News: Blender 2.57 Quick Effect Operators Demo

DEVELOPER NOTES (Janne Karhu)

Quick effects operators:

* A couple of operators to quickly create effects that would otherwise take some time to set up.
* Nice to use for demoing functionality or as a starting point for more complex effects.
* "Make Fur" - Gives every selected mesh object particle fur with a desired density and length.
* "Make Smoke" - Makes each selected object a smoke emitter and creates a new domain object around the emitters with the correct material to render the smoke. ** Has style options for "stream": constant smoke flow, "puff": only create smoke once from the volume of the emitter object, "fire": enable high resolution smoke and set a secondary fire color texture for the domain object.
* "Make Fluid" - Makes every selected object a fluid object (normal/inflow) and has the option to start fluid baking immediately.
* This should provide a nice base for extending these / adding more operators for different effects.

More info at the Blender Developer Blog...

technorati tags: Blender3D, 3D, graphics, Blender tutorials

News: Blender 2.57 RC1 (Release Candidate) available for Download

The Blender Foundation has just made available the first non-Beta release of Blender 2.5!

You can find download links, here...

technorati tags: Blender3D, 3D, graphics, Blender tutorials

New Tools: Theme Manager, and LoopTools

The power of python programming in Blender and the development skills of Bart Crouch combine to bring us two much-needed tools for Blender. Actually, it's far more than two, if you include the many tools in the LoopTools addon.

Theme Manager

Sharing custom themes for Blender 2.5 used to be difficult, as you had to share entire .blend files, replace your default .blend and then manually reorganize your start-up screen with the new colours. That's why I'm introducing: Theme manager

More info on the Theme Manager...

LoopTools

The LoopTools add-on is a script containing a collection of tools to aid mesh modelling in Blender.

More info on LoopTools...

technorati tags: Blender3D, 3D, graphics, Blender tutorials

News: Fluid Particles have been Refactored

From the developer (jahka)

...the refactoring is finally done! Check the video to get a quick start on the new functionality...

More info...

technorati tags: Blender3D, 3D, graphics, Blender tutorials

Resource: Incredible Design and Composition Lessons from Feng Zhu

The Feng Zhu Design School provides valuable video lessons on composition, color design, lighting, digital painting techniques, and more. These lessons are packed with extremely insightful information that's very relevant to what we do in Blender.

The lessons are free and given by Feng Zhu, himself! Feng Zhu is one of the most in-demand concept artists in the game and feature film industry.



Here's the first "episode". I recommend going through them in order because some of the content is progressive.


Here's a link to their YouTube channel to see all of the videos...

The information in these videos, if studied and applied, will greatly improve the final results you get in your 3d graphics work. A lot of important issues are addressed in these videos that are rarely adequately covered in a "3d" tutorial.

technorati tags: Blender3D, 3D, graphics, Blender tutorials