Where did that shortcut go in Blender 2.5? If you often find yourself asking something like this, you should bookmark the FAQ written by developer Aligorith.

The first part was written a while ago, but he has now updated the list with new frequently asked questions. Before asking in forums I'd recommend you take a look there. :)

The Bishop rig, one of the trademarks of Animation Mentor, received a HUGE update on its features. Now it's fully customizable:

This amount of freedom reminds me of the great Blendr rig called psl-Man MultiRig, by Daniel Martinez Lara (Pepeland).

This blog is lacking updates recently, mostly because this project I'm working on: a book about character rigging and animation in Blender. Soon I'll talk more about it, but I can say some chapters are already written and I'm working hard on it. Regardless of my available time, I have to stop by here to promote this news:

The new Blender Pro website is online. For those who don't know it, Blender Pro is the Brazilian Blender Conference, and will be held this year at the sunny Fortaleza-CE on 10-12 of October.

I had the great pleasure of visiting the 2008 edition in Belo Horizonte and also being awarded with the Best Character Animation prize at the 2009 event. I've been following the discussion lists about this year's event and I can say this one may be the best of all. :)

Yes... Blender 2.5 beta was just released, but something managed to be even cooler than that: Coyote and Road Runner are definitely back!!

I've just seen this on Cartoon Brew. Jerry Beck was invited to watch the three new theatrical shorts, and he has some more cool details (and also images). The animation seems to be produced by Reel FX, as some people commented on that article.

Every year, the students from Gobelins make awesome animation shorts specially for the Annecy festival, which happened a month ago.

If you didn't watch them yet, they are available at Gobelins' channel on YouTube.

Today I've found this making of Chaman, by Vincent Nghiem, one of the students who worked on this film. Great stuff:

Here is a very cool animation reference straight from the World Cup semi-finals:

Check out the commentator (the guy near the camera): his initial facial expression denotes a bit of disbelief (is Spain scoring a goal after a corner kick against the taller players of Germany?); then it goes to a apprehension one, where his torso and head remain completely still for a moment (it seems that Spain can actually score this goal); and ends with the celebration with the beautiful goal from Puyol. Very cool!

And congratulations for the teams of Spain and the Netherlands for advancing to the finals! :)

The World Cup is finished for us Brazilians (and Argentinian). My bet was a Brazil vs Argentina in the finals... Anyway, I had to talk about something related to animation and the World Cup here, right? :D

I just saw this, thanks to Suryara's tip: a recreation of the German goals in stop motion, using Lego and over the original narration, made by the German newspaper Bild.

I think its an amazing approach. Here in Brazil there are a couple of websites which don't have the rights for reproducing the World Cup images and decided to recreate them in 3D, but the lack of enough production time made them look less than interesting. This one by the German website is at least as interesting as the original goals. I had to watch them over and over to pay attention to all the funny details. Congrats to the people at Bild, who managed to turn an unfavorable condition into something memorable.

You probably remember the awesome wall-painted animation MUTO, by the italian artist BLU.

Now he managed to make something even bigger in a short of amost 10 minutes and an outstanding mix of creativity and hard work: Big Bang Big Boom.