

BlenderNation recently came across a really interesting tool which takes 2D freehand drawings and converts them into 3D models which can be loaded into other programs such as Blender. You can literally create just about anything you can draw on the screen!

Continue Reading '2D to 3D Applet' »

The new site and new release (zip) are a testament to Nicholas Chapman's work on his free unbiased raytracer Indigo (now version 0.6 test 1).  And as usual, Nicholas keeps on top of the Blender export script for each release.

Continue Reading 'Indigo, New Site and New Release (0.6 test 1)' »

I remember when I first saw an autostereogram image. It took me a while to figure out how to see it, but then the concept of a three-dimensional image being hidden in another image blew my mind. Kapil Hari Paranjape describes how you can create these images for yourself using Blender, the Gimp and StereoGraph.

Continue Reading 'How To Make a Autostereogram with Blender, the Gimp and StereoGraph' »

Remember the Blender web plugin from long ago? Like a veritable phoenix, it has risen from the ashes and been brought back to life!

Continue Reading 'Blender 2.42 3D Web Plugin Alpha' »

Pixar has been posting some nice papers on techniques they have used to overcome several issues in film production.

Continue Reading 'Pixar Research Papers' »