Ten Excellent Community Resources - The Part of Tens - Blender For Dummies (2015)

Blender For Dummies (2015)

Part V

The Part of Tens

Chapter 18

Ten Excellent Community Resources

In This Chapter

arrow Discovering websites that are valuable sources of information and help in Blender

arrow Finding a place for real-time communication with other Blenderheads

The true strength of Blender is in its community. It’s strong, organized, passionate, and perhaps even a little bit crazy. People use Blender for a variety of reasons, from producing animated films and video games to creating scientific and architectural visualizations to even wackier things (such as controlling unmanned drones and 3D printing interactive art installations). The following community resources give you a good idea of just how diverse and motivated this group is.

Blender.org

The official Blender website, www.blender.org, is the place to go for nearly anything Blender related. Most obviously, this website is the one to visit when you want to download the latest stable version of Blender. Not only that, but you can also track new developments in the Blender Foundation and Blender Institute, including new features being coded into Blender.

Another item of interest is the official Blender User Manual online. This “live” manual is located at www.blender.org/manual. Like Blender itself, the manual is constantly being updated as changes are made to Blender.

You can also use this site to find Blender trainers who have been certified by the Blender Foundation or go to the Gallery to sit back and enjoy some of the best artwork created by the many skilled artists in the community.

BlenderArtists.org

If you had any questions about how active the Blender community is, you would only have visit www.blenderartists.org once to quell those doubts. The primary community website for Blender artists, this site is the main place to go for English-speaking Blender users.

BlenderArtists.org (or BA.org, as many affectionately refer to it) is a web forum for Blender users. Here you can see artists of all skill levels sharing their work, learning new features, offering tips, participating in contests, and engaging in idle chitchat. (Disclaimer: I'm a moderator on BA.org. I go by the username Fweeb.)

tip A particularly cool thing on the BA.org forums is the Weekend Challenge. Late Thursday night (GMT), a theme is posted. Participants have until the same time Monday evening to model and render a scene to fit that theme. At the end of the weekend, the community votes on a winner, and that winner gets to pick the theme for the next Weekend Challenge. This is a great way to find out just how good you really are, and it's a lot of fun, too!

BlenderNation

If any new developments with Blender occur or anything interesting happens within the Blender community, BlenderNation, the main news site for anything Blender-related, reports on it. BlenderNation (www.blendernation.com) covers events, reviews books, and presents tutorials.

In particular, this website is a great way to see what kind of professional work is being done with Blender. (Many working professionals don't always have time to be active on the forums at BA.org.) BlenderNation also reports on topics that, although perhaps not directly related to Blender, may be of interest to Blender users (such as news on open source software or events in the larger computer graphics industry).

BlenderBasics.com

This is the Blender For Dummies website that I maintain for this book. Not only can you find all of the sample files available for this book, but I also have additional content video tutorials, additional files, and errata updates. In addition, there are a few sections in this book where I refer to helpful written tutorials. This is the website where I have them posted.

blender.stackexchange.com

The Blender section on StackExchange (http://blender.stackexchange.com) is a relatively new Blender site, but it's already one of the best places to go for support. If you have a question about using Blender, chances are good that it's been asked here. And if your question hasn't been asked yet, you can expect to get a very clear, well-researched, and extremely thorough response from the Blender users and developers who populate that site.

BlenderCookie.com

A regularly updated and high-quality site loaded with education material for Blender, BlenderCookie was one of the first sites to provide video tutorials and documentation for Blender's new interface. It's been successfully cranking out great content ever since. BlenderCookie continues to provide high-quality examples and tutorials for anyone interested in advancing their CG skills with Blender. The vast majority of materials on this website are freely available, although some tutorials offer the ability to purchase supplementary files and source files for a small fee.

The fine folks at BlenderCookie also manage the Blender Market, a website designed to facilitate Blender users to sell their useful additions to Blender. These include highly advanced add-ons, pre-modeled asset packs, and refined materials and shaders for Cycles. The site (and the concept) is still young, but some great tools already are being made available there.

Blendswap

At this online repository of a variety of 3D models created in Blender, models are contributed by the community and organized by category. Associated with each model is a license that clearly shows what you have permission to do with it. Blendswap played an instrumental part in some of the weekend modeling sprints for the Sintel open movie project from the Blender Institute.

Blenderart Magazine

Focusing on creating artwork with Blender, Blenderart is a very well-designed free online magazine in PDF format that is released on (roughly) a bimonthly schedule. Some of the best artists in the community have written for this magazine, and it's a great place to pick up new tricks.

builder.blender.org

When you really start getting into Blender, it can become highly addictive. One of the huge benefits of Blender being open source is the sheer amount of access you have to developers and, by extension, development versions of Blender.

builder.blender.org is a website set up by the core Blender developers to provide everyone with daily builds from the development source tree. An automated system creates an executable build for each of the major platforms Blender supports, and they're uploaded to the site each evening. This way, regular users can play with new features while they're being developed and, hopefully, contribute to the process by creating bug reports and providing feedback to developers. This level of access is unheard of for regular users of any of the proprietary 3D packages, and it's one of those things that you get with Blender precisely because it's open source.

Blender IRC Channels on freenode.net

The ultimate place to go for instant discussion and feedback from other Blender users is the Blender IRC channels on freenode.net. IRC is Internet Relay Chat, one of the oldest protocols on the Internet. Using a chat program (called a client) like mIRC or Chatzilla or even the open source IM program, Pidgin, you can log into the freenode server. If you don't want to install anything, you can use a Web interface at http://webchat.freenode.net/. Simply choose a nickname and join one of the many channels devoted to Blender.

In particular, the following channels may be most interesting to you:

· #blender: Kind of the obvious de facto official Blender channel. You can often get quick help here, but sometimes the channel is populated with people who only know as much about Blender as you do.

· #blenderchat: For general discussion, critique, and occasional help in Blender. This is probably the most active Blender channel on freenode and is a great place to interact directly with other Blender users.

· #blenderQA: As the name suggests, for getting your Blender questions answered. This is usually a pretty good place to go if you're having problems and need help quickly.

· #smc: Speed Modeling Challenge. Visit this channel to really challenge yourself. Artists here organize challenges where everyone is given an object to model and a time limit (usually 30 minutes to an hour) to create that model and render it.

· #blendercoders: For people involved with actually writing the code that makes Blender. Although discussions here might be a bit technical for new users (and even some experienced ones!), it's a good place to find out the latest information on Blender's development. Also, if you think you've found a bug or error in Blender, this is a good, quick way to talk with a developer and find out if the error is real or if you're just doing something incorrectly.