Bascially it’s a webpage which displays colour palette of five colours made based upon a given image. Simple yet very helpful and inspiring in all kinds of stuff (let it be 3D, 2D or web page design). Try it and set yourself free from black and white!

There are three huge new/improved things – hair, cloth and rewritten particle system. All those things were largely boosted by producing Big Buck Bunny and improving tools needed to make this short.

From the lesser (but surely important for me!) things I can mention pose libraries, somehow built in distributed rendering solution for animation, colour correction in sequencer, and more more more!

Release note about 2.46 can be found on official Blender site.

I’m really excited about this release because of improved animation elements (custom coloured bones will do just great!) and lightint options (approximate AO). I hope you guys will enjoy this free, yet robust application to the maximum!

I recently got myself modo and I see how perfectly I could use those tools together! Well… unless modo gets a decent character animation, fluid simulation and particle system or Blender improves rendering, painting and sculpting engine. So as you can see – nothing is perfect but this release really shows the power of open source!

Simple objects, complex scenes, animations – all recreating the real world that surrounds us and more.

And have you ever had this weird feeling, that it is not sure, whether the picture that you’re looking at is real, or maybe it is a 3d render.

If not and if yes, I proudly present Mr. Alex Roman from Spain and his portfolio on CGsociety.

Especially two of his magnificent works took my breath away:

Forest Refuge Project

BCN auditorium

It is not the fact that all you can see in those pictures was rendered that kicks ass.

It is this illusion that one is looking at trully art photographs. Every frame is picked carefully. Lighting, composition, focal distance, bokeh.

Were you misleaded?

Those kind of challenges makes you think what 3D is really all about and that you don’t have to master everything to transmit great ideas.

Thread I talk about can be found here. Really – check it out – you won’t regret it!

p.s.

Obviously some guys broke the rules and created some bigger scenes, but I like the one created by dEspadas:

Here is simple try:

Anyway – for some time now I’m aware of Photoshop Express – online image editor which seems to be hitting internet hard (keeping in mind commercial support and popularity of Photoshop). Since I’m a no fan of online editing while I got all the tools I need offline nor do I have to tweak my photos after sending them to my Flickr account, I found it a lot easier to compare those two apps by just reading what someone else got to say (hey! that’s the way it’s done, right?).

After a while it struck me that surely I could find a lot more of those image editors (and I believe every other kind of mainstream application that the market has demand for). So I began a quick search and I found many of them and only few seemed to be worth taking a look. To my surprise I also found quite nice comparison of those tools on Aviary – image editor that seems to be the best of the breed but… isn’t out yet.

If you delve a bit more into Aviary website you’ll find that they got BIG plans for online editing. Just taking a look at the list makes you wonder what more could there be? Come on – image editor, vector editor, 3d modeler and audio editing on one site?!? Woah! That’s gonna be HUGE!

p.s.

There’s one more image editor not mentioned on Aviary and worth taking a look if you’re into online editing – oie

I myself use Blender and Gimp in everyday work and I also have usage for Inkscape and other smaller OSS. It seems that there will be two events about Blender this year – one about Apricot project (free and open source game developed using Blender and Crystal Space linked to Peach / Big Buck Bunny short) and the other will be 3d workshop with Blender.

Click below to see where LGM is this year!

Display map.

You could spend some time looking for textures on stock photo sites but having tried some of them they ain’t worth a try unless they’re specifically texture oriented. Some of you perhaps have some secret sources of their textures and so did I unless I found really wonderful site called CGTextures.

Don’t expect to get full blown hd layered seamless textures BUT the site is an excellent resource for getting final touch on your model (and some of us already know tricks to create bump/normal/reflection layers). Most of images are easily tileable and at pretty high resolution. Licence enable use of those images to noncommercial as well as commercial usage so you don’t have to worry about some hidden limitations. Actually only one limit is 15 MB download limit per 24h (for those leechers out there). So if you’re not in need of really big files and you actually are looking for one particular one to fill the gap – there is no problem.

Site also provides some nice backgrounds (skies), reference images (animals), signs and more. Just go check it out at http://cgtextures.com/

If you know some better texture resources – just leave a comment with link.

Working on something resembling metaballs ShapeShop lets you create 3D on the fly by just drawing shapes in viewport. Program then interprets the shape and create resembling mesh which can be easily connected into one mass with other meshes. All creation and modification is thus based on 2d drawings impacting 3D.

Texturing side looks less amazing but it’s also cool by using drag and drop system to place and transform texture .

I don’t yet see the “real” use of it but this app looks like an excellent thing for kids wanting to get into 3D or just to play with it testing own’s imagination. And keeping in mind new touch screen technologies this could be something big in future.

Let’s hope kids don’t forget about playing with clay.

See it in action: