Intro to New Blender Features

    The release of Blender 2.61 is a pretty big milestone with some really impressive new features that will likely draw in a torrent of new users. The feature that long time blender users are most appreciative for would have to be the new Cycles render engine. The feature that will most likely draw new users would have to be the motion tracking, which let's users put 3d objects in movies.

Cycles Render Engine

     Before Blender 2.61 when rendering a 3d scene that was indoors or most scenes for that matter, the render lacked certain light elements that left the scene looking blan and not real. With the Cycles render engine the lighting is handled completely differently and it shows as the renders are allot more realistic. Another feature of cycles is that it features OpenCL and will use graphics cards for rendering where possible.

In this tutorial from Andrew Price of Blender Guru you will discover:

• The difference between the internal renderer and Cycles
• Some of the cool features of Cycles
• How to create your very first Cycles render
• Using lights, materials, textures and bump mapping
• How he made the donut scene

Motion Tracking

    Blender as a video editor is a pretty powerful tool, and with the new motion tracking features things just got serious. Mixing people into 3d scenes had been doable for a long while now, but with motion tracking we can now put 3d objects into movies.

A small 10 second example


A quick run through of setting up motion tracking. In this video the ground has already been mapped and the object is getting mapped.


    The other new features for blender 2.61 include ocean simulation, dynamic paint, camera sensor size and presets, 3D mouse color wheel editing, and more translations to other languages. New Addons in this release are an Adobe After Effects exporter, an Acclaim and C3D motion capture importers. Not to mention the 108 bug fixes and improved methods for new developers to make addons.

Blender is a free and Open Source Software get it at www.blender.org/get-blender/
Release notes for Blender 2.61 http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-261/
Demo files to that open in Blender's to try the new features  http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-261/blender-261-demo-files/

Openshot Video Editor

    Openshot is a free and Open Source video editor. It is really easy to use and has lots of great features that are also easily used. Such as the 3d title animations, they are really simple to setup, just fill out a little wizard and hit render. To create the 3d title animations Openshot uses scripts that are controlled by the easy to use wizard and aimed at an installed copy of Blender.

Screenshot of the 3d title animation wizard

    Dream. Create. Share. Video editing on Linux has never been easier or more fun. If you create an awesome video with OpenShot, please share it with us. And remember to tag your videos with the word "openshot" on YouTube so others can discover them.

Here is a little video I put together with Openshot

Ubuntu Unity Not So Bad

    All across the web people are downing Ubuntu's new UI called Unity. They go as far as to say it's the worst thing ever, and other harsh words I'd rather not repeat. I Honestly think it's not bad at all, in fact I actually like it.

    Got to keep in mind that Ubuntu isn't aimed at power users but at everyone, and it shows. In the application finder it shows what apps you use the most, ones that are installed, and suggests new one that are available to download in a couple clicks. I can see why old Ubuntu and Linux users are upset, the applications launcher used to be really organized and quick to get what I was looking for, but with Unity if you know the name off the application you're trying to launch it is super fast to press the window button, and start typing the name of program, then select it.

Ubuntu's developers put allot of thought into Unity. They must have considered that most people have widescreen monitors, and as such the best place to put the launcher bar is on the side, and I agree with it goes good right there. I get the most screen real estate with Unity from the launcher being on the side and auto hiding to the window management. The window management is like a OSx in the way the to option like File, Edit, Help are on the top title bar all the time.

A brief feature walkthrough of Unity



    Any who, with Ubuntu's Unity, you either love it or hate it, although I'd say I like it, but not ready to commit to loving it quite yet.

jME3 and Android Java 3D Game Development

    The open source community is always providing an amazing array of useful software. It also has great set of tools to work with. I'll introduce you to a combination of a couple tools that I'm using for 3d game development.

    jMonkeyEngine (jME) is a game engine made especially for modern 3D development, as it uses shader technology extensively. jMonkeyEngine is written purely in Java and uses LWJGL as its default renderer.OpenGL 2 through OpenGL 4 is fully supported.

    jMonkeyEngine is a community-centric open source project released under the new BSD license. It is used by several commercial game studios and educational institutions. The default jMonkeyEngine 3 download comes readily integrated with an advanced SDK that makes it more like a studio.

    By itself, jMonkeyEngine is a collection of libraries, making it a low-level game development tool. Coupled with an IDE like the official jMonkeyEngine 3 SDK it becomes a higher level game development environment with multiple graphical components.

Here is a Demo reel of jME from early 2011

    Using Blender3d you can save models with textures, animations, particles and more as a blend file then open them in the jME3 SDK and drop them into your game. On top of all that jME3 will compile to an android install package, if you point it to the android sdk. 

    Another piece of free and open source software in jME3 is the Nifty GUI. Below is a video demonstration of some of Nifty GUI's features. More on jME3 to come soon.

    One thing is for sure, it wouldn't be 3d with out Blender. Blender is a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software product used for creating animated films, visual effects, interactive 3D applications or video games. Blender's features include 3D modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging and skinning, fluid and smoke simulation, particle simulation, animating, rendering, video editing and compositing.

Here is a Demo reel of Blender made in 2011

    Blender has so many features it is more like a studio of software it's just amazing what it can do. Being Open Source and free there is a huge community of users helping noobs! Such as Andrew Price's website www.blenderguru.com where there are many in depth tutorials on using blender, plus a file that you can open in Blender and compare yours with his. There is also place to download free models such as www.blendswap.com and with creative commons licenses they can be reused and built upon.

    Blender has a physics engine and tools in place to create games without knowing any programming, which is awesome but for programmers to simple. That's where jMonkey Platform comes in.

Check out the links, get the software and have fun creat!