You may or may not know about Blender's open source movie project, Peach, and associated game project, Apricot but now is the time, if you're a user or potential user of Blender, to get involved.
Basically the Blender Foundation is funding another film project to drive development of Blender and this time there's also a follow on game project using the assets from the film.
Read about the Peach Project film here:
http://peach.blender.org/
and the Apricot Project game here:
http://apricot.blender.org/
The main purpose of the Apricot Project is to drive the development of Blender as a tool to be used in the pipeline of "professional" game developers. The call for discussion about what is required has now gone out on the Apricot blog. Have a look at the mini site for the background information and maybe join in the discussion.
Blender now has a rock solid .b3d exporter (thanks to Diego aka GaNDaLF) and in my opinion is the perfect partner with blitz for media generation.
Don't know what Blender is capable of? Take a look at the newly posted fur tests on the Peach blog.... nice. You're not going to see that in a game but hell that's impressive.
New developments already in svn branches of Blender include automatic armature creation and skinning using heat bone techniques which automatically rig and weight a mesh to an armature and in my tests produce fantastic results for models imported into blitz.
So, get involved, forget about pirate copies of 3D Studio Max, and maybe even support the Blender Foundation by pre-purchasing a DVD of the film or game.
Basically the Blender Foundation is funding another film project to drive development of Blender and this time there's also a follow on game project using the assets from the film.
Read about the Peach Project film here:
http://peach.blender.org/
and the Apricot Project game here:
http://apricot.blender.org/
The main purpose of the Apricot Project is to drive the development of Blender as a tool to be used in the pipeline of "professional" game developers. The call for discussion about what is required has now gone out on the Apricot blog. Have a look at the mini site for the background information and maybe join in the discussion.
Blender now has a rock solid .b3d exporter (thanks to Diego aka GaNDaLF) and in my opinion is the perfect partner with blitz for media generation.
Don't know what Blender is capable of? Take a look at the newly posted fur tests on the Peach blog.... nice. You're not going to see that in a game but hell that's impressive.
New developments already in svn branches of Blender include automatic armature creation and skinning using heat bone techniques which automatically rig and weight a mesh to an armature and in my tests produce fantastic results for models imported into blitz.
So, get involved, forget about pirate copies of 3D Studio Max, and maybe even support the Blender Foundation by pre-purchasing a DVD of the film or game.