making apps, making webs.

I've gone through this great blender animation tutorial . It's really well made, and teaches you blender from the beginning - explaining everything as you go. It was a "Blender summer of documentation" project where someone spent a whole month working on it. It was also based on an older tutorial which was itself really good There's a downloadable PDF version (180ish pages) if you prefer to read things that way - otherwise it's broken up into many separate html pages. It's also got .blend files you can download at every step if you wish - so you can skip steps. So if you want to go from knowing nothing about blender, to being able to construct and animate a basic 3d character - this is the tutorial for you. Introduction to Character Animation - with blender

This cookbook entry shows how you can use pygame without a windowing system. http://pygame.org/wiki/HeadlessNoWindowsNeeded Useful for scripts that run in webservers, or little command line utilities. Sometimes you just don't need a GUI. Like maybe you want to do some 2d drawing in your opengl application. The cookbook example is just a thumbnail generation example(using pygames fast mmx assembly using smoothscale function) - but you can do lots of other things with pygame too - like drawing lines - or graphing .

David, the author of the upcoming Pitchers Duel baseball game has made a nice little module for pygame and opengl. It allows you to use some of the GUI libraries with PGU. In the examples, it uses the excellent PGU , and Ocemp libraries. However I think the general method can be applied to other GUIs fairly easily. It does the drawing on off screen surfaces, updating opengl textures as needed. It even has a zooming demo... where the gui zooms. I like things that zoom.

We have a new windows maintainer - Lenard Lindstrom. He's been submitting patches to pygame for a while now, and as agreed to help get pygame 1.8 out the door. As part of his work, he has made compiling pygame on windows a lot easier. """I automated the dependency build process using a single standalone Python program, build_deps.py. All that is needed is to obtain the necessary libraries and MinGW/Msys tools. The builder will first reconfigure MinGW for msvcr71.dll. Then it will build all the libraries and install them into the Msys directory structure. All this can be done from the Windows command prompt. Expect it to take several hours though. Next the Pygame config.py script is run from the Msys console. Make sure the Python directory is in the Msys PATH. Finally setup.py can be run from the command prompt to build and install Pygame itself. All the necessary libraries will be copied to the pygame package.""" Brian Fisher has also joined the