There’s a new Book Design added to the picture mixer. It lets you put a custom front and back on a 3D book model. If you want, you can animate the book flipping from a view of the front to a view of the back, and tell a little picture story that way - just hit the “make animation” button. Remember that after you make an animation, you can adjust its timing. It is often good to add a longish pause between the end of the animation and when it starts over again, so as not to make it too overwhelming visually.

Big site update. Where to begin? We’ve refined our mission statement on the main page. The picture mixer interface is a lot better these days, and you can now download your pictures or animations as webcam effects for use with ucanvcam. There are lots of examples of designs from users showing up. We’ve posted a call for blends to start the search for blender designers who might want to use the site to “package” their work in an attractive way. Lots of activity, and lots more to come.

You can make a slideshow of zooming images with our slideshow tool. It gives you an easy way to set up controlled Ken Burns effects, rather than the random zooms and pans of other tools. Here’s an example:

Our make sweet animation tool has been improved again, thanks to all who provided feedback!  The interface is getting cleaner and easier to understand.

Our animation tool just grew a “make hi-res picture” option. Click this option to get a crisp, high-resolution version of your current frame. Here’s an example of the quality (reduced for this blog from 800×600 pixels to 400×300 pixels):

Have fun!

We’ve had a tool for some time now for making movies with your own images and text.  Many of you have made good use of it, but noted the following drawbacks:

• It is quite slow.
• The artwork is very basic.

We are now experimenting with a simpler tool for making animations from your images.  It deals with the first problem, since it is much much faster (I don’t quite understand why, ask our Bozo).  The speed will also let us use fancier artwork (though we haven’t got that in place yet) without the website grinding to a halt.

Watch this space!