blenderblog

B@rt points to BlenderCE, a project to revive the PocketPC version of Blender.

Blender is a fantastic open source package providing almost everything you could need in Computer Graphics. It was already ported for old IPAQ but the project was not open source.

The aim of this Blog is to provide all information about the advancement of BlenderCE, a project to make Blender run again on all modern PocketPC. Don’t hesitate to comment any article or make suggestions. And if you want to join me in this adventure, you are welcomed.

Hopefully this will lead to versions of Blender that run on other PDA platforms.

Matt from the Orange Project has posted a great description on how they organise their Blender files in a team-based scenario.

Blender offers a pretty wide range of options for managing assets with its library linking system, and we’re using it a lot. As well as appending things straight into a local file, you can link any blender datablocks like objects, object data, actions, or entire sets from an external library .blend file. Blender also allows multiple Scenes in each file, which can be completely independent, or have various datablocks linked between them. The trick for us was in deciding what features would suit us best (and what should be coded :)

It's a great read. Managing files may not be a high priority for users that work solo, but it's still important to know. Even if you are working by yourself, a simple backup and revision/versioning system is a good place to start. I use Subversion at my day job [software developer] but also use it for my own Blender projects, and important GIMP/Photoshop files. In theory you can use subversion to backup/version anything.

Wow...that was quick.

With less than one month of development time, this has been a short and sweet release cycle. The focus of this release is the Game Engine which has added a number of nice new features such as GLSL shaders, the capability of using multiple materials and uv maps; multiple viewports; as well as a number of important fixes such as the return of the armature system. Of course Blender's core tools also have been improved, with subsurf aware UV mapping; the addition of a live sculpting tool; set chaining; a number of python script additions and improvements; and the addition of the python Pose module along with other python improvements and fixes.

Releaselog.

Download page.

If you can, use BitTorrent to download Blender - less load on the Blender Foundation servers and their friendly mirror sites.

B@rt has posted links to some great tutorials on Fluid Simulation using the integrated Fluid simulator in Blender 2.40.

Check the beginners and imtermediate tutorials, or check out the full documentation on the fluid simulator.

On a side note, I'm really enjoying using the Blender documentation online since it was moved into mediawiki.

The Project Orange blog has been around since June 2005 and is the best way to keep up with information on the project. It's also a great learning aid for starting your own small production project.

If you're not using an aggregator to keep up with you Internet news, you should [there's many reasons why, but you discover them yourself].

The Project Orange Blog isn't advertising their rss feed on the blog anywhere, but because they're using WordPress 1.5.2, you can access the RSS feed from the blog via this URL.

Issue #2 of BlenderArt has been released. As with the first issue it's packed full of helpful and interesting information, including a inside look at the Orange Team and enough tutorials to help all us novices turn into pros.

You can grab a copy from this newstand. Congrats to the BlenderArt team.

B@rt has started a blog and you all know it's going to be a great place for the latest info on Blender. Personally I think it's going to be one of the best Blender info resources out there, and something for me to aspire to.

Well done B@rt, and thanks for starting a great site.

While I've been away version 2.40 was released. Although we've all had preludes to this version with the Alpha2 and Pre-Release, there's still a lot of new editions to the app we all love. You should check out the release notes while downloading a copy [I'm so late with this post that we've all got it already right...oh well].