Hi Blender guys!
I just decided to release under CC license the bathroom I made in Blender for a project I called “Bathroom project” (obvious name, isn’t it? 
)
Appliances and objects in the bathroom include textures and materials, so it’s ready to be used in your own works!
You can use everything is in the .blend file for both commercial and non commercial use, enjoy it!
Hi!
I’m proud to announce you that Blender++ v. 1.2, the batch renderer for Blender, has been released today!
Blender++ 1.2
If you don’t know what is Blender++, please check it out here!
What is new in Blender++ 1.2:
- Queue support: now you can submit queues to Blender++ in a special .que file format. Check it in the Blender++ folder to see how is it done!
- Command line: you can now use Blender++ without opening the GUI at all! This means that if you can remotely access to your machine (i.e. with Putty) you can just start your renders using the following sintax:
Where t is number of threads you want to use (remember that Blender uses from 1 to 8 maximum threads) and app_folder is the path to the blender.exe file. Moreover if you are using the OSX or Linux version just change brend95.exe with “python brend95.py”
- Baked data support: fluids and soft-bodies/cloth baked data is rendered as long as it’s pre-baked in Blender before launching Blender++.
- Threads support: you can decide how many threads Blender will use to render your blend file or queue (max. 
- Bug fixes
If you find some bug please report it to me and I’ll be happy to help you out providing a patch
You can download Blender++ 1.2 from sourceforge.
Akta
Directly from BlenderNation, this can be really useful to you guys out there
Mike Pan has published the .blend file and textures of 21 of his works (stills, animations and interactive) under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License.
Mike writes:
I know I will never be a great writer, so instead of doing tutorials, I have decided to release some of the personal project I’ve worked on. The result is a 300MB folder of 22 project, including a lot of the things on my portfolio and demoreel.
When I was learning Blender, I start a lot of personal mini-project that I never really finished, so instead of having them just sitting on my harddrive, perhaps others can find them useful in some way. The pack contains animations, stills and a realtime game project.
Link
Hi!
Before being on holidays I wanted to complete this other personal project using my favourite two toys: Python and Blender
Today I’ll show you how to get with cheap technology such as a webcam, a pen and a laser, cool things like object tracking in the BGE. Of course when you don’t have enough money to buy awesome (and really expensive..) hardware, then you go with software solutions.
First of all, what’s object tracking? For those who don’t know it yet, it’s a “is the process of locating a moving object (or several ones) in time using a camera. An algorithm analyses the video frames and outputs the location of moving targets within the video frame.” (from Wikipedia) So basically, it’s like the computer is able to see and detect moving objects. There are many approaches to this, I used laser lights and color-tracking. Somehow color-tracking is simpler, but my plan is of course to do full motion tracking in the future. Unfortunately I couldn’t use OpenCV because my webcam was not supported, so I used Videocapture to get PIL data from the webcam, Python Imaging Library (PIL) to handle the matrix and sockets to communicate internally with Blender. Why sockets? Read my previous post 
Laser tracking is simpler, however you can’t have depth which restricts movements in the BGE to two dimensions. On the other hand tracking objects is good if you want to have a full 3D interaction. How do you get the depth? Just checking the size of the bounding box area, when it gets bigger it means the object is closer and viceversa. Another important concept in this is the threshold. You need some time to tune it in order to get a perfect tracking. Spheres are the easiest to track since the shape doesn’t change if you rotate them. I didn’t have any sphere, so I used also a red d20 from my dungeons and dragons kit
Anyway, stop talking, enjoy the video and if you have question post it below 
Sources will be available in a couple of days, I need to clean them up a bit from test code and write also some comments. If you are interested in another cool thing about webcams and BGE check this video made by Nathan Letwory, one of the Blender’s coder living here in Finland who I never had the pleasure to meet, but just exchange a couple of emails
Sources available! Click here to download them!
Akta
Edit: look at what Mike Pan did using BlenderTrack, amazing and brilliant idea. I was actually wondering how to head track using this script, but Mike was faster and smarter than me
Enjoy his video and let’s see what comes next!
Hi, after one busy week I managed to release this first simple demo that shows you how to use the n95 accelerometer as an input device in Blender The application is structured in this way:
Why did I use a local socket? Sometimes I experienced some lag using pyserial in Blender, so to avoid that my idea was to use a non blocking socket. With this approach I had a smooth game running in Blender without any lag.
What do you need to run this? A Nokia N95, a PC/Laptop with a BT connection and Blender of course! You need to install PyS60 on your Nokia phone from here. Download both PythonForS60_1_4_5_3rdEd.sis and PythonScriptShell_1_4_5_3rdEd_unsigned_testrange.SIS you need to sign the ScriptShell otherwise the accelerometer data won’t be retrieved by the script due to security reasons of Nokia phones. You can sign it from https://www.symbiansigned.com/app/page using “Open signed online”. I’m going to put the source code of what I did really soon, I want to improve a little bit some part of the code to make it more stable. However even though the scenario I present in this video is really simple, it’s a way to show you how Blender is really powerful (besides modeling, animating, composing, whatever ), Python is really one the strongest features that Blender has, since it makes the possibilities of interaction with other apps, device etc, endless. Try for example to imagine the N95 as a joypad for a Blender game WipeOut style (I personally hate WipeOut, but somebody may love it ).
So enjoy the video and if you have feedbacks, questions, comments, feel free to ask!
Edit: sources available! Click here to download blender95!
Akta
Well, in my spare time (it’s not that much unfortunately because my job steals 90% of my time in this period) I’m working on a simple multiplayer game using Blender and of course python to create the classes server and client that will be used to share realtime data such as positions, rotation etc. among the players. I’m thinking about Pong as baseline for my game, however some changes may happen due to a couple of things that I need to verify!
For now enjoy this amazing tutorial about arrays in Blender, really useful sometimes to achieve nice effects as shown in this video
