Report: Blender at the Pink Cow cafe bar, Tokyo

Tony writes:

Hi Bart,

Last night we had the Blender workshop at the Pink Cow cafe bar in Tokyo that I wrote about a few weeks ago. It was a really great time! I gave a two and a half hour long beginners tutorial that was very well attended by people following along on their laptops. Definitely quite a few eager beginners, which is always good to see. For the workshop I gave a brief introduction to Blender by showing Sam Brubaker’s Infinitum and giving an overview of the .blend file (which is a terrific resource for giving students a quick look at the whole process of creating a Blender short), then a modeling tutorial of a chess pawn, and then we used Calvin’s Peach-inspired guinea pig to animate a very simple walk cycle.

Afterwards we showed animations. Ekakiya was there, showing a terrific musical mash-up of his work, and Shigeto Maeda perfomed a live VJ set with material he had created in Blender. His excellent new book was also available for people to check out (as was a copy of the original Ka-ra). I showed an animation of my own and also Elephants Dream. All in all we had a very diverse selection of artwork. To say people were impressed would be a real understatement I think. Most people were really astonished at the kinds of different things that Blender could be used to create.

A lot of the blender.jp forum regulars attended, and it was great to finally meet them in person. Here’s a picture of the blender.jp folks who attended (I think there were a few more who weren’t in the picture). From left to right that’s Ekakiya, Caplicon, Horie, Daywalker, Shige, and me… I hope I didn’t get anybody’s handle wrong…

There’s already talk on the blender.jp forum of following this up with more Blender-oriented events.

Tony