Ton has posted an update on the Blender Foundation’s activities on Siggraph: there’s news on the Birds of a Feather meeting, a major company showing Blender at their booth, new people and Open Source projects who will be present, free tradeshow tickets and a few calls for content. A bit too much for a short intruduction really, so read on ;-)
Birds of a Feather Meeting
First of all, there will be a ‘Birds of a Feather’ meeting on the Sunday before the tradeshow. BOFs are more or less informal meetings of enthusiasts and if you want to meet fellow Blender users, then this is a great place for it.
A great bit of extra news that is hidden in this announcement is that Bassam and Andy (who both worked on Elephants Dream) will be present, not only during the BOF but during the entire show.
Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, Room 213
Sunday July 30th10:15 am – 10:25 am: Elephants Dream
10:30 am – 12:00 am: Blender Foundation plans, Community meeting12:30 am – 1:30 pm: Elephants Dream, and Making of documentary
01:30 pm – 03:00 pm: Live demos by Director Bassam Kurdali and Art Director Andy Goralcyk, explaining how shots from ED were made.
03:00 pm – 04:30 pm: Artist showcase. Several artists from community present their latest work.
Call for participation Please join the Artist Showcase, mail ton(at)blender.org to reserve a time slot!
Blender shown at the HP Booth
HP will be showing Blender at their booth, giving it equal exposure as other 3D apps such as Maya and 3DS. From what I’ve heard they especially liked the Blender Demo Loop (more about that below).
New Open Source Pavilion Member
Second, Jashaka has joined the Open Source Pavilion. Jashaka is an video and film composting and special FX system that uses OpenGL hardware rendering. I’ve never used Jashaka before, mainly because it required installing a thousand extra libraries on my OSX system, so I’m extra interested in that. The Jashaka websites seems to be down at the moment so sorry, no links!
Free Tickets!
Ton has a bunch of free tradeshow tickets to give away:
Because we are an official exhibitor, we can give out free tickets for people to visit the tradeshow (only tradeshow). You can apply for that, on a first-come-first-served base by email ton(at)blender.org with as topic “Siggraph tradeshow ticket”.
Call for demo loop artwork
Ton would like to receive extra content for the automated Blender demo loop. He writes:
Something that always worked great on tradeshows was using Python to run a cycle of demo files. To try it for yourself, download this zip (Requires Blender 2.41 at least).
Automatic running Python Scripts are by default disabled in releases, this for obvious security reasons. So, when you start up Blender you have to press the “Enable Script Links” button, this is in the Script Buttons (icon to the left of Material Buttons). Then just load one of the demoloop files and watch it go!
For our upcoming Siggraph show I’d like an updated loop, or even better; a couple of nice artistic shows even. They’re great fun to watch, and something the other apps don’t have really. Of course I’ll ask the Orange team to make one too.
Contact me by email at ton(at)blender.org, or post it in the Siggraph discussion forum.
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