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[FilmmakerIQ] posted 555 links to Blender tutorial videos.

[Blender] has done some open source projects like “Elephant’s Dream” and “Big Buck Bunny” (2M downloads). They are also working on an open source game called [Yo Frankie].

I was having trouble exporting 3DS files with a default install of [Blender]. According to this [post], I had to edit line 10 of “C:/Program Files/Blender Foundation/Blender/.blender/scripts/3ds_export.py” which fixed the problem. The special ‘a’ characters in the author name had to be replaced with ASCII ‘a’. I also had to install [Python 2.5.4].

I’m trying to work in Blender with two uv sets, but unfortunately most of the exporters and importers are stripping off the second uv set. [forum post]

If you are like most people, you don’t understand the [Blender] interface. SageDread has put together a large collection of [tutorial videos] that explain the interface in detail.

The [Blender Underground] has in-depth hi-quality video tutorials that explain the [Blender] interface in detail.

The new open movie [Big Buck Bunny] made exclusively with [Blender] has just released.

If you want to convert an autocad DXF file to the Collada format, download [Blender]. Install the [ColladaBlender] plugin using the [install directions].

Import the DXF into a clean scene.

Then export as a Collada 1.4.1.

[More Blender training videos] with be available in December. Either pay for the DVD or download freely.

[Blender 2.45] has shipped. One of the major features is better support for FBX exports including amatures and keyframes. (More [details] on the bug fixes)

It appears there is a lot of hype out there for the new COLLADA format. There are COLLADA plugins for Max, Maya, Blender, and Ogre. So it looks like this could be my new favorite format. The COLLADA Wiki lists products that support COLLADA along with links to plugins.
[http://www.collada.org/mediawiki/index.php/Portal:Products_directory]

Simply install ColladaMax and ColladaMaya to install the export plugins for Max and Maya:
[http://www.feelingsoftware.com]

Looks like I’ll be filling [some bugs] against ColladaBlender:

[http://colladablender.illusoft.com/cms/]

There appears to be a COLLADA plugin for Ogre as well:
[http://www.ogre3d.org/wiki/index.php/Ogre_COLLADA_Plugin]

As far as I’m concerned the top artists tools that I have access to are Modo, ZBrush, and Blender.

The only reason that I use Blender is that it has pretty good import and export scripts to Ogre. I’ve seen faces, normals, UVs, and bones export perfectly out of Blender. That said I can’t really model in Blender. The interface doesn’t like me. And I haven’t found very many video tutorials on Blender to describe all the things you can do with it.
http://blender.org

That said, ZBrush3 is coming out May 15th. I expect it’s going to be cool. However Pixologic probably won’t provide many details on their SDK, so I don’t expect an importer / exporter soon. They have awesome artists post video tutorials and they have a decent community. ZB2 only shows one viewport at a time, I don’t like that.
http://pixologic.com

And then there’s Modo. Probably not as well known as XSI. The Modo interface is plenty easy to pick up. Luxology has over 3GB of video tutorials on every aspect of the modeling tool and they give out the tutorials for free. Modo supports as many viewports as you want to add to your layouts.
http://luxology.com

I prefer viewing models in Modo, detailing in ZBrush, and exporting with Blender (only because I have to).

Anyway, I wanted to enhance my pipeline by importing/exporting to Ogre directly from Modo. I now have an import script that runs inside Modo that can handle verteces and faces. I plan to convert it to an exporter. You can follow my progress in this thread.
http://forums.luxology.com/discussion/topic.aspx?id=16386

http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=216011#216011