Blender Underground extends a sincere thank you to two field agents, Alan Whinery and Joe Hamner, for their direct action in mirroring Blender Underground’s video tutorials to help take the load off of our host. Their bravery and self sacrifice has assured us yet another victory against The Man.

You can find links to the new mirrors on our Video Tutorials page: Blender Underground Video Tutorials

Come on in to the forums and say thanks: Thanks to Joe Hamner and Alan Whinery

I’m belatedly writing this post to give a little more information on Blender Underground’s site outage beginning Thursday September 25th, 2008, and ending on Saturday, September 27th. I had intended to write more last week, but didn’t get around to it.

I’ve had some time to reflect on this and settle down a little — I’m not so angry about it anymore — but it’s still difficult to comprehend the actions taken by Bluehost Support: they pulled the plug on the entire Blender Underground site without any warning; and I have concluded that they won’t hesitate to do so again if they find it convenient.

UPDATE: If this post is deemed in violation of Bluehost’s TOS, it will be removed upon request.

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On Thursday, September 25th, at around 2:25PM Pacific Standard Time, our web host, Bluehost, pulled the plug on Blender Underground without word or warning. What followed was a cold, impersonal, auto-generated email message:

Your web hosting account [...] has been deactivated (reason: site causing performance problems).
Although your web site has been disabled, your data may still be available for up to 15 days, after which it will be deleted.

This website was shut down summarily and without warning, and I was given 15 days to retrieve my data. Actually, I was not able to access my data at all — my email and cPanel access was also revoked. Had I not been working from a Gmail address, I would not have received any notification whatsoever, nor would I have been able to email Bluehost technical support for a resolution.

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If you’re interested in using MakeHuman to generate models for rigging in Blender, then Blender Underground’s chief specialist, Penix1, has something just for you. He has posted a detailed three part tutorial on how to make use of MakeHuman models in Blender. Part 1 of the series even begins with instructions on compiling the MakeHuman source in Linux.

Make Human to Blender Part 1
Make Human to Blender Part 2
Make Human to Blender Part 3

Come on in and have a look, it’s really quite well done. He’d appreciate any tips or feedback you have to offer as well. There is some mild, artistic nekkedness in some of the screenshots, so if you are bothered by such things, be ye warned. If you are under the age of 16, please get your parent’s permission before viewing.

Over the last several months on the forums, we’ve answered quite a few Blender questions — and sometimes they were answered with the help of blend files. I figured it might be useful to list some of them here, in case they can be of help. So here they are, along with some others. It’s not a complete list, just some of the ones I thought to be more interesting or instructional. Most of them are simple; not intended to impress but usually to demonstrate a single how-to…

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Composite with sky color, consisting of Combined, Modified Shadow, Reflection, and Specular passes

In Part 1 of this series, we started by looking at some of the key render passes that result in the final image as seen when we press F12 to render. We also reviewed how to set up for node editing, and we “built” a small part of the render pipeline by compositing diffuse and specular passes into a final image. Finally, we looked at the basics of pixel math, demonstrating some of the ways that Blender composites pixels internally – which can also be reproduced with a simple node setup…

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Viewer nodes showing Combined, Alpha, Diffuse, and Specular render passes.

I’ve been experimenting with compositing nodes lately; not so much for achieving specific results as for understanding how they work. The subject is also educational for increasing understanding of Blender’s rendering pipeline. Believe it or not, it’s possible to get a grasp on this without diving into the code…

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While going through my access logs I noticed a link from the CarveWright user forums. A user there had posted a tutorial showing how to use Blender for CarveWright patterns. If you don’t know what CarveWright is, it happens to be a bench-top woodcarving machine that automatically mills images into wood based on a 2D height map…

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