Elisabetta Project is the the code name of the Winter Contest, which will take a different format from other contest organised in the past on this community. First of all, for the first time it is going to be several topics to choose from and an animation category. Secondly, contestants' best work will make into a training DVD under a Creative Commons license. The sales of the contest DVD will be used to support the organisation of a YafaRay Code Sprint in the second half of 2012.

Blendiberia is the most important Blender workshop in Spain. This year Blendiberia will take place in Móstoles (Madrid) on November the 5th and 6th. This time we are very proud to offer an important panel of experts who will share their knowledge on film and game production, virtual & augmented reality, software development and VFx!

Please check our website at http://www.blendiberia.org for more information and to stay tuned.

The Winner of this year's summer contest is Matej Mo with his work Vespula. Congratulations! You can visit a gallery of entries here. Thank you for participating.

Stag bettle by Fine

Pedro Alcaide, also known as povmaniaco, who has coded several exporters for other render engines, has been working for a year on an Autodesk Softimage XSI exporter for rendering scenes with YafaRay. Some weeks ago he released the source code of his work at Github. Today Pedro has released a first beta of the exporter, ready to be used. You can find it at our downloads page. We hope you find it useful.

This year we have been finally able to get regular Win64 builds of YafaRay, apart from the usual Win32 and Linux 32/64 builds, thanks to Gabriele Ferreri and Alexander Smirnov. However, there is still a platform that needs more love, which is Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Jens Verwiebe has helped us a lot with the OS X builds for the past years, but we need at least a second maintainer.

The Jury of the Winter Contest has spoken: "It is our decision to award the victory of the Winter contest to milan981 for his work, Coraline's Pink Palace. Second position goes to Abner's Simple Circle and third position goes to Sanderboer's GH house revisited. You can visit all entries in this gallery. Thank you for participating and congratulations to the winners."

We have already put our ideas page up for GSoC 2011, for sharp students who want to start preliminary contacts with prospective mentoring orgs, and in that way increase their chances of being selected. You can find it here. Regards.

Hi there! We have decided to organise a Winter contest, based on a topic choosen by the community. The topic choosen is 'Amazing Architecture', and consist in rendering an architectural creation of your own. However, since most of us are not architects, contestants' creations do not need to be driven by practical considerations or arquitectural conventions, nor they need to be structurally viable; the contest is about form for form’s sake. Works might be intended for this planet and age, or for another planet, time and culture.

pCon.planner, a professional and freeware application for space planning, is using YafaRay 0.1.2 beta as a render engine. pCon developers are mainly interested in direct lighting & ambient occlusion features because it is easier to setup for their customers, but GI is also available. More information at pCon.planner.com.