Planet Blender

Sculptris - Escultura Digital
4RTE DIGIT4L - 2010-02-19 21:43:00

Sculptris é uma ferramenta de escultura digital que vem sendo desenvolvida desde Dezembro de 2009, por Tomas Pettersson. A principal característica do Sculptris é a malha dinâmica que fornecer detalhes adicionais, sempre que necessário, sem que o usuário precise se preocupar com isso.

Mesmo em fase de desenvolvimento, o programa é impressionante pela complexidade. Vale a pena testar, além de ser gratuito!

Sprint – Asset list and new Rules!
Durian Open Movie Project - 2010-02-19 17:05:52

Hey everyone!

We had an, how to say…. overwhelming response about the sprint.  Initially we were planning to manage the sprint in realtime, overseeing work, assigning tasks, and keeping tabs on people.  However, since it looks like we underestimated the mass of people interested in participating, we’ve decided to go for a ‘freer’ approach so that we don’t go insane.  What this means is that we won’t be managing versions or restricting people’s options on what to model.  Here is how we’ll proceed:

We made the list of all the objects and props we need modeled on the Blender Wiki.

On that page you’ll be able to edit the page, and mark your name next to an item as you begin to work on it.  We think this is a good idea to get a sense of what’s being worked on, and what models are being neglected.

So here’s how it will work:

1. Get on IRC and log into the #Blenderdurian channel

2. Go to the Asset wiki page here:

Sprint Assetlist

3. Pick an asset

4. If you have questions about it, ask them on #Blenderdurian

5. Start modeling (and texturing, if you wish) and post your progress on IRC as you go along so we can critique and direct you

6. Your file should be named this way: yourname_category_assetname.blend . (No capital letters please.) Upload your work to http://www.blendswap.com/ when you’re done.

Important Note: The models uploaded to the “Durian” Category on BlendSwap.com will be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution “By” 3.0 License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ unless otherwise stipulated by the artist. If you incorporate any external textures or other data into your work, make sure they are under a compatible license (CC BY, under the public domain, or CC0) and attribute the original source in your submission.  (Please put this information in an open text window in your .blend.)

It may take some time to be approved and made public.

7.  When it comes online, if you want to be especially awesome, take your Blenderswap model page (the one you just uploaded) and add the url to the Asset page underneath the item listed. It will be easier for us to track the models at the end of the day. Do not overwrite other people links! It’s ok to have several versions of the same asset.

8. Go back to step two and start again! If you don’t know what to pick in the asset list, ask us, we’ll guide you! 

SOO!  You can get started right away.  Have fun!  However, the sprint officially begins, still, at 2:00pm +1 GMT on Saturday.  During this time we’ll be streaming video live and will be available in the IRC chatroom to answer questions.

Good luck!

–The Durian Team

Blender 2.5 Alpha 1 released
Blender - 2010-02-19 14:10:00

Eagerly awaiting the first real beta release, we've published another alpha test build to ensure...

Video Editing with Blender Now Up!
Reyn's Blog - 2010-02-19 13:53:00

This month, we published another Blender article covering the video editing aspects of Blender on an introductory flow.Thanks to Packt Pub and the whole Blender community! ^_^Nothing beats than a direct link to what I'm saying, so here it is:http://www.packtpub.com/article/video-editing-blender-using-video-sequence-editor-1http://www.packtpub.com/article/

Bits of Blender #44 - Explosions
Art + Logic - 2010-02-19 13:48:00



A quick tip on using the explode modifier in Blender. Blender 2.49b.

Bits of Blender #43 - Force Fields
Art + Logic - 2010-02-19 13:46:00



A quick tip on using force fields in Blender. Blender 2.49

Join Triangles
BMesh Integration Blog - 2010-02-19 13:02:13

The last three weeks have been insane for me, but I’ve managed to make some progress.  I recoded the join triangles tool, though I’ve not yet tested the more advanced uv/vcol features.  I also finished getting all the primitives to work. The next big thing will be the loop to region tool, and after that [...]

DVD training 5: Chaos & Evolutions
BlenderNation - 2010-02-19 12:27:45

The Blender Foundation have announced their fifth training DVD: ‘Chaos and Evolutions’. Durian art director and concept artist David Revoy takes 20 hours to talk you through several areas of digital painting. Of course, everything is done using Open Source software. Unlike other Blender Foundation products though, this DVD focuses completely on 2D [...]

The Making of a Blender car
mike's digital anthology - 2010-02-19 07:57:22

Wow, a project I actually finished!

Since I started working on this car project, I’ve been getting a lot of positive feedback which really helped me move the project forward. It’s only fair that I return the favor and share a bit of what I learned here. (The full scene file including model, lighting, material and texture is available at my site)

The entire scene is rendered with the internal renderer in Blender 2.5.  As an artist, I want precise control over each elements of the scene, and the internal renderer allows me to iterate through test renders extremely rapidly to get the look I wanted. A photon-tracer like LuxRender would be too slow for me, with little extra return in image quality in my opinion.

Supposedly, like eyes to a human, car headlights defines the character of a car.  There is really no shortcut to making a sparkly looking headlight, I just modeled everything as geometry and applied a lot of reflection/refraction to the material.  As long as the geometry is there, all the cool effects happen automatically once you hit render.  i also placed a lamp at where the light should be, to throw in a bit of extra lumen.

A lot of that ‘cinematic’ look is due to post-production color correction.  Here you can see my postprocessing nodes setup.

For the animation, I rendered out the entire video at 1280×720, as PNGs.  Because PNG is only 24bit, extra dynamic range is lost, which made all the post-processing and cross-fading look half-assed.  Next time I’ll definitely render to floating-point EXR formats, which should help when I start applying more aggressive processings.  I also realized that a single computer is NEVER fast enough;  The 40 second clip would have taken 83 days to render on a single core, but with the help of 24 cores spanning across 4 PCs, I managed to push out the video in less than 4 days.  Dropbox made file synchronization embarrassingly simple.

A lot of the technical issues with the video (bad driving dynamics; black pixels; flickering) only cropped up last minute in the final rendering, at which point I am just too annoyed to re-render it.  So hopefully I’ll fix these distractions later and release a better version soon.

That’s it for now.  Hope you like what I have so far.

Getting Started with Blender
Blender Tutorials Downloads Videos & Education - Blender Cookie - 2010-02-19 05:06:45

Something we realized is though there are plenty of amazing video blender tutorials all over our site, there wasn’t a clearly defined starting point. As with anything there has to be a beginning or an initial handshake of “Hey, nice to meet you” to really get started on the right foot

http://blendercookie.com

graphicall: Entire Blender 2.5 dev activity animated! Thanks again Bobalicious http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hgF0WFPTpc
Twitter / graphicall - 2010-02-19 02:47:42

graphicall: Entire Blender 2.5 dev activity animated! Thanks again Bobalicious http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hgF0WFPTpc

Half Acre Day's "Skeletons" Are Out!
Phil McCoy's Posts - Project London - 2010-02-19 01:30:00

Seattle rock quintet and best friend's of Project London, Half Acre Day's "Skeletons" are out as of Feb. 14 - the Lunar New Year 4707 and dawning of the year of the striped big cat. Come and listen to the song. Then let them know what you think.

This is just the beginning. The band is releasing a single every month for the coming lunar year. Stay in the loop on the release cycle. Friend them.