You can now pre-order "The Blender Gamekit 2nd Edition! From the product page on Blender e-shop: This fully revised and updated second edition has been written with Blender 2.48, and covers all improvements for game creation thanks to the Open Game Yo Frankie! project. The Blender GameKit starts with an extensive section for people who [...]

The Brazilian Blender book, Blender 3D – Guia do Usuario was released again with a revised and expanded third edition. Now the book has 552 pages covering most of the basic aspects of Blender. This new edition was updated with the latest Blender 2.46 and 2.47, and all new features released with those two versions, like: New [...]

Daniel MArtinez Lara (psl/pepeland) has just uploaded a couple of videos showing how to use Blender's sculpt tool for animation using blend shapes.  The results look quite promising! Daniel writes: I've just upload a video about how to use sculp in animation (AniSculp), you can make squash & stretch, redefine a shape of a model or a [...]

Spot anything slightly familiar on planet-positive.org ?

Oliver Perfumo has made a nice demo reel worth checking out. It features his work from the past 3 years, set to a pretty catchy song. The T-Rex sequences are particularly impressive. Oliver writes: "Hello! My name is Oliver Perfumo. I want to present my demo reel. It is a compilation of work to do in Blender for 3 [...]

The Japanese Blender community is planning a party on Saturday, November 29th. Tony Mullen writes: I wanted to let people know about an upcoming event in the Japan Blender community. On Saturday, Nov 29, the first ever NAGOYA BLENDER PARTY will take place! The event will include a screening of Blender animations, some "mini courses", and of [...]

ResourceSpace is a web-based, open source digital asset management system, with a twist: it will dynamically render previews of Blender files, making it a great solution for Blender Asset Management. It's based on PHP/MySQL so you'll need to have access to a webserver if you want to use it. Tom Gleason wrote: Some blender users may be [...]

The Excellence Center in Free Software of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain), has created an on-line course of 20 hours to teach the use Blender. The course starts at February 23rd, and costs €60 for students/€100 for everyone else. Carlos Gonzalez Morcillo wrote: The course is made up of a variety of elements, including step-by-step tutorials and a [...]

CGChallenge have announced their 23rd challenge, themed 'Steampunk Myths and Legends'. Steampunk is the application of advanced steam age technology to a modern or science fiction setting. This challenge asks you to render traditional myths and legends in the steampunk style using elements of gears, springs, brass and steam power. Re-imagine legendary characters from some of the [...]

Here's something we don't *nearly* write enough about on BlenderNation: the Aqsis RenderMan compliant renderer, and the MOSAIC plugin that allows Blender and Aqsis to work together. Eric Back has just published a very cool sample of what kind of quality you can achieve with these systems - check it out. Oh! And these guys are [...]