BlenderDiplom wishes all its readers a Merry Christmas 2016! Have a great time and keep on blending.
Blog
The BlenderDiplom Blog features test, doodles, previews for tutorials and various other things related to Blender.
The integration of Mantaflow into Blender got a big boost with this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC). While it is still far from finished, interested users can test it out in the fluid-mantaflow branch.
The new Version of BlenderDiplom's Cycles Encyclopedia is out. If you don't want to scrub through it looking for the latest additions yourself, here is a list of the most important changes.
Last year's fluid particle demo has been meshed using the cubesurfer addon. Check out the results and how the version with surface compares to the one with just the particles and as final bonus a version that shows both.
As promised, here is the .blend and the slides from the Cycles Light Path Magic talk at the Blender Conference 2015 in Amsterdam. Which was about the light path node in Cycles.
Jacques Lucke released the animation nodes showreel 2015 - a great demonstration of what is possible with this powerful Blender addon.
When looking for references, textures, backgrounds or just inspiration online, image databases are the way to go. But many sites place restrictive licenses on their images. The most liberal and undoubtly best license is CC0 which allows you to do what you want with the images. We compiled a list of great resources for CC0 images.