Olivier Archer, a cinematography student in an art school in Switzerland, is kind enough to make available online his thesis project on Digital Distribution.

From Olivier:

I am doing this guide because I was given a very open “Memoir” assignment. Since I have always been interested in the internet and technology but I noticed that, my fellow classmates and schoolmates are not embracing this wonderful tool.

I hope that if you will learn something from this guide and it might even jump-start your online video career, people are making money doing it, you can too! Even I have made a little bit of money on my online digital distribution escapades, but at the time my goal was not making money and it was audio, just like video but smaller.

The site is a good introductory on distributing your media digitally.  Check out the site here.

Dan and Nick offer up their 11th podcast on music for the open source artist.  This week the focus is on Midi.  The podcast is only 40 minutes long and can be grabbed below:

OS Muscian Podcast #11

Great episode again guys!

Bits of Blender #35-37 – After a long absence these short vidcasts are back with three new episodes.  Bits of Blender are video tutorials of some basic Blender functions.

Openfootage.net – A great website offering free high resolution video and textures.  The downloads are under a Creative Commons license that allows you to use for commercial and non-commercial uses.

Blender for Dummies – The book is now in stock at the Blender E-Shop.

Blender 2.5 Development Tour v.3 – Blender Labrat has posted the third video tour of what’s new in the historic Blender 2.5.

Claas Kuhnen has been rapidly releasing a number of Blender tutorials over the last couple of days at Blip.tv.  The tutes are in episodic form and titled “Digital Organic Product Modeling”.  In the latest, Claas shows us how to model the cushions of an office chair.  (See the embedded video below).

You can view the episode archive here.  Blip.tv also allows you to subscribe to the episodes via RSS, Miro, or Itunes.

The guys over at Linux Outlaws have posted an interesting interview with Campbell Barton, a lead developer working on Blender.  Campbell talks about how he got started coding for Blender, the success of Big Buck Bunny, and the development of the Yo! Frankie game demo.  He also touches on Project Durian (the next Blender Foundation project) and other future Blender development.

It’s a great interview, so thanks to Fab and Dan for putting this together.  The talk is part of their weekly linux podcast and begins at 35 min and 46 secs, but I recommend listening to the whole bit if you are into linux and free software.  Those guys do a good show.

Linux Outlaws – Episode 72

Marcin Wodzynski has posted a great piece of game art over at the Blender Artists forum.  The work is called Abandoned Warszawa M20.

It was modeled with Blender 2.47 and textured in the Gimp.  At the forum site, Marcin gives a little insight into how he textured this and technical details about the model.  It’s worth checking out.

Also, check out Marcin’s website for more beautiful renders.  My personal favorite is the Old Ford Van.  The details on his textures are unbelievable.

(NOTE: Abandoned Warszawa M20 is copyrighted by Marcin Wodzynski.)

Well, technically, they are going to FLOSSify a current textbook geared towards Adobe Creative Suite.  By FLOSSify, they intend to convert the text and examples of a book from closed software to Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS).  The book in question is Digital Foundations produced by Michael Mandiberg and Xtine Burrough (http://digital-foundations.net/).  It’s a text book designed to teach software by teaching design, and currently uses Adobe CS as a basis.

The FLOSSify event is a community project being held  Feb 6 – 8, in NYC.  All are welcome to participate.  See this blog post at FLOSS Manuals for more info.

In case you haven’t heard, FLOSS Manuals is a not-for-profit Foundation based in Amsterdam.  It’s aim is to increase the quality and quanity of free manuals about free software.  They already have an impressive collection on it’s website.

Blender guru and author Tony Mullen has added another notch to his belt.  Sybex is offering his third book, Mastering Blender, for pre-order on Amazon.com.  From Tony’s blog:

(My) third book,  Mastering Blender, is now available for pre-order on Amazon, and I expect it to start shipping before the end of March. I’m really excited about this one, which covers a wide range of intermediate and advanced topics. In addition to material on sculpting and retopo workflow, advanced texturing, video compositing and editing, the Blender game engine, and a host of other topics, this book also includes a complete introduction to Python scripting for Blender, starting with the very basics of Python. No programming experience is assumed (although Blender experience is definitely assumed!)

Tony is the author of two previous books: Introducing Character Animation with Blender, and Bounce, Tumble, and Splash.  These have proven to be excellent resources on Blender.

Mastering Blender is now available for pre-order here.