Blender Around the World: Japan

The focus of this website has been mainly on the English speaking part of the Blender community. But have you ever wondered what people in, say, India, Brazil, France, China or Japan are creating with Blender?

Sometimes it's hard to find out and that's why we are inviting you to help us. If there is an active community in your language, then we'd like to share their stories. Are you the reporter who can help us? Then please get in touch.

Today will be the first report in this series: Satoshi Yamasaki (author of YamYam's Field) was friendly enough to give us an extensive overview of the activities of the Japanese Blender users:

Hi Blenderheads in the world,

I would like to introduce of Japanese blender scene. Recently, unique access of the Blender.jp is over 1,000. Some of Japanese have been already posted their works(Do you remember the hollykaz's "slope" in the Official Gallery and past BlenderNation article?). But also other Japanese make their works actively. I would like to show some of them…

Galleries of Japanese users

• Blender Picture Uploader & picture forum(Sorry for heavy…)
• Blender@2ch(Notice: contains nudity image)
• MOMO-ten(An exhibition for Japanese 3DCG users. Close at 4/31). (The previous link is only for Blender work; if you want to see works made by other tools, you can find it here).

Realtime Content, Tools, Resources

• Matsui made a realtime content 'Blender.jp museum'. You can walk through it and see many Japanese user's images with blender. They was posted at blender.jp's Blender picture uploader(see above).(Notice: Copyrights of these images and models are owned by their authors. Plese don't use them your projects…)
• Manda made a tool(Win) and PythonScript 'bl2magic'. These check a blend file what version made it. Note that they can't read zipped blend files. He said it's just a fun, not a serious tool, so if you can, please make it useful tool to add another checking functions such as Scriptlinks, Autoplay, and so on.
• AKI made a rig of a dog with animation. He said he referenced a skeletal preparations for it. Also he made a rig of a human body.

Activities

• Shige teaches 3DCG at an university annually. Of course, with Blender! He made a tutorial document by himself, and teached with it. He said this year will get more time to teach…It's great!! :-) 2004, 2005 (no images).
• Toudou got a place at CGWorld user's gallery section. CGWorld is (maybe)an only Japanese 3DCG Magazine. Also He wrote a texture tutorial article at Nikkei Software.
• It's hot news! Ekakiya's "amelia's magic" will be screened at the shortfilm section of the Cannes International Film Festival! (About the movie).

Thank you for reading long post.
Have fun!