The Finnish architects K2S recently won a big architecture competition for the design of a new hospital. The main visualisations were done in Blender. Abel Groenewolt tells about the adoption of Blender in his office.

Continue Reading 'Blender used for hospital design' »

Woah! Three years have already passed since I began a small experiment in blogging :). Time for a birthday present!

Maybe you remember our previous fundraiser where we donated 1 classroom, 4000 hot meals, 2 goats, 1 alpaca and 3 animal care kits to a Third World country? That was great, but when tax time came it became hell for me because I had to sort out all the donations with my bookkeeper ;-)

Still, I want to do something similar again - use the size and enthusiasm of this community to do good for others. Just with less tax headache.

Continue Reading 'BlenderNation now three years old! Help us make a difference' »

The Linux Foundation is hosting a contest to create an "I'm Linux" commercial. Grand prize: a trip to Tokyo! Deadline is March 15, 2009.

Continue Reading '"I'm Linux" Video Contest, win a trip to Tokyo!' »

From the entire team: the best wishes for 2009! What are your hopes for Blender this year?

Leonarda Sala (see also his 'Mikrobitus') sent in a nice New Years e-card. Enjoy!

Continue Reading 'Happy 2009!!' »

Here's a *really* nice form of interactive 3D advertising, and it looks like they did the 3D design in Blender.

Continue Reading 'Ad Displays 3D Car in Augmented Reality' »

As much as this sounds like another open source project, it's not.  Rather, The Emily Project is a very impressive life-like human representation by Image Metrics.

Continue Reading 'The Emily Project' »

Green Button has just announced their rendering services for Blender. Using the python script that they provide, you will have a rendering consul  inside Blender which you use to upload your file to their servers. They currently have access to over 2000 processors in New Zealand and an additional 1000+ in Australia and they are currently  working with some very large data center providers in the US to add more thus giving you major studio sized rendering support.

Continue Reading 'Green Button Announces Render Support for Blender!' »

Oscar Alvarado (of Gothique Studios) has released a teaser trailer of his new animated short, "Le Monsieur, Le Vampire et Renee Marcelle", animated by Oscar Alvarado and Martha Vaquera.  The video looks quite promising!

Continue Reading 'Teaser for "Le Monsieur, Le Vampire et Renee Marcelle"' »

Blender Art Magazine (BAM) are adjusting their release schedule.

Continue Reading 'New Release Schedule for BAM' »

The planetarium of the Weber State University uses Blender to create content for their full-dome digital projector. Rendering for this screen requires a Fisheye camera, for which they have created and released a camera rig.

Continue Reading 'Ott Planetarium Releases New Fisheye Camera Rig' »

The Nurbana NURBS code is being integrated into Blender and the developers could use a hand!

Continue Reading 'Blender NURBS project needs testers' »

Clark Thames has recently upgraded his website (www.tutorialsforblender3d.com) to include a new game textures section. The textures are all free to download and most come with normal maps.

Continue Reading 'Game Texture Database' »

Great news!  Ton posted an update about Blender 2.5 and it's sounding great!  (Thanks to Tim Suess for the head's up!)  Here's a little snippet of the report:

Continue Reading 'Blender 2.5 Progress!' »

Christmas Eve is about to begin here, so let's dress up BlenderNation with some great Holiday Seasons headers! I picked 27 designs from this weeks contest and put them on the site - almost everyone's a winner this time! A new one will be shown each hour, so keep reloading to see if you're in it ;-)

Merry Christmas!

The BLENDING LIFE challenge has ended and what a ride! There's been some amazing entries!

The judges have given their scores which will count for fifty percent of the total score. The other fifty percent  will come from you, so they need you to please stop by the contest site and and give your vote!

Continue Reading 'Blending Life Contest Needs YOUR Vote!' »

Blender and Big Buck Bunny have made the 12th place of the annual CG Retrospective! Their description is touching:

Here is a wonderful example of technical and artistic selflessness that in fact built this industry. Well done guys, thank you.

A heartwarming, well-deserved praise for everyone involved! Check it out here.

Stencil maps can help push your model to the next level by allowing you to layer materials exactly as you see fit. This tutorial by Jonathan Williamson,  covers how to create a stencil map, applying it to your model in Blender and then using it to layer two different materials via the Material Nodes

Continue Reading 'Tutorial: Introduction to Stencil Maps' »

Alain Mathez (mcBlyver) has created some companion videos to his rigging tutorials that were featured in the BlenderArt magazine #19.  The videos show off what can be done with these rigging examples (a furniture hinge and a catepiller soft track) in real-time.  Quite impressive.

Continue Reading 'Videos about BlenderArt Magazine #19' »