Sintel Open Movie Released

Sintel is out.

Download it here.

A great animated short from a technical standpoint, and it lasts 14 minutes and 48 seconds too! Although as many people have pointed out, there are a couple of plot holes, I think that overall the short is very good. Although maybe not as good as the Blender Foundations previous short Big Buck Bunny, it is very close, and I would definitely recommend watching it.

As you might or might not know, this short was produced as an open movie, which means that almost all software used to produce the movie was open source. The main production tools included Blender, Gimp, MyPaint and some other software.

I look forward to the Blender Institutes next open movie project which could be in production in the next year. You can see an interview with Ton Roosendal (The Producer of Sintel as well as head of the Blender Institute.) over at BlenderGuru, where Ton talks about the Sintel project, as well as his plans for the next project, with a possible codename: "Mango".

http://www.blenderguru.com/interview-with-ton-roosendaal/

Maya and Blender - Presets and Integration - And other keymap help

Lots of people have been wondering how they can easily switch between Maya and Blender, without having to worry a whole lot about different hot-keys and such. Well there are two easy solutions that I have come up with.

One.

Blender now has a Maya key-map preset built right in! No need to go through the long lists of key-maps and change everything so that it is to your liking, instead right on the splash screen is a nice little drop down menu with presets (under the name Interaction Presets). Right now there are only two, Maya and Blender, however in the future it is possible that other 3D programs will have their own "interaction" presets built into Blender. Unfortunately for the die-hard Maya user, not every singe hot-key has been ported (Blender's features aren't all the same as Maya's - otherwise there would be no point in having it.), still it is supposed to be very helpful.

This change has been in Blender's Trunk since r31638 at least, so building the latest version of Blender will guarantee that you have the feature, however even if you are not a programmer, you can still have access to it! Download a fairly recent version of Blender for Windows (Complete with Installer!) from Letwory Interactive at this page, and enjoy!

Two.
Blender Guru just released the Free Blender 2.5 Cheat Sheet, a list of all the keyboard shortcuts in Blender, grouped by task (eg. Modelling, Sculpting, Fly Mode, etc.). Now you won't have to worry about knowing the shortcuts, just look them up!

Hope these ideas help you out with your Blender fun (and work)!

Oceanscape

If you're new to blender, still developing your skills or even are an expert at it the Blenderartists Weekend Challenge is a great way to hone your skills. I usually check back there every week or two to see what the theme of the contests is and if I like it and have the time then I'll enter. You can read up on the rules here and then you can start designing!

For last weekend's Weekend Challenge the theme was "Cityscape" so after some initial concept creation I made this:

I decided to make this a big learning experience as well so I split the scene up into layers and composited all the render layers together. There are 3 separate layers: the foreground (The buildings in the front and some of the water), the background (all the far off water and buildings) and the sky (moon, stars, etc.). I then applied some colouring effects (making everything a little blue) as well as giving some bloom and a little background bluring. I modeled all the buildings, platforms and bridges, then I lit it all (extremely hard work I must say.) and got everything the way I wanted it to be.

My final result was what you see below:

I used the .blend files from a Blender Guru tutorial to give me some hints on how to create my highrises, and from there I was on my own.

I do wish I had gotten it a bit more complete, maybe added some people walking around, some more building variation and I was hoping to create some sort of transportation system (monorail or something.) however I am very happy with what I accomplished and learned in my latest foray into the world of 3D.

Blenderstorm

The title of a recent BlenderArtist thread, and then an email in the Blender Developers mailing list: Blenderstorm... Is Back. I haven't see it before, but then, I haven't seen a lot of things. However one thing is for sure, it has one slick website.

By now I'm sure you're going, "What is Blenderstorm anyway?" Well you can head over there and check it out, but I'll also give you a short summary as well.

Blenderstorm is essentially, a big, online brain storm of problems with Blender and (This is important) solutions to those problems. You must have a solution if you add a problem! The problems (or ideas as they are called by the website) are then put into the "Idea Sandbox", where users (you must create an account to use Blenderstorm) can comment on the ideas and provide other solutions as well.

Blender 2.53 Beta Release

Although many Blender 2.5 Alphas have been release, everyone has been looking forward to the Beta, and now it is here! There has been a lot of changes since the last Alpha, including a whole new way of using add-ons (as well as including a lot of great ones), a lot more stabilizing of the python API, a whole host of improvements in sculpting, thanks in part to the Google Summer of Code, and many other great upgrades.

Blender Guru - The Complete Weather Series

About a month ago Andrew Price, the man behind Blender Guru, was able to finally start working full time on making blender tutorials. And he has just finished his first month, after publishing five high quality tutorials on Blender Guru. All of them are relating to June's theme "Weather", if you want to know what next month's theme will be, visit his post here. The titles of the five tutorials he has published are:

• Puddles
• Rain
• Lightning
• Snow
• Heat Distortion

I'm glad to say that Andrew is keeping an open standard and has written two of them up, instead of just using video for all of them. The Puddles and Heat Distortion tutorials are both available for browsing as soon as you get to their pages, no need to watch any videos. That along has made me check back at Blender Guru very often! The style of these tutorials are usually very easy to follow, and (surprisingly) I've actually learned more about blender through these tutorials. If you're interested in learning more about blender, check out Blender Guru!