The Blender Foundation has announced the release of version 2.81. (more...)

The Blender Foundation has made the videos from its 2019 conference available online. Watch them on this YouTube playlist. 

Flipped Normals has released a tutorial explaining how Cryptomattes can speed up your work when compositing and lighting with Blender projects. Watch it on YouTube.

AMD has joined the Blender development fund at Patron level, joining the ranks of Epic and NVIDIA. This news means that AMD will be contributing a further $120,000 a year, enough for two full-time developers. According to a post on Blender Nation, the money is earmarked for " supporting AMD's own technologies and paying for general development" as well as "migrating the software to the cross-platform Vulkan graphics AP". Also announced was $30,000 per year funding from Swedish game developers Embark Studios who will also be releasing some of their in-house tools for Blender.  Find out more about the development fund here.

F12 has released a new version of The Grove, its parametric tree modelling tool for Blender. New features include the ability to animate tree growth, improved tools to allow growth to react to forces, improved materials, a better UX, and many simulation improvements to increase realism and allow for fine-tuning. To see what's new in detail, visit The Grove website. 

Adidas is the latest company to join the Blender Development fund according to a recent tweet by the Blender Foundation. Adidas joins as a silver sponsor alongside companies like Google, Ubuntu, Intel, Steam and more. You might wonder what a sports apparel wants with Blender, but apparently, they used it in the past for visualisations. 

Quixel's Adnan Chaumette has released a live stream recording that breaks down Blender's render engine Eevee, and offers tips and tricks to help get the most out of Eevee's features and Megascans assets. Watch it on YouTube 

This tutorial by Southernshotty demonstrates how to create, texture, and paint a character from scratch. Watch it on YouTube.