What you missed in Octobers Newsletter

As some of you may know we recently switched Blend Swap over to a new host and new server. Good Ridens Dreamhost. Hello Hostgator!!! We are now running on a VPS with 30GB storage, 1TB bandwidth, 1280Mhz processing, 3gb Ram. Lets just say compared to our old package this is a sexy 18 year old coed with a body that doesn't stop. All of this was possible because of the generosity of you guys and of Alex Telford. Alex has given us space on his server free of cost, THANK YOU SO MUCH ALEX. Alex has got some nice tutorials on his site so make sure and drop by and check them out and thank him for helping Blend Swap service and advance.

Now some of you who made donations might be wondering, "well since your hosting is free, where did my money go." Great question. Your money is still in the Blend Swap paypal account and will remain there. The rest of the money will be used for more development of the site, and contest. It will all remain in the community and will be used for only Blend Swap one way or another.

HJM Studio's +Blendswap Contest

So we just wrapped up our contest, I want to give a huge shout out to our Prize Sponsors CGmasters.net and Packt Publishing for offering the great prizes we have to offer.

Also want to thank our judges, who are now hard at work pouring over your models and picking our winners.

Wes Burke of Blendercookie.com and mavenseed.com

Dolf Veenvliet of entoforms and Sintel

Ben Dansie of Sintel, and all around stud Blenderhead.

Also a big thanks to Nick of HJM Studio for putting this contest together and to everyone who participated, best of luck in winning.

Jonathan's Dev Corner

And now some words for the geeky.

Development of Blend Swap has become a lot more manageable since the 3.0 update, which was a big update in all possible senses, regarding design, UX and features. I'm now working on a whole bunch of new features that you'll see in the following months.

Some of you may have noticed the new Report! button, it is to report any blend you are SURE is violating copyright, like using textures from CG Textures or ripping a model from a game. Please use this button with caution. If you're not sure about your report please use the contact form instead.

In the past weeks we took down some models that were in some sort of fuzzy issue with trademarked content like characters and logos. Some of them were put back and some didn't make it. We'll keep rejecting some blends, for example, if you make a Apple logo and upload it.

Some others, like characters, can be kept online, but remember the agreement you acknowledged when you uploaded the blend, if some company complains about the model it's your problem to get out off.

Edit Blend Limit:

I worked a lot on this one feature and got ready to get flooded by your edits, but guess what? So few users actually used this that we decided to lower the minimum number of blends required to edit blends to 2. Yes, just 2 blends!

Please make sure to read our Handbook before going nuts with this privilege and to avoid any confusion.

Matt's Pleading

This is going to be my little area to vent a little and ask you guys for help. So here we go! START RATING MODELS!!! I mean seriously guys, you look at some of these artist work and what they are giving away, when you download a model and open it to take a look go back and rate it honestly. START LEAVING CONSTRUCTIVE COMMENTS, see above reason. As most of you know, you speak English, 99% of our user speak English, so if you speak another language, please use a translator and add a English translation to your post.

October's Featured Artist: Mutte

Every month we will be featuring an artist on Blendswap in the newsletter. This is just another way to put the spotlight back on you guys. This months artist is one of my personal favorite on the site. I love seeing his uploads and basking in the glow of his character design and dare I say twisted sense of creation. Check out all Muttes models.

Edited January 27, 2013 by mofx