Linux for Designers

I have written a workshop for the CG and 3D mag Digital Production 03:08:
Blender: Professional Pipeline
A team workflow for modeling, compositing and video editing completely inside of Blender.
The result of this workshop is a small video, some pics of it can be found here and here.

The final of Blender 2.46 is very close but there are some todos on the list before releasing it. The 4th release candidate of Blender 2.46 is now available for download. Take a tour of the new features of Blender 2.46 in the Wiki or as a video too.
If you found any bug report it. The funny video of Chris explains you how to report bugs.

During my own update session and the talk about WINE at the Hardy release party Berlin i forget that besides the normal Ubuntu distribution Ubuntu Studio 8.04 is available too.
Ubuntu Studio is a special edition packed with a lot off tools for creatives focused on Graphics, Sound and Video. It ships with a special dark theme too and supports realtime audio by the kernel. You can update your normal Ubuntu installation to Ubuntu Studio by installing the "ubuntu-studio-*" packages.
Thanx to Dan for reminding me

Yesterday was the world premiere and after party of the 2nd open source movie made with Blender "Big Buck Bunny". It seems it was a big success for the Peach team. Can't wait to watch it with my one eyes



More Impressions of Martin Pyka about the premiere.

The new issue #15 of the Blender Art Mag covers animation basics and "beyond with a variety of articles and tutorials that will help you take your animation from ok to wow":
* Taking Your Animation to the Next Level
* Acting for Animation
* Product Modeling: SDS and Details
* Product Rendering
* Hero’s Blender Animations
* Facial Expressions in Stupidus
* Einstein Dwarf
* Blender in a Classroom

Nope, the final of 2.46 isn't out yet but there is a lot of other good news about Blender:
* The Blitz3D Toolset for Blender is available, Blitz3D is a toolkit for game creation.
* There is an interesting thread at Blenderartist.org about the Renderman exporter RibMosaic and it's teamplay with Pixie and Aqsis.
* Andrey Izrantsev has developed an Blender exporter for the VRay renderer too.
* Glenn Melenhorst, creative Director at Iloura, created a game using the Blender Game Engine:

One of the first contests especially for Blender was the F1 which is started this time again. Like ever "What is better then speed? More speed!".
Take a look of the results of the last year to built a real cool new speed vehicle:
2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007

The WindLight First Look Viewer and Dazzle First Look Viewer of Second Life for Linux reaches after 2 years of development the beta state. That means all features available in the Windows version have found their way into the Linux version. WindLight offers new graphic capabilities while Dazzle offers an improved interface.

After Blender enters the BCON3 state, the first release candidate is published now. It seems it isn't officially announced yet but available for download. Read the release logs about all the nice, new features. Try it out and report bugs to make it rockin' stable. If you never report a bug and like to know how to do it watch Chris funny video.

Well any open source application needs the input of the users as feature requests, patches and bug reports. So do Blender too.
Watch this funny video of Chris about how to submit a bug and what it is a good bug report: