The Network - Open Source Blender

Movie Made in Blender

nospam@example.com (Allison) — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 20:49:43 -0700

A short film has been released that was made in Blender, the 3d modeling program. This opens up a number of possibilities going forward for the immersive web. But it also opens up the possibilities of low cost animation (because Blender is a free program).

Some things to watch for in the future are to see if anyone manages to blend (no pun intended) Blender developed content with content developed inside Second Life. It could get quite interesting.

According to Blender:

the project had four main goals: create new tools for editing and rendering hair, fur or grass in Blender, improve on character animation tools to make them more suitable to "cartoonish" motion, put the software through its paces for rendering large outdoor environments, and "further validate Blender as a professional animation creation suite." Secondary to those main goals, the open movie project provides everyone in the Blender community with professional-level source files to modify, remix, and learn from

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Here's the film:

beatenetworks

Blender 2.46 Released

nospam@example.com (Allison) — Wed, 21 May 2008 18:56:13 -0700

Click for Download

The Blender team just released a new version of Blender (2.46) and includes a long list of cool new features. If you do design work in SL, then you might want to consider Blender. It's free, open source, and perfect for 3d design work. Here are some of the new features:

Cloth Simulation

Cloth simulation is available in Blender via a modifier on Mesh objects. Cloth then realistically and in real-time interacts with other objects, the wind or other forces, all of which is fully under your control.

Hair and Fur

Many features have been added to make fur and grass rendering for Peach possible. Big improvements were made in visual quality, rendering speed and memory usage.

Glossy Reflections

Reflections and refractions are now possible to be rendered with a glossiness factor, controlling the roughness of material.

Skinning improvements

Bone Heat Weighting is a new method to create vertex weights for bone deformation, it generates better results, and does not require setting a radius for bones. Also added was Quaternion-Interpolated Deformation for superior blends

QMC & Adaptive Sampling

Blender now includes two new sampling methods, using a Halton sequence (Adaptive QMC) and a Hammersley sequence (Constant QMC).
Raytracing now also supports adaptive sampling.

Soft Shadows

Raytraced soft shadows are now possible for all lamp types; including spot, sun and point lights.

Game Engine improvements

The Blender GameEngine has seen a great deal of improvement with an increase in play-back speed, a number of nice new features including 2D filter compositing, and of course attention to quality through bug fixes.

UV texture editing

UV texture coordinates now are accessible via regular Mesh editmode. And many more features were added such as:

UV draw types
Solid opengl view with textures
* 2d cursor in Image window

beatenetworks

Tutorial - Blender

nospam@example.com (Allison) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 13:42:05 -0700

Blender Tutorial - Making Text Rotate Around a Globe

nospam@example.com (Allison) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 21:55:20 -0700

Here's a tutorial on Blender. This one covers how to make text that rotates around a globe.

Free 3d Software: Blender

nospam@example.com (Allison) — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 08:53:58 -0800

In our continuing series of outlining free and open source design tools, we next get into the area of 3d modeling. The application you want to have for designing skins and clothing (and much more if you so desire) is Blender. Blender is free and it is open source.

Blender is a 3D animation program released as free software. It can be used for modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging, skinning, animating, rendering, particle and other simulations, non-linear editing, compositing, and creating interactive 3D applications. Blender is available for several operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, IRIX, Solaris, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD with unofficial ports for BeOS, SkyOS, AmigaOS, MorphOS and Pocket PC. Blender has a robust feature set similar in scope and depth to other high-end 3D software such as Softimage|XSI, Cinema 4D, 3ds Max, Lightwave and Maya. These features include advanced simulation tools such as rigid body, fluid, and softbody dynamics, modifier based modeling tools, powerful character animation tools, a node based material and compositing system and Python for embedded scripting.

Blender screenshot (source: Wikimedia)

As we move forward we will begin to feature tutorials for Blender (as well as Gimp, Inkwell, and other design tools we discuss here). In the meantime you can download Blender by clicking here.

beatenetworks