I've released a new version of Multiblend! Version 1.4 has the following improvements over the previous version:

• Display timing info after rendering.

• Added -E option to skip existing frames and render only the missing ones.

• Smarter distribution of frames.

• Implemented simpler logging.

• Verifies that the output directory exists before rendering.

• Added 'cachesync' executable that can distribute the Blender cache directory (such as used with particle systems) to nodes.

• Removed use of the md5 module when using Python 2.6 or newer.

• Replaced the popen2 module with the subprocess module. This limits the compatibility of Multiblend to Python 2.4 or newer on the master node.

• Split the implementation into several modules to increase maintainability and insulation of the parts.

Multiblend connects to multiple computers on your network, and lets Blender render in parallel on each. This will drastically improve your rendering speeds!

For my Master of Science course in Game & Media Technology at the Utrecht University I had to make another 3D animation. This time the focus was on more traditional animation techniques such as stretch-and-squash.

The assignment was to make a 3D animation with your last name playing a role. I chose this particular subject as many, many computer programmers are having a hard time separating UTF-8 from Latin-1, which renders my last name as Stüvel :(

For the Utrecht University I made a short animation called Pong. together with two fellow students. We used Blender to add models to the MoCap data we recorded, and rendered with Blender + Multiblend.

Pong from Sybren A. Stüvel on Vimeo.