For those who have been hoping for a conference here in the USA, I am excited to announce that the Kingsport Art Guild will be hosting a 2nd day Blender Conference here in scenic Kingsport, Tennessee on August 2, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and 3rd, from 9 a.m. to 12 noon, 2008. This conference will include mini work shops and tutorials on various intermediate and advanced techniques used in Blender. Much of the focus will be on some of the newer features of version 2.46.

Continue Reading 'Blender Conference, Kingsport, Tennessee' »

With Bart on his much needed sabbatical, I will be stepping in to help keep BlenderNation running. However, I do not have the time to write articles everyday and would like your assistance. It was Bart's goal to give you at least two or more articles per day, but the reality is that this is an unpaid job, so while there are several Writers "on staff", family and job commitments come first and the contribution of articles is therefor sporadic, thus putting pressure on Bart.

So where do you the reader come in to help out?

Continue Reading 'HELP WANTED, Inquire within.' »

Recent events in my life (a baby, and starting my own company) and on this site have made me decide it's time to put some distance between myself and the Blender community. I find it too hard to motivate myself for the huge amount of time I need to put in this project every day. So, I'm stepping down for at least a month, maybe longer, maybe permanently. The site is in the more than capable hands of our team of editors now!

All the best,

Bart

Robert Schober, whom we know from 'Dear Valentine' and 'Machines', has produced a new video for Mastodon.

Continue Reading 'Mastodon "Sleeping Giant" - Music Video Made With Blender' »

I just closed the commenting for the Microsoft Support thread as I think we've seen all the angles of this discussion. In addition, I pulled the OOXML post. Kernon meant well, I'm sure of that, but it's only putting oil on the fire right now.

I can't even begin to explain how disappointed I am by the attitude in this community - I can only hope it reflects the opinion of the minority or else I'm wasting my time here.

Microsoft's Open Source support has recently contacted the Blender developers regarding their file format support. Groklaw picked it up and wrote an interesting piece on it.

Here's a short tutorial that'll explain how to create some rather realistic twirling smoke.

Continue Reading 'Creating Twirling Smoke' »

Ton just posted the following dates on the Peach blog:

• May 17 or 18: Release of Blender 2.46
• May 20th: DVD Arrival, shipping
• May 30 or 31: Internet release of Big Buck Bunny

If you always wanted to know, what was going on at the Blender development commits, now you can!

Continue Reading 'Follow Development Commits in Real-Time' »

Sterling Roth [mexicoxican] started a challenge over at Blender Artists: what can you make with just 10 cuboid shapes? This very limiting rule is opening up a *lot* of creativity.

Continue Reading 'Weekend Fun: Cube Modeling Challenge' »

My previous Giant Spider post turned out not to be done in Blender after all, so I set out to find one that was. I found a videotutorial by 15 year old Daniel Reynolds, who explains how to align a spider animation with live action footage and then uses After Effects to composite it.

Continue Reading 'Giant Spider Compositing with After Effects' »

John Merrill reports to us that about two weeks ago "I was made aware that a video from my Blender portfolio has been mistaken for evidence of the paranormal. The video in question depicts a UFO sighting followed by an appearance of the cryptozoological monster El Chupacabras. Apparently someone found this video on my youtube page and sent it to journalist and ufologist Jaime Maussan claiming it was filmed outside of London, England in late 2007. Maussan has been airing this video on his own television show, and on others, as well as screening it at private lectures for several months."

Continue Reading 'Blender Video Mistaken for UFO Sighting' »

Michael Tieleman aka. Freakydude, has re-release an updated version of his Little Fella rig.

Continue Reading 'Re-release: little_fellaX rig.' »

Russian Animator Shiva3D posted this awesome animation. This is the kind of stuff that I imagine the Blender Institute's next project will have: SciFi, Robots, explosions, smoke, pointless impressive stuff. Love it.

Update: I thought this was made in Blender, but that was not the case. Bummer. Anyway, we can do better than that, right? ;-)

Continue Reading 'Itsy Bitsy Spider?' »

The Blender 2.46 RC4 has been released, only for windows. Along with the RC4 release, a message posted at the weekly meeting from the Blender developers, report a one week delay until the final release.

Continue Reading 'Blender 2.46 RC4 (windows only) and ToDo list for 2.46 stable' »

As you may know, nothing escapes our attention (you there! stop picking your nose, it's disgusting!), and here's my latest catch: over the last few weeks I've been tracking a Korean site which diligently translates all our articles.

So, here you go: suddenly YOU're on BlenderNation, too! You're doing a great job - thanks. It would be great if you could introduce yourself in a comment below.

Like many other apps, Blender does not work well with Arabic or other right-to-left written languages. ArabBlend writer Islam Abofarha explains how to work around this.

Continue Reading 'Using Arabic Scripts With Blender' »

JiriH has created this nice squash and stretch ball rig to give beginners an introduction to rig animation. However, note that the rig only works for Blender 2.46 RC and hopefully the final 2.46 release as well.

Continue Reading 'Squash&Stretch Ball Rig' »