blenderblog

Blender3D.org now offers an RSS feed so you can subscribe and keep up to date with what's happening.

The feed contains all the news & announcements posted to Blender3D. It's a static file that is updated every 15mins. That's not to say you should set your aggregator to ping it every 15mins. In fact, give them a break and ping it for changes only once a day [If you use an online aggregation server like Bloglines you don't have to worry about this].

Congrats to Bart and everyone else involved in making this happen.

The Lynnart site is a little low on information about itself and I don't want to make any assumtions about it, but it looks like the personal website of a 3D artist who has decided to share, and who can find fault with that [not I]. It has some nice models & textures to download.

I'd show you an example but the copyright on the site states the following...

All models and the texture images are copyrighted to lynnart.net. They may be used privately or commercially, but may not be displayed in web galleries, resold or distributed in any way.

Credit is appreciated but isn't necessary.

Fair enough and good enough.

In any case it's a good place to grab a few models or textures to do some testing with. Most of the models come in .lwo, .3ds or .obj so they are Blender friendly. The textures are mainly low-res jpegs, but like I said, good to mess around with.

PlantStudio Botanical Illustration Software is a tool for creating 3D plant models and 2D illustrations. PlantStudio simulates herbaceous (non-woody) plants like wildflowers and cut flowers, vegetables, weeds, grasses, and herbs using a parameter-driven simulation of plant growth and structure. You can "grow" plants over their life cycles, producing lifelike images at any age. You can design, animate and breed a wide variety of plants. By using the "evolutionary arts" of variation and selection in the plant breeder, you can quickly and easily create whole families of unique plants for your 3D scenes.

PlantStudio is free to download and looks like a promising application to add to your 3D toolbox. There is only a Windows version available so unfortunately I haven't been able to check it out myself just yet. If anyone has used it, let me know what you think.

Industrial-Meshes.com is a new 3D site devoted to...

Welcome to Industrial-Meshes.com - a new 3D and Digital computer art website containing galleries and forums for enthusiasts of industrial, technical, mechanical and pretty much most made-machinery, be it large or small.

...

If you are interested in 3D and Digital artwork, regardless of what application that you use, 3D or 2D, whether you are just an enthusiast, do not produce artwork yourself, or perhaps are even a professional, please feel to join the site - it's free.

In the FAQ on the site is a question - I'm new to this, what is available cheaply?

And their answer

In many environments, there is an old adage of 'you get what you pay for' and while it is also true in this industry, it is also true that Open Source software can provide you with some excellent alternatives without needing to spend a penny...

In regards to a cheap start, we would recommend Blender. Many people (especially from other applications) criticise Blender for its interface, but this is mostly an historic argument and mainly connected with the fact that it is different from other applications.

Today, Blender is an extremely powerful application that goes from strength to strength on every release. If you want a good start in 3D, especially if you don't want to commit a whole load of you hard earned cash to finding out if you even like it, you can't go far wrong with Blender.

Nice one. Apparently there are some Blender tutorials on the site, but I've yet to check them out. I'll do so soon and let you know how I go.