Blender 2.5 released

The first official testing release of Blender 2.5 has been released. Work on Blender 2.5 will proceed alongside the Durian open movie project, along with continued collaborative work from the worldwide developer community leading up to a fully stabilised and production ready Blender 2.6 release in mid 2010. This version of Blender has the Blender Game Engine (BGE) build in so it's a tool for Machinima as well. There might be some changes to the BGE implementation until 2.6 but that gives you enough time to learn the new interace and features of Blender. If you want to have control of everything in your production and as well have a tool with no EULA strings attached, have a look at Blender. Interested? Michael Fox has made some great videos about Blender 2.5 at his Blog 'Blender Labrat'

New Machinima Tools

Some new Machinima Tools appeared on my radar. As Bllius wrote already on his blog,
'Machinima Studio' is a tool that allows you to design, capture and export your own machinima movie-scenes in an easy and intiutive way.. I'll download it today and will have a look. Right now ony a limited set of game content is supported, but that may hopefully change soon.

'MachStudio Pro' is 3D visualization suite based on a real-time (GPU powered) rendering engine. Unfortunaley the price tag makes it affordable for only a few of us.

Two other tools that might be of interest are:

'Mixamo' is a new tool to create 3D character animations based mainly on preset library. The workflow looks a bit like 'Animeeple'

'Evolver' as a website where you can create and customize a 3D character model (avatar) online and export it in a several format to us it in your tool (Animeeple, Mixamo, FaceFX, Blender..). Building an avatar is free, but you have to pay when you want to download the fully rigged avatar.