Blender Conference Reporting

Posted on by

bconf2007.jpgToday is the first day of the Blender Conference 2007. Unfortunately I’ll only be able to attend on Saturday so for today and Sunday we’ll turn to YOU, the audience for our report on the event.

As the entire event will be taped, broadcast live and published on the blender.org website, we’re only looking for short impressions of each presentation: 3-5 lines of text, if possible with a picture. We’re also looking for some general impressions of the day, the venue and the crowd.

If you want to report on a specific presentation, leave a comment and I’ll add your name to the list below. When you’re done, send your material to bart @ this site and we’ll combine all the entries into one extensive report.

Thanks, and happy conferencing!

Day coverage (full program):

  • Welcome and keynote – not covered yet
  • Plumiferos – not covered yet
  • Case study: Blending games at Playsign – not covered yet
  • Hands-on masterclass rigging and character animation – not covered yet
  • Blender as a Design Tool (about generative design systems) – not covered yet
  • Perception concepts in User Interface design – not covered yet
  • Enrico shows work he did in the past years! – not covered yet
  • Peach development and advances in Blender’s rendering system – not covered yet
  • Workshop: Blender’s Game Engine as a Live 3D Simulator for External Programs – not covered yet
  • Artist’s Showcase – not covered yet
  • Animation festival – not covered yet
  • General impression – not covered yet
Be Sociable, Share!

    Twitter



    Please support us

    • http://www.ovander.se Jon

      Is that the blender conference poster, it is really really nice, constructivistic, simple and a touch of 3d. Would be really nice on a white background.

      I’m looking forward to the reports and movies from the conference….

    • http://www.venomgfx.com.ar venomgfx

      wow, Plumiferos is the first event of the conference, I hope people get early there!

      looking forward for reports, last year’s were great :)

    • http://www.catnipgames.nl Hoxolotl

      Other places to follow the conf: on freenode IRC #blenderchat, where Hox_bconf and possible other attendees will try to give you input into conversations, and talk about what’s happening.

    • http://marketiers.org shul

      please post links to video streams, if any,

      thanks,
      shul

    • http://www.blendernation.com Bart

      @shul: I’ve asked the organisation to email me the links but I’ve had no reply yet. As soon as I do, I’ll post them.

    • Poisos

      Live broadcast? Waaah … were is the stream? I wasn’t able to find it on the blender.org website!?

    • Tony

      Excellent. I wish I could be there, but I’ll certainly be enjoying the videos. And great poster! Who designed that?

    • Meltdown

      Can we still register for tomorrow and pay on site?

      Cheers and congrats!

    • Antichrome

      Wow, nice poster, just enough 3D to get the message through. Congrats to the author.

    • Goofster

      Meltdown, I asked around. You can come to the venue itself and register / pay there.

      I’m keeping a list of sites that report on BlenConf here: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=107324

      Roel

    • steve

      rtsp://streamer.neoarena.fi/blender/conference.sdp
      Live stream from an Apple iSight on the front row of the main presentation room. Tested on Mac OSX with Quicktime. Please post instructions if you find out how to view it in other ways.

    • steve
    • Sergeant Oreo

      I wish I could be there but I’m only 13 and Amsterdam is a long way away from
      the U.S. ;) Thank you to the people that are video-taping though! It will be almost
      like being there!

    • http://www.blendernation.com Bart

      Hmm, zero contributions! Sorry, no Blender Conference report today :-/

    • http://www.renderplace.com AntonG

      Here is the Petunia robot show, this part was recorded from above mentioned stream … the image quality is not perfect, but at least you can get the feeling, how animations turned out … hope the full quality version will be online soon

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2NGy2tGCBo

      -AntonG

    • http://advanced-lemon.blogspot.com/ epat

      @Bart: The people able to report on the conference are probably all too busy with the conference… ;)
      ~epat. :P

    • http://thinningpictures.googlepages.com/ LoMac
    • http://www.catnipgames.nl Hoxolotl

      If people wonder why the stream is doing weird stuff: that’s my fault, it’s the first time I do this kind of stuff, also I have to cut the stream before and after recording. So in between sessions it’ll be a bit flakey… sorry about that :)

    • http://www.catnipgames.nl Hoxolotl

      And having a crappy wifi connection doesn’t help either.

    • VanPelt

      By the way: Wow, what a darn good poster! I love that retro bauhaus look :)

    • http://www.feeblemind.com olivS

      @Bart: I ll post a few comments on the presentations I saw once back at home, with a azerty keyboard and not a damn qwerty ;-) you can count on it… it should be around one third of the presentations, perhaps one half, not sure… do you prefer them by e-mail or in the comments within the posts?

      any case, attending the conference is quite interesting, even if I had troubles with understanding all accents, all picthes of voice, all speeds of speach… and now that I start to understand almost everyone, it s almost time to leave! but I learned many interesting things while there… I ll certainly come back next year!

      well Peach project presentation should start within a very few minutes so I should go! :D

    • john leigh

      I attended the friday conference only but well worth it even just for the day-
      Particular highlights for me were Tons opening presentation with a bit of history and talk of the future also.
      Great plumiferos presentation with some fab insights and the talk on Blender as a Design Tool whilst mainly directed towards architects was also a worthwhile talk to be in on.

    • http://www.feeblemind.org olivS

      Welcome and Keynote:
      In his traditional welcome to the Blender Conference attendees, Ton Roosendaal first introduced the new De Zwijger conference place. He then made a quick overview of what are, as far as of today, the main components of the Blender universe.
      -The Blender Fondation: mainly to be considered as a bank account, necessary for fundings, and for legal issues (copyrights, branding, etc.) in order to protect Blender
      -The Blender institute: commercial bizz, production of open movies and/or open games, training center, etc. This is where money is made, and sent on the Blender Fondation accounts
      -The Blender community: it is where Blender is developped and used, and where decisions are made about Blender’s future.

      Plumiferos:
      Claudio Andaur (“malefico”) gave us a very interesting overview of the Plumiferos project, from the production stage and through the various aspects of a CG featuree film. A lot of insight on the work pipelines has been showed, along with a lot of examples images and/or video movies, a lot of them being outstanding. Then he pointed out the difficulties encountered while making the movies (mainly white/black spots on rendering being vector blurred, and wrong collisions using the softbodies; Ton promised to address the first, while the Cloth plugin might solve the second) and offered help to solve any potential issues.

      Hands-on masterclass rigging and character animation
      A very interesting master-class given by Nathan Vegdahl and Claudio Andaur. At first, Nathan gave us some usage advice on rigging (universal rigs vs specific rigs, smart use of controlers to ease the work of animators, etc.) and showed us how easy it could be to pose-to-pose animate a rabbit into jumping when the right controlers are set. On his side, Claudio showed us how convenient it could be to use Bone Heat weighting for animating facial expressions.

      I have a few photographies for each of these three subjects. I’ll send them directly to Bart once back at home this evening.