Jim Blinn

Photo-0140 kopie.jpgWe've had an amazing occurrence here at the booth. Well, actually Bassam just did.

Jim Blinn (I'm sure you know the Blinn shader - yes, that's him), one of the pioneers of computer graphics, stopped by to get a demo of Blender, and Bassam obliged (demoing Blender's Blinn shader of course). We have two pictures of the event which we have in the thumbnail and below. The whole booth was in awe, as I am sure you can imagine. Blender was running a bit slow during the demo, and afterwards we found out why… There were two other Blender's running in the background!

Photo-0141.jpg Photo-0140.jpg



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44 Responses to “Jim Blinn”  

  1. 1 Mike Edit Link

    freaking awesome.

  2. 2 Pitel Edit Link

    And what about mister Phong and mister Perlin? ;)

  3. 3 Jason H Edit Link

    oohh so cool.

  4. 4 ZanQdo Edit Link

    I would like to meet Edwin Catmull some day :)

  5. 5 bataraza Edit Link

    Extract: There were two other Blender’s running in the background! HaHaHaHa…. amazing…!!!! So funny. Did you have the time to tell him about the "little problem" to Blinn before he left…?

  6. 6 thoro Edit Link

    Haha, that's indeed a special guest - and one of my favourite shaders :-)

  7. 7 Big Fan Edit Link

    I hope you had your wits about you and gave him a Blender tee shirt as you invited him to join the developers ;o)
    We are always looking for talent eh…I mean we have Wu for sex appeal and now we need talent :o)

  8. 8 bataraza Edit Link

    Hey Blinn Hey… Hold on!!!! there was another 2 blenders running in background, 1 rendering a yafray scene and the other one playing with de GE… and, other.. and other….hahahaha

  9. 9 Blackblender Edit Link

    Wow!

    Cool Beard…

  10. 10 Eddie Edit Link

    I never thought that Blinn is really a person name ..

  11. 11 FastEddy Edit Link

    sometimes I wish I could be there…

  12. 12 Spike1907 Edit Link

    OMFG!!! And yea… What bout perlin and lambert! Where the hell are they!
    :P

  13. 13 JoOngle Edit Link

    OMG!

    Ton should grow one of those beards!

  14. 14 T-Ry Edit Link

    Too bad John Yafray couldn't have stopped by to see the…oh wait… :|

  15. 15 Dasaan Edit Link

    Does anyone else have problems with the thumbnails on this site?

    When I click on them all I get is a white rectangle on a greyed out background. I have to reloas the page to get it back to normal. I'm using Firefox 1.5.0.5 on Debian Unstable (amd64).

  16. 16 Rock Robertson Edit Link

    Phonh Bui Tuong has been dead over 30 years…

    gee, i hope you guys are kidding :)

  17. 17 Gez Edit Link

    No, Christopher Lambert is a celebrity. I don't think he'd be out there visiting the booths.
    At least not without his sword. There can be only one!

    Oh, my god…

  18. 18 Big Fan Edit Link

    …any booth babes there?…
    I know Jim and his beard is cool but I am easily distracted by legs… ;o)

  19. 19 Bmud Edit Link

    Reminds me of uh.. that other bearded guy. SOme co-founder for 3D Studio MAX. I've seen him a couple times. I really want someone to get a picture of Paul Debevec! He's my hero! http://www.debevec.org Or Takeo Igarashi! http://www-ui.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~takeo/

  20. 20 ShiftingClouds Edit Link

    I like the Blinn shader just fine and the guy really looks like he is a hoot… but talking about all those dead, possibly dead, dying guys, I miss my daily shot of news about actual fellow Blenderheads.
    I can feel the withdrawal symptoms creeping in…

    Aaarrrrgggg !

  21. 21 Eugene (etr9j) Edit Link

    @bataraza
    We didn't get to tell him before he left! We only figured it out afterwards. No one intially saw it because the other Blenders were on another desktop within Gnome.

  22. 22 kurt Edit Link

    can anyone tell me the software u used 4 the images, i mean how u did the thumbnail to full view projection of those.is this freeware?, any links? :-)

  23. 23 Lecksfrawen Edit Link

    @Kurt:
    http://www.huddletogether.com/projects/lightbox/
    Check the source of the page next time ^ _ ~

  24. 24 Wim Edit Link
  25. 25 buergi Edit Link

    wow this look like a really experienced guy :D
    hope bassam let him get a good impression of Blender, but who else could if not he

  26. 26 Richard Edit Link

    Surprised nobody else asked. What did Jim think of Blender? Can't really tell with the photos.

  27. 27 Garland-Waide Bradford Edit Link

    Cool I'm really happy that Blender is getting the response it deserves.

  28. 28 Sonic TH Edit Link

    No video of that? Hard to tell from the blurry pictures what expression he has on his face but looks like deep thought. I'd like to see how he reacted to Blender.

  29. 29 postlogic Edit Link

    That's just too cool to be true.

  30. 30 Omar Abo-Namous Edit Link

    well done Bassam.

  31. 31 [t0rc] Edit Link

    Wow. I bet it was cool to have him around for a few.

  32. 32 [t0rc] Edit Link

    Oh yeah another thing. Was Bassam aware that it was him before or after?

  33. 33 Peter Edit Link

    Awesome… man, though, yeah, Edwin Catmull would be so cool - who isn't indebted to him?

    BTW, thanx so much Lecksfrawen for the Lightbox link. I think I am going to use that 4 my image galleries from now on.

  34. 34 blendercross Edit Link

    Great! Maybe bassam find some time to share with us that what Mr. Blinn think on blender.

    Till now i see all videos about the show and i like it … thanks Bart, great work
    ….. but who by th hell importet that holländisch beer to the US?? ;)

  35. 35 konrad8ha Edit Link

    Why, oh why use AJAX for displaying images. It never works on my Linux-Firefox. Using Web 2.0 tech for such a trivial task sure seems like overkill. And it's not user-friendly at all.

  36. 36 John Brindle Edit Link

    Wow … that is a bit cool … Mr Blinn himself .. I bet you were a bit taken aback … here's hoping he supports the open source world as much as we do!!!! JB :)

  37. 37 Eugene (etr9j) Edit Link

    Bassam knew it was him from the beginning (I think Ton sent Mr. Blinn to Bassam, so everyone knew). I'm not sure what Mr. Blinn thought of Blender since afterwards Bassam was too excited to tell us! I hope he posts about that, but I'll ask him.

  38. 38 Surt Edit Link

    Pity there wasn't a correct implementation of Blinn's bump mapping (yes he's also the guy who invented bump mapping) to demo to him.

  39. 39 Eugene (etr9j) Edit Link

    @Surt
    I'm not fluent in Bump map implementation… care to elaborate? I'm really interested!

  40. 40 Surt Edit Link
  41. 41 Renato Perini Edit Link

    Mmmmm, Blinn doesn't seem so much interested :P

  42. 42 toontje Edit Link

    OOOoo, so that is how a geek looks like when he gets old. I have so much to look for lol.

    Next step, make him interested to develop for Blender

  43. 43 Artkansas Edit Link

    This could be big for Blender if he chats it up a bit. I gather he was impressed.

    I was fortunate to get a chance to chat with him while we were waiting in line to get our Walking Teapots.

    I don't think he would develop for Blender though. His boss Bill Gates might not like open source code. ;)

  1. 1 carebearluver1551


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