The Connecticut Film Festival will be taking place from the 2nd to the 7th of June in Danbury, Connecticut. The festival features not only live-action filmmaking, but also animation, music, and interactive media like video games. Hand Turkey’s Jason van Gumster will be speaking on using Blender to produce animations on Friday, June 6th at 4:00 PM as well as sitting on a panel the following day entitled ABCs of CGI.

If you’re in or around Connecticut (and even if you’re not!), come on out. It’s sure to be a great event!

Hand Turkey Studios is proud to announce the release of Blender For Dummies by company co-founder, Jason van Gumster. Blender For Dummies is a beginner’s reference guide Blender, the freely available 3D modeling and animation suite used in all Hand Turkey animated projects.

The book is available just about anywhere you can purchase books, including Amazon and the Blender e-shop. Wiley Publishing has also provided a PDF file with the full table of contents as well as a sample chapter of the book. Use the following link to download the Blender For Dummies Sample Chapter.

A website has also been created to support the book at www.blenderbasics.com. The site currently has all of the project files included on the Blender For Dummies CD and will also be the home of a number of video tutorials to assist with the concepts covered in the book.

Stay tuned to this site for more Blender-training news from Hand Turkey Studios in the near future.

Blender: Compositing Techniques with Render Passes

In a partnership with CG Channel and cmiVFX, a second episode of free online tutorials was launched. This time around it’s a tutorial by Hand Turkey Studios’ Jason van Gumster covering composting techniques with render passes in Blender.

Registration is free, sign up today to get your free tutorial.

Update: We’ve decided to release the .blend file for this tutorial. You can find out more about this on sheep-dot.


http://www.cgchannel.com/
http://cgchannel.com/news/viewfeature.jsp?newsid=6763

Hand Turkey Studios recently created a logo for the open source Flash video player, FlowPlayer. FlowPlayer is a very useful player that can be embedded into any website to play videos in the Flash video format. It is used on such large sites as The Internet Archive and putfile.com, as well as Hand Turkey’s own animation portfolio page.

A detailed description of the process that was used to create this logo can be found on sheep-dot, Hand Turkey’s side projects blog.

In the October 2007 issue of 3D World magazine (Issue 95), there is a review of the Advanced Blender Fluids training DVD that Hand Turkey Studios produced with CmiVFX. The training DVD received a rating of 8 out of 10 stating that “for pros who need the option of realistic fluids in Blender, it’s a must.” Go to your local bookstore or magazine stand and to buy the magazine and read the rest of the review!

We’re quite pleased with their assessment and even happier to announce that we’re working with CmiVFX on the second advanced training DVD for Blender in that series. Look for an official announcement of the DVD to come in the near future!