3D News Community Conferences SIGGRAPH

Blender Foundation in the ‘Open Source’ Pavilion at Siggraph

Bart ·

sig2006.pngThe Blender Foundation today announced their presence at the 2006 Siggraph Exhibition. They have teamed up with the Gnome Foundation and the Uni-verse consortium to create, for the first time ever, an Open Source pavilion on the exhibition.

The joint effort will create a very strong presence for Open Source software on the exhibition that is traditionally dominated by closed software. The ability to show Elephants Dream will definitely increase the impact of this show and the goal of Elephants dream, to put Open Source software firmly on the map in the professional graphics industry, will be one step closer.

Ton writes:

Thanks to a big discount granted by the Siggraph Committee, and a substantial (but anonymous still) donation we can put ourselves on a giant 20×30 island booth amidst companies like Disney, Electronic Arts and Boxx, in the main aisle of the trade show… just a couple of booths away from Lightwave, Maya and 3DStudio.”

It looks like this is going to be a great show and while Blender (and Elephants Dream) and the Gimp will of course feature prominently, Ton makes it clear that other open graphic applications are welcome as well:

We don’t want to limit our presentation to only the three organizing partners, also other open source CG projects are very welcome to present on the booth. For example Inkscape and Aqsis have been contacted already. My target is to have at least for them (together) a designated ‘demo pod’ as well.”

The Foundation still needs help and/or sponsorship for finding an ‘approved’ booth constructor, getting a good deal with rental of video and audio systems and computers, and the creation of a DVD handout. Furthermore, they can always use help to set up equipment, give demonstrations (on the big screen if you dare!), so shopping etc.

On top of it all, the Foundation is giving away 150 free Exhibition Passes. Details on those will follow.

More Siggraph updates, some of them involving BlenderNation, will be posted here during the following weeks, so stay tuned!

Siggraph 2006 is held from 1-3 August in the Boston Convention Center.

Author Bart
I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Community Lead at n8n.
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