Andrew Kramer did release the long awaited “The Bullet” training.  Before you read on buy The Bullet right now.

This new DVD will take you from your favorite 3D program to After Effects and back, including compositing multi-pass renders and importing camera data.

“The Bullet” training is designed to show you how to create large-scale visual effects in an organized and powerful work flow.

What do you learn about After Effects:

• Creating elements from scratch
• Working between AE and 3D, integrating camera data
• Multi-Pass exporting and compositing
• Advanced color correction techniques
• File management and work flow tips such as pre-comp proxies
• Displacement effects and other creative uses for common plug-ins

What do you learn about 3D Software:

• Model a realistic bullet and shell casing
• Texturing and lighting with reflections
• Animation with Null objects and groups
• How to render multiple elements for compositing

The Bullet Video Training:
Over 5 Hours. If you continue with a single 3D program training time is about 3 hours.

01. Introduction / Organize
02. Preparing Footage and building 3D Scenery
03. Building Assets: 3D Muzzle Flash & Smoke
04. Building Assets: Perspective Slide Action
05. Work-Flow Tips & Building Proxies
06. Compositing the Elements
07. Final Compositing
08. Finishing Touches & Advanced Color

Andrew Kramer sells “The Bullet” for $49.95 available on a DVD or through download.

Blender has been updated in several areas and now available to you. Download Blender

This version supports a new particle system with hair and fur combing tools, fast and optimal fur rendering, a mesh deformation system for advanced character rigging, cloth simulation, fast Ambient Occlusion, a new Image browser and more:

• Hair and Fur Many features have been added to make fur and grass rendering for Peach possible. Big improvements were made in visual quality, rendering speed and memory usage.

• Particle system rewrite The particle system has been rewritten from scratch. It now allows advanced hair grooming tools, but also much better physics, boid animation and even explosions!

• Cloth simulation Cloth simulation is available in Blender via a modifier on Mesh objects. Cloth then  realistically and in real-time interacts with other objects, the wind or other forces, all of which is fully under your control.
• Skinning improvements Bone Heat Weighting is a new method to create vertex weights for bone deformation, it generates better results, and does not require setting a radius for bones. Also added was Quaternion-Interpolated Deformation for superior blends.
• Image Browsing The new Image Browser is blazingly fast and stable, and not only allows to browse for images in your filesystem, but can also show previews of materials, textures, world, lamp and image data.
• Approximate Ambient Occlusion Ambient Occlusion is a render option that darkens areas with less visibility, simulating the effect of environment light. This new AO option is based on quick approximation, giving many factors of speedup.
• Physics caching and baking The softbody, cloth and particle physics now use a unified system for caching and baking. For real-time tweaking, a new option “Continue Physics” will continue the simulation regardless of the current frame.

Blender is released under the GNU Public License, as Free Software, and therefore can be distributed by anyone freely. 

Get yourself started with the great blender video tutorials:

• Getting started
• Model/Material/Light
• Animation
• Advanced Tools
• Miscellaneous

Blender 2.45 has been released. Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite. Blender allows you to model, animate, render and composite. Blender does support key features like Physics, Particles and Fluids which you sometimes only find it more expensive packages. Blender allows you to get started in the 3D world for low costs as Blender is available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License.

You an find all Blender features here or watch the Feature videos.

In it’s latest version several Improvements have been made including

• FBX Exporter updated
• SSS improvements
• Several bug fixes

The entire release notes forBlender 2.45:

http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-245/