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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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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Blender Underground is hosting a friendly little challenge on our forums. There are at least two purposes for this: 1) to generate an owl model for Agent Darth to use as part of a business logo; 2) to assist those interested to build their modeling skills and their knowledge of Blender. You can read about it here on the forums. There are no prizes, but if you want to have a little fun, we’d love to have you.

If you would like to participate, you’ll need to register for the forums. This should be fun and will assist any interested parties in building their Blender skills! We anticipate lots of questions, and forum users helping each other to increase know-how. So if you want to take a shot at it, increase your skills along the way, and interact with others working on similar projects, come on in and join the fun.

I put up a donations link today, and I wanted to say a few words about it. First and foremost, I want to stress that the Blender video tutorials posted on this site are provided free of charge, and you are under no obligation to pay for them. In addition, there are numerous ways to support the site that don’t involve your wallet, which I iterate below.

I started doing Blender tutorials as a way of giving something back to the community that gave me Blender. When I first started with the application, I was amazed at how full-featured and capable it was. I started by watching the video tutorials on blender.org and progressed from there to sites like blendernewbies.com and geneome.net, among others. It was these tutorials that helped get me up and running. For this reason I wanted to produce a few of my own…

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I’ve set up a (tentatively) temporary forum for those wanting to come hang out, get questions answered, make suggestions, etc. Don’t expect everything to work right away (and don’t expect forum beauty) but if you want to kick it with other Blender Underground associates, operatives, and agents, come on over and register.

Blender Underground Forums

Hey I wanted to let everyone know that Blender Basics Parts 1 and 2 are available in Quicktime format, in case you didn’t notice the extra links in the original posts. These versions include chapters, which is very nice. This is due to the efforts of Blender Underground operative kaveh, from http://www.river-valley.tv…

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If you notice any malformed sidebar widgets or funky pages over the next day or two, it’s because I’m experimenting with polls, and it might take me some time to get the styles and alignment right. Feel free to participate…

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