Call for Blends (beta)
Are you a blender fanatic? Consider submitting a blend to the Picture Mixer. We're looking for scenes that have a few “fill in the blank” elements, such as places for images or text to appear. We're interested in both single frames and short, punchy animations.
Why should I do this?
Increased exposure for your work. Show off your work to your friends, letting them quickly generate customized variants, including webcam effects. Increased exposure of blender to a new segment of the public — you can feel good about letting non-tech people make nifty graphics that they otherwise could not.
Give me an example of what you want
At the time of writing, the most popular design on our site is currently a “heart-shaped locket” design that lets romantic folk produce a message for their beloved:
If you go ahead and insert a picture in this design, you should get a result quite quickly (unless we have a big spike in traffic). This is because we use texture map caching to avoid rendering for simple image insertions and animations. That way, we can support higher traffic than we could with a straightforward service wrapped around blender.
How do I start?
Make a blend with the following properties:
- Image size of 800x600 pixels.
- At least one surface with an image on it, mapped using an empty (there are scaling and aspect ratio problems with other ways of mapping an image on a surface).
- Name the material containing the image texture something meaningful, like “left/right” or “front/back” (if there is just one such material, call it “any”
That is it! The blend can be a single frame or an animation. On makesweet, we will build a parameterized render of your blend to allow rapid replacement of images for preview purposes. We are improving the fidelity of this preview; for now, complicated material manipulation will simply not be captured correctly. See existing blends on the site for examples of what is possible.
All the blends on this site can be freely downloaded. For example, go to the heart-locket design page and click on "about this design" followed by "download the design".
How do I submit a blend?
Visit the MakeSweet Support Center and open a ticket. Or just send email to central@makesweet.com.
How do I track the status of my submission?
Visit the MakeSweet Support Center and login (you'll need to register if you haven't done so before). You'll then be able to track the status of all communications between you and this site.
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July 8, 2008
