blenderblog

Over at Elysiun is a post where M@dcow generously donates several quality sky maps to the Blender community.

Nice one M@dcow. And great work.

The blender.org site that was previously being run using PHP Nuke has been redirected to blender3d.org's Typo 3 CMS.

Thanks to another attempt by someone to exploit the vulnerable phpNuke site we had running on blender.org, we decided to move this weekend over to a new system. It was already planned for a long time to integrate both www.blender3d.org and blender.org into a single Blender portal. What you see now is still only partially finished, since the top menu structure is based on the blender3d.org website. Expect a new navigation system to be implemented during the next few weeks!

I'm glad they got rid of the PHP Nuke system, but I now need to go through and fix all the broken links =). Also, at least PHP Nuke had a feed you could subscribe to. The Typo3 system doesn't seem to support RSS feeds [or any other type]. I hope this changes in the near future.

But in any case, the new homepage looks great and is a little more user friendly that the previous version. Well done to the people involved in the change-over.

Nice one Google!

As part of Google's Summer Of Code, 10 students who will work on the code of Blender have been given US$50,000 - to be split between them. That's a nice chunk of change.

To check out the students and what they will be working on, have a look at this page from the Blender wiki.

The orignal post from the Blender Foundation can be found here.

Blender 3D - Noob To Pro is a wikibook that I've mentioned before and find myself revisiting every once and a while. Today I noticed that it's been voted as wikibook of the month for July 2005. Congrats to Spiderworm and all the contributors.

Recently I installed Tiger on my Powerbook, and shortly thereafter Blender [of course]. But as you tend to do after a fresh install, I was having a look at the new features and apps available with Tiger. Several links later and I was at the OSX Downloads - Imaging & 3D page of the Apple website. The image to the right was one of the sidebars on the page.

Makes me wonder how many people out there are really getting into Blender. Being the top download of this section means there must be literally thousands of people all around the world at least trying Blender. Of those people, a percentage [I'd hate to guess] would get past the initial learning curve and then a percentage of those people would stick with it and start producing some cool stuff. That's still got to be a couple of thousand people don't you think? [considering most people would download Blender directly from the Blender3D.org site, and that OSX is only one platform of many that Blender supports, this guesstimate is still only a small percentage of the total number of Blender downloads - aka potential users]