Planet Blender

Development Update #1
Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project - 2009-10-14 20:35:13

Our plan is to do regular development updates, summarizing what we are working on, rather than doing it only for bigger features. Last week and this week the focus is on bug fixing in Blender 2.5. The artists here are already using Blender 2.5 for modeling, shading, lighting, rigging, animation and video editing.  In the Peach project Blender wasn’t used as much in the first weeks, and then we started from a stable version even. So, that immediately resulted in many different bugs and small feature requests from the artists.

We’re not going to list the bug reports here now, instead here’s some photos of our bug lists. There’s also multiple places where you can track svn commits, for example here: Blender project, Campbell’s commits, Brecht’s commits.

Landscape - Sea coast - Part 04
feeblemind - 2009-10-14 18:04:20

Not easy to see it, but the texture of the landscape uses he trick depicted in my short tutorial Texturing landscapes according to slopes.

Enough talks, here's the picture.

Free download of furniture models for architectural visualization
Blender 3D Architect - 2009-10-14 16:35:10

If there is one thing that we really need to keep in a safe place, for architectural visualization, besides a good texture collection, is a library of furniture models to use in interior design projects. This is something useful to speed up the production of any project, because we will only have to model the [...] Related posts:

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Online Version [dot]BlendMagz 01
Hello! - 2009-10-14 16:15:19

Kabar baru dari kami. Telah di buat versi online [dot]BlendMagz 01 di situs ISSUU.com. Versi ini di peruntukkan bagi siapa saja yang ingin meng-embed eMagz ini tanpa harus mendownloadnya. Lumayan enteng dan praktis di embed di blog atau website Anda. Cukup copy HTML scriptnya berdasarkan blog/website masing-masing. Silakan!

HTML

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WORDPRESS

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BLOGSPOT

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ORKUT

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MY SPACE

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JOOMLA

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BlenderArt Magazine #5 in Spanish
BlenderNation - 2009-10-14 14:03:53

BlenderArt Magazine #5 is now available in Spanish. Einer Iriarte wrote: We published the 5th edition of BlenderArt Magazine translated into Spanish, for everyone to enjoy it, we have also opened the forum BlenderArt Magazine in Spanish, to take comments and suggestions from readers. Also to know that other people want to work with translations and join our [...]

Hit & eat DVD
Trickle Project - 2009-10-14 14:02:12

Here we are with the DVD cover of the first Trickle Project “Hit & Eat”,
so anyone can make the DVD by itself for free.

Soon we will add all the original files of the project with creative commons license.
We invite you to download it and use for make new and fun animation.
…So stay tuned!!

Emanuele speaks about Trickle Project
Trickle Project - 2009-10-14 13:16:57

Emanuele Leoncilli speaks about his experience inside Trickle Project:

“I accepted with great interest the invitation of Spark DE to realize this project, because I never had the chance to work in a team and also because learning a new 3D software is always stimulating.

I started modeling Marghi (the Daisy of “Hit and Eat”).
As you may know, modeling is a very artistic job and I was able to do it without particular difficulties (once the initial lack of knowledge of the new software has been filled).

Then I started learning the rigging in Blender. Despite some little mistakes due to my young experience, I think that the rig of the 3 main characters came out pretty cool.

Last part of my work was the animation.
I would have liked to do it better but, due to schedule limits, I had no more time to spend in refining.
The tight deadline incoming taught me the importance of being part of a team where the work flow optimization is a crucial point to focus on if you want to be on time.

Now I’m working on a 3D cartoon serial named “Taratabong” at “Fulmini e Leopardi” and I’m happy to say that I found very useful the experiences gained during the Trickle Project.
Now the first things I take care when I start a new project is “where I have to save files” and “which name I have to give to those new files“. You have no idea how important are these two things when you work in team!

With no doubt an experience that anyone should catch!”

Emanuele Leoncilli

2.5 Deep shadow maps
Blender Labrat - 2009-10-14 07:24:00

Just a quick small post, recently Brecht commited his own version of deep shadow maps.

Keep in mind its jest so the durian team can do some shading tests and lacks many features the joeedh's DSM has like tiled maps and catering for transparencies, and shear speed

anyway images speak louder then words so here ya go

Classic-halfway buffer


Deep Shadow Buffer

Short film: The Ballad of the M4 Carbine
BlenderNation - 2009-10-14 05:35:06

Watch in HD Andrew Price writes: It’s always been a dream of mine to create an animated short, and with this year’s Blender film festival close by I couldn’t think of a better time. The M4 Carbine has been the weapon of choice for US soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001, and is still used today. The [...]

Weekly update October 5-12
Freestyle integration into Blender - 2009-10-14 04:39:12

Last week, Tamito completed the final integration of Freestyle into Blender 2.5 ! You should be able to recreate the images that you produced before the transition to the new codebase.

Below, you can find screenshots of the new interface. The workflow has not changed much:

1. click the global Freestyle checkbox in the “Post Processing” section to enable/disable the use of Freestyle in the rendering pipeline. (first screenshot)
2. click the layer Freestyle checkbox in the “Layers” section to enable/disable the use of Freestyle in the currently selected  layer. (second screenshot)
3. as you toggle the checkbox, the layer’s style module configuration appears. You can set all of the parameters used by the pipeline: add (filechooser) or remove (black cross) style modules, determine the intended style module order (top/down arrows) or select the style modules to include in the render. (third screenshot)

You should be able to compile the latest branch revision without any problem. Tamito has reported that the program renders correctly on his Windows machine. I am experiencing crashes on my Macbook, due to OpenGL.

You might ask yourself why OpenGL is interfering with Freestyle: great question ! It is unfortunately one of the latest remaining dependency of Freestyle. Even though it is not used in any way during rendering, Freestyle’s internal texture manager still depends on it to instantiate the default stroke texture. Prior to the transition to the new codebase, the OpenGL code would not have any side-effect but things have apparently changed, at least on my machine.

This is clearly a showstopper. My short-term priority is to refactor Freestyle’s texture manager to use Blender’s texture system and have an almost fully-functional Freestyle soon. Let me know if you are experiencing similar crashes. We have also been merging the trunk code into our branch weekly so compiled binaries of our branch follow the latest 2.5 developments.

Enjoy !

Guide about interior lighting for architecture with Blender 3D or YafaRay
Blender 3D Architect - 2009-10-14 02:25:07

In architectural visualization we consider the light of interior scenes, one of the most critical stages of a project, because it can really turn a great model into a poor scene, and make a simple scene gain life, with a well planned illumination. If you choose to use an advanced render engine such as YafaRay, [...] Related posts:

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3. More tutorials and examples of interior design with Blender 3D and YafaRay In the past few days a lot of interesting materials...