Anttilat

We've had all kinds of annoying problems lately. First our hosting service started doing funny things and caused this website being unreadable for several days. We still haven't heard any explanation of what was going on. Once the site started to work again we got trouble with ATI's proprietary graphic card drivers. Right now I get all kinds of funky effects if I try to do too many things at the same time. We're waiting that the latest ATI drivers appear to Debian's repositories and hope that it'll fix the problem.

In the meanwhile I wanted to show my readers that I haven't abandoned this blog :) So I collected some links that might be interesting for (new) Blender enthusiasts. I haven't really gotten to know many of these sites yet, so this is also a bookmark list for me.

http://www.blender.org/
First the obvious one. But really, that site is a great resource and it's easy to spend a long time there discovering all the things the site has to offer. One of them is page http://www.blender.org/community/user-community/ that has a pretty nice list of websites, somewhat like this one I'm trying to create here. One of the sites I checked there hadn't been updated since 2006 so I'm not sure how often that list updates, either.

http://wiki.blender.org/
You can get to the Blender wiki from the official Blender website, but this is such a great resource that I felt it was justified to mention it as it's own site. You can find the text of the book I'm using, "The Essential Blender", there among other great tutorials.

http://www.blendernation.com/
Blendernation is a news and resource site for Blender community. It seems to be a must to follow if you want to keep up with what's going on in Blender world. It has become so popular that there's even been a blendernation effect (similar to Slashdot effect) to be seen a couple of times.

http://blendernewbies.blogspot.com/
A site I'll probably look into closer after I've finished with the book. There seems to be tutorials for many different skill levels so it's probably useful for a complete newbie, too.

http://blenderartists.org/
BlenderArtists is a very popular site and especially it's forum is referred to a lot. I've been a chicken and haven't made my user account yet as there seems to be so amazing skilled artists on those forums that I just don't fit in. But it seems to be an integral part of Blender community so I'd better get the courage some day. There's also all kinds of contests that could be fun challenges.

http://www.blenderart.org/
It's a magazine delivered in PDF form. It's pretty cool.

http://www.planetblender.org/
I can't go through all the great sites out there. Planet Blender aggregates a bunch of Blender sites. This blog can also be found there so the site must be great and useful ;)

http://blenderunderground.com/
Another site dedicated to Blender including a lot of tutorials and a forum. I just checked it shortly so I'm not actually sure if it's a good site or not.

http://www.graphicall.org/
If you for example want to try the very latest svn version of Blender but find using a special svn client too complicated, this web page might be a solution for you. Specialized Blender builds ready to download. (I haven't actually tried any of them but I hear they work.)

http://www.blenderjobs.com/
There's a lot of Blender artists looking for a dream job and a lot of people looking for skilled people who know their Blender. This site tries to connect those two groups of people. That's not something I could consider for a while but maybe it's worth remembering anyway.

http://www.artificial3d.com/
I haven't followed this guy's blog before but I've seen his work and he's good. Like, you know, Really Good. He's not the only wonderful Blender using artist I've seen but the only one whose active blog I found this time.

http://www.elephantsdream.org/
http://peach.blender.org/
http://apricot.blender.org/
Elephants Dream was the result of the first open movie project called "Orange". You can download the short film for free - and all the production files. Peach project was a similar project and it created a short film Big Buck Bunny. BBB was released just a short while ago and some of the people who pre-ordered the DVD received it today. The rest of us can see the movie online in one week. Also all the production files (this time it really means ALL and there'll be huge amount of stuff!) will be released. Apricot is an open game project that is still in it's beginning but I'm excited to see what they'll accomplish.

I'm sure there's plenty more great resources. If you, my dear reader, think I missed something important feel free to tell about it in a comment.