Planet Blender

MYoB: project 8 lil pilot retopologized….
ThruDreamsgate's Blog - 2013-06-19 18:54:40

Retopology takes a loooong time. At least for me it does. I have finally finished up the retopology of the lil pilot model I have been working on. Well I finished everything except the hands and gloves. I didn’t like how the hands turned out at all, so I am shelving that part until I […]

Stage Hands (Includes Models)
BlenderNation - 2013-06-19 14:00:49

An intriguing image by mozzy69. mozzy69 writes: Hi, here’s a little side project I been workin on for a while. i really enjoyed working with Blender’s new sculpt updates like the new...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Innovative Ariz. class turns students’ dreams into reality
BlenderNation - 2013-06-19 13:20:25

Kids in Gridley Middle School in Tuscon, Arizona, are using Blender for a Virtual Reality project (article link).

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Tutorial: How to Engrave Glass in Blender
BlenderNation - 2013-06-19 11:00:19

Filippo Veniero takes you through the process of modeling and rendering this amazing scene. Links How to Engrave Glass in Blender: Part 1 How to Engrave Glass in Blender: Part 2

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Party Technology Workshop using Blender and Raspberry Pi’s
BlenderNation - 2013-06-19 10:00:01

A free workshop on June 25th in Utrecht, the Netherlands on creating ‘immersive spacious projections’ with Blender and Raspberry Pi’s. Machiel Veltkamp writes: On Tuesday 25th of...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Game Development with Blender
Dalai Felinto - 2013-06-19 08:01:51

The book in a nutshell:

1. Blender in a Nutshell
2. First Game
3. Logic Bricks
4. Animation
5. Graphics
6. Physics
7. Python Scripting
8. Workflow and Optimization
9. Publishing and Beyond
10. Case Studies

We start covering the basics of Blender for new comers followed by a simple game project from start to end. That should give the reader the perspective of the components of the Blender game engine important for making your own projects.

The following chapters  are self-contained, each one with its own approach. Most of them have tutorials and short projects focused on the presented tools. Finally, chapter 10 gives the reader a perspective of real usage of the Blender game engine presenting 10 projects from different artists around the world explained by the authors themselves.

What version of Blender does this book cover?

The book covers Blender 2.66a fully.

Will there be an ebook?

Yes. The book is going to be sold as old-fashion paperbook (sorry trees) and its ecologic-friendly cosine, ebook. It should be available for purchase in early July.

About the authors:

Mike Pan is a CG generalist who started using Blender 10 years ago, before it was open sourced. Mike’s interest in Blender includes everything from special effects to compositing, and from real-time graphics to scripting. He has given talks at the Blender Conference in Amsterdam, hosted workshops at the View Conference in Turin and Blender Workshop in Vancouver, and conducted a three-day Blender course in Kerala, India. Mike is currently the lead programmer for a two-year project at Harvard Medical School to develop a biomolecular visualization software using Blender. Before that, he worked at the University of British Columbia with Dalai on a marine ecosystem visualization project. Mike lives in the always-raining Vancouver, Canada. You can find him at mikepan.com.

Dalai Felinto, who is currently living in Vancouver, Canada, was born in sunny Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He has been using Blender since beginning his undergraduate studies in Architecture and Urban Planning in 2003. His participation in the Blender Community includes papers, workshops, and talks presented at events such as BlenderPRO in Brazil, Che Blender in Argentina, Blender Conference in Amsterdam, View Conference in Turin, BlenderVen in Venezuela, and Blender Workshop in Canada. He has contributed patches and code to Blender since version 2.47. Dalai uses Blender and the game engine in his work as a science communicator at the University of British Columbia, Canada. However, his day job doesn’t stop him from doing freelance Blender projects around the world. His latest works have been for Italy, England, and the Netherlands. Dalai’s dream career move is to land a job in the movie industry, working at Pixar. Follow his adventures at dalaifelinto.com.

Bonus Question: How did this book help the game engine?

One of the reasons it took us almost three years to complete this project was to make sure it would cover all the game engine latest developments.

We were alarmed that some areas of the BGE (Blender Game Engine) could/should use a revamp. I’m one of the BGE developers, so we made the decision of taking the book writing and some needed development side-by-side. That includes a lot of changes in the UI, the support for unicode and ttf fonts, and the removal of texface properties in favour of per-material settings, and lots of bug fixes.

It wasn’t an easy call because we knew the book delay could harm the book sales. However my first concern was into making sure we were proud of the engine we were talking about. And even though we both make a living out of working with Blender and the game engine, we knew there were room for some pressing improvements.

We finally settled on the 2.66a. And before handing all the manuscript to the publisher, in the author review phase we made sure things were updated. From there on people can follow the release notes of new Blender and it will be fine.

The book companion files (over a hundred) also helped to test the BGE itself. Just to illustrate it, we were short in time prior to 2.66 release and couldn’t dedicate time to test the official release (somehow to finish a book takes time (: )). We then worked closely with other developers to have 2.66a stable as far as the animation, uv materials, and multiplatform support goes. The result? between 2.66 and 2.66a alone we had 15 bugs fixed by the bge developers (some by myself directly, and others by fellow programmers). And all the book files are working in 2.66a as they were originally conceived in all major platforms (Linux, Mac and Windows).

We hope you enjoy the book!

Feel free to drop us a line with any feedback or commentaries you may have.

Blender Conference 2013, 25-26-27 October, Amsterdam
BlenderNation - 2013-06-19 06:00:21

The Blender Foundation just announced the 2013 edition of the Blender Conference. Will you be there? Ton Roosendaal writes: Mark in your calendars: Blender Conference is the last weekend of October,...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Reconstructing a Lightning Bolt in Blender
BlenderNation - 2013-06-18 17:12:34

Richard Wheeler used Blender to reconstruct a 3D image of lightning. He used 2 images of the same lightning strike that he found using Reddit. Richard writes: Having two pictures of the exact same...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

3D Printed Spider Bot
BlenderNation - 2013-06-18 13:10:55

Remember Ben Simond’s Master Class? He had his spider 3D printed, and it’s looking awesome! Ben writes: This guy just arrived at the office. I think he’s looking pretty cool. If you...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Digital Rebel Academy Students Reel
BlenderNation - 2013-06-18 11:59:43

Students from the Digital Rebel Acedemy in Barcelona are sharing their work in this reel. Luis Arizaga writes: Hi my name is Luis Arizaga from Digital Rebel Academy, I wanted to shared with the...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]