Blender Around the World: China

Today we report on another Blender community that is largely hidden to English speaking Blender users: China. Sumomofan sent us a the following report of the Blender activities that are taking place in the largest country of the world. Xie xie, Sumomofan!

Blender China (AKA BlenderCN) is the only community for blender users whose native language is Chinese. BlenderCN was officially founded in April 2005, and now it is one year old. However there was enthusiasts of Blender in China as early as in 1999. The official homepage is http://www.blendercn.org; the bulletin board is http://bbs.blendercn.org; there is a wiki too: http://wiki.blendercn.org.

For now, BlenderCN devotes itself to localizing and propagandizing Blender in China, but we hope to take part in the development and have some serious work soon. This article will summarize the Blender status in China.

Localization

Interface: Oyster is in charge of the translation work, who has written a tool named mygettext particularly to write portable object files (blender.po) for translation. And then, the blender.po is divided into some parts for volunteers. Localization of Blender 2.37 has been finished now, and a version for 2.42 is under translation now.

Documents: Chinese translation of Blender document will be synchronized with official Blender wiki, and we have finished 50% to 60%. The Yafray tutorials has been translated 100% particularly.

Tutorials: In order to speed up the Blender popularity in China, BlenderCN also prepared many Chinese tutorials, including translated tutorials, original text tutorials, and original video tutorials. These tutorials cover main parts of Blender. (Original tutorials documentation-26, Original video tutorials-6 hours)

You can download the videotutorials here.

Artwork

Most of the projects file of BlenderCN's artworks are open sourced under Creative Commons license, and are downloadable form BlenderCN bulletin board, in order to develop the spirit of sharing and cooperating..(Artworks below are authorized by their owners, and open sourced under Creative Commons protocol-open sourced files are restrictive for studying and researching non-commercially. Figures are possessed by original owners.)

Finished Artworks:The blender files are released as Creative Commons open content.

Game

Open the Door: Coin a professional game in 10 minutes. See the tutorial for details. The blender file is released as Creative Commons open content.

Subway: In a traffic design contest, clyde simulates the passenger flow in a subway with blender GE. In this simulation, every people has its own AI.

Ongoing or planned works

Deathblood's F1 challenge: The game is over, but the challenge just begins. The regression files are downloadable.

Moket: He has made a 2 min 30 sec animation for oyster's dissertation presentation, and the blend file is released as Creative Commons open content.

Sumomofan: I want to reload “monkeys pick the moon” totally in Blender, which is a famous old fasion 2d cartoon by Shanghai Animation Film Studio. This project will be finished in the two years.

Programming

BlenderCN plans to enhance the ability in development/programming. BlenderCN has organized some members, part of who are from universities of China, for source reading and comprehension. We hope BlenderCN is able to devote itself to Blender source code.

Conclusion

In China, Blender does not not confine itself to CG fans. Members of BlenderCN has introduced this amazing software into fundamental education. In universities, some students study or learn from Blender source code. A Chinese magazine, i.e. CG Magazine (well, a lazy name) recently covered a special topic on Blender. Now, every new release of Blender is reported in some forum too.

Author: Sumomofan
Translator: DripStone&Oyster
Submission: BlenderCN

Acknowledgement to no_71, deathblood, harrison, moket, noflower, clyde, MagicX, oyster, kidux, and sumomofan for their artworks and help.

PS: Request for development

Blender does not support two-bytes-characters, so we cannot read a Chinese fold/filename correctly, and cannot use Chinese for object name, which is sometimes  inconvenient. This embarrasses Blender users in some other countries too, for example Japanese and Russian. We would like to see improvement in Blender in the future, or there is some guide for solve this problem.

The Blender Around the World Series reports on the activities of non-english Blender communities. If you would like to write a report, please contact us.