You can now pre-order "The Blender Gamekit 2nd Edition! Continue Reading 'Preorder "The Blender Gamekit 2nd Edition"!' »

The Brazilian Blender book, Blender 3D – Guia do Usuario was released again with a revised and expanded third edition. Now the book has 552 pages covering most of the basic aspects of Blender.

Continue Reading 'Third edition of the Brazilian Blender Book Released' »

Daniel MArtinez Lara (psl/pepeland) has just uploaded a couple of videos showing how to use Blender's sculpt tool for animation using blend shapes.  The results look quite promising!

Continue Reading 'AniSculp technique - using the sculpt tool for animation' »

Spot anything slightly familiar on planet-positive.org ?

Oliver Perfumo has made a nice demo reel worth checking out. It features his work from the past 3 years, set to a pretty catchy song. The T-Rex sequences are particularly impressive.

Continue Reading 'Demo Reel : Oliver Perfumo' »

The Japanese Blender community is planning a party on Saturday, November 29th.

Continue Reading 'Blender Party Nagoya Japan, Nov 29' »

ResourceSpace is a web-based, open source digital asset management system, with a twist: it will dynamically render previews of Blender files, making it a great solution for Blender Asset Management. It's based on PHP/MySQL so you'll need to have access to a webserver if you want to use it.

Continue Reading 'ResourceSpace: Open Source Asset Management for Blender' »

The Excellence Center in Free Software of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain), has created an on-line course of 20 hours to teach the use Blender. The course starts at February 23rd, and costs €60 for students/€100 for everyone else.

Continue Reading 'On-line Spanish Blender course' »

CGChallenge have announced their 23rd challenge, themed 'Steampunk Myths and Legends'.

Steampunk is the application of advanced steam age technology to a modern or science fiction setting.

This challenge asks you to render traditional myths and legends in the steampunk style using elements of gears, springs, brass and steam power. Re-imagine legendary characters from some of the world's most ancient stories, such as a steam-powered minotaur, or a Zeppelin-mounted Thor, hurling lightning bolts from the sky.

I could think of a few Blender artists that should enter straight away ;-) Go on then, make us proud!

Here's something we don't *nearly* write enough about on BlenderNation: the Aqsis RenderMan compliant renderer, and the MOSAIC plugin that allows Blender and Aqsis to work together. Eric Back has just published a very cool sample of what kind of quality you can achieve with these systems - check it out.

Oh! And these guys are aiming at rendering a small part of Big Buck Bunny as well, "the perfect project to really push MOSAIC's integration with Blender and its ability to efficiently export a large animation.". Awesome.

Continue Reading 'Blender to RenderMan: Aqsis/Air Depth-Mapped Occlusion using multiple light rigs' »

Tamito Kajimaya (T.K.) has created some test videos with Blender using the Freestyle renderer and he has come up with some great results!

Continue Reading 'NPR rendering with Blender/Freestyle' »

Zac Duff won an internship at Good Game, a TV show in Australia, and Blender played a big part in his workflow. A prototype of the game will be released later this week. Zac reports.

Continue Reading 'Blender used in Australian 'Good Game Game'' »

Yep, that's right. The shiny new Apricot DVDs are ready and are now at the Blender Institute, arriving today from the printing factory.

Continue Reading 'Apricot DVDs Ready!' »

Earlier this week the German Blender magazine 'Blenderzin' had his (her?) its first birthday. Congratulations!

For German readers, it might be worth knowing that they also have a German Blender weblog on their website.

The texture node system is a project to integrate a node-based texture generator into Blender.

Continue Reading 'New Feature in development: texture nodes' »

The HandsOn project of the Department of Media Technology at the Helsinki University of Technology is researching optical tracking and 3D user interfaces for modeling and animation. They make heavy use of Blender to test new concepts in user interaction in virtual 3D environments, and have published videos of their work so far.

Continue Reading 'Blender meets Minority Report: Helsinki University of Technology' »

An updated version of William Reynish' UI analysis (25 pages, PDF) is now available.

Continue Reading 'William Reynish' UI paper' »

Gunter Hannig aka zapman has written an excellent in-depth review of Carsten Wartmann's 'Blender DVD Seminar'.

Continue Reading 'German 'Blender DVD Seminar' Reviewed' »