Sintel

Be sure to check this out, its quite inspiring. Sintel is an open movie project created entirely in Blender. Blender is a popular open source 3D software package that can do just about anything, even compositing, film editing and digital sculpting. Sintel really shows off Blender's dynamics and camera capabilities the best.

The project was created by an international group of 14 artists and took a little over a year to develop. Kudos to all of you for an outstanding and inspiring piece. Learn learn more about this project and support it, to do so, be sure to visit the Sintel.org site.

And to learn more about Blender, and where you can download the program for free, be sure you check out the Blender.org site.

Happy blending everyone!

Fire it up!

"Big Buck Bunny": Blender Animation

Premiering on the internet this week is "Big Buck Bunny". The movie is special because it was modeled, rigged and animated in a free open source 3D program called Blender. This animation really shows off what the application can do.

The environments display beautiful color and lighting and texturing, we see great examples of fur, water, FX animation, rigging and smooth animation. The animators were also able to create some pretty funny emotions in the characters. It has a great story that will keep you entertained. 

The project is entirely Open Source, if you would like to learn more check out bigbuckbunny.org. You can learn more about the project, browse through galleries, download the files (oh yes, you can actually download the actual models and play with them), and its also where you can also purchase the DVD, a good idea as sales of the DVD goes to help produce more projects like this. 

The idea of Open Source is really nice. The script is available for programmers to enhance and therefore, new and more powerful versions of Blender are always available to you. I often encourage my classes to check it out. The program is free....the only cost however is the learning curve. I taught myself Blender earlier last year and visited the Blenderwiki site to access some pretty helpful tutorials. This Blender tutorial will show you the basics of the navigation. 

Give it a shot. The Blender program can be downloaded off of the Blender.org site. 

Cheers to the group that created "Big Buck Bunny", well done. 

Andy Goralczyk : Creature Factory

I got into Blender about a year ago and had to put it aside in order to finish up with school. I'm still pretty impressed with what it can do. Blender is an open source 3D software that can do just about anything. The best part about it is that its free. The only cost however, is the learning curve. How much time would you like to invest into getting to know it?

I saw this demo reel and was inspired. I particularly liked the node based editing screen, where one can see the image in the background being adjusted. The project is by Andy Goralcyzk, and there's no word yet as to when he's completed it or not. You can check out high rez pictures of the project by clicking here.

Until the DVD comes out, enjoy!