BlenderNation

The first Blender animation challenge, held over at Blenderartists.org, has finished taking entries and is now in the voting stage of the challenge. There's a huge amount of entries, so it will be a bit of work sorting through them to find a favorite to vote for. You might remember the previous article on Blendernation, bringing [...]

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. Abel wrote: The architects office where I work (K2S Architects, Helsinki) has just won a big architecture competition for the design of [...]

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 [...]

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. From the announcement: If you've been alive and aware of mass media over the last twelve months, you've probably seen television commercials from Apple and Microsoft touting their operating system. From Apple's ubiquitous [...]

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! Leonardo wrote: Hi, I've just finished a short greetings e-card to promote my services, as usual totally made in Blender 2.48. It features very simple but funny [...]

Here's a *really* nice form of interactive 3D advertising, and it looks like they did the 3D design in Blender. What appears to be little more than a black and white advertisement in three recent German automotive magazines becomes a 3D holographic model of the Mini Cabrio through a webcam and the Mini website. The ad works [...]

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. With no further ado, meet Emily: Thanks to Michael Cuffe for the article suggestion!

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 [...]

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! Oscar writes: Info about my new animated short! I hope you like it ;) Atte Oscar Alvarado The short will premiere at the Blender Conference 2009. Make sure [...]

Blender Art Magazine (BAM) are adjusting their release schedule. Sandra Gilbert wrote: As Blender art magazine enters its 4th year of publication, (yes it really has been that long), the time has come to adjust our release schedule. While the staff as well as the contributing artists and authors make every attempt to hit our release schedule, [...]

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. Ron Proctor wrote: The Ott Planetarium is pleased to announce revision 9a of our Blender Fisheye Camera Rig. Previous revisions have been [...]

The Nurbana NURBS code is being integrated into Blender and the developers could use a hand! JiriH wrote: The Blender NURBS project (Nurbana) is patiently progressing to be eventually fully implemented into Blender. In fact Eman, who is the main coders, gained recently strong help from other Blender devs and new Blender NURBS are more closer to users [...]

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. The textures are all from a texture pack made by Spiral Graphics, who used the Genetic texture maker and they can be used in both commercial and non [...]

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: To summarize; here's the highlights what Blender 2.5x will bring you: New window-manager, allowing multi-window setups. New area-manager, allowing flexible division in sub-regions with each a distinctive task (like toolbars, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 Blender Stencil [...]

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. Alain Mathez writes: The first video shows the result of the article "Caterpillar [...]

Quick shots of Blender news. Fourth edition of Blender-Empire.ru magazine released Vladimir Vychegjanin wrote: What is interesting about it? First of all it has changed its layout. Now you can easily read it on your computer without zooming the page. I think it is much more convenient. Besides, there are a lot of things to learn: art gallery, [...]