Interview with Brecht and Campbell on FLOSS Weekly 25
Brecht and Campbell were interviewed for over 30 minutes on this week’s FLOSS Weekly podcast. FLOSS Weekly is a very popular show – this news item was submitted by 5 people, a record!
Kneeling Chair
A pretty good interview. Sadly the hosts of the show haven’t used Blender in a long time, but the interview was good. Its about 30 minutes.
I think it’s interesting how various FOSS/Free culture people all look to each other for approval.
..and how the people who contribute to stuff like this are like.. /real people/.
You know, you can have some article somewhere mention nice handling in a new scheduler and wham: there’s linus, making sure they get the facts straight. Or a random discussion on compiler flags and ope, there’s RMS. Hit the right IRC channel at the right time? Say hi to Mark Shuttleworth.. It really is amazing.
In all actuality, Blender is something i consider one of the real jewels of FOSS. I don’t think anyone could really say otherwise.
..and this may be a little offtopic, but does anyone know when January’s art gallery will be up? It’s March now. Are they still, like, doing that?
The interviewers were quite annoying, considering that they are not at all familiar with 3d (not just with blender) and picked up blender actualy just before the interview…..thats why I found the conversation a bit stalled in the point where interviewers just didn’t know what they are talking about….
but still nice that blender (ant it’s developers) gets more and more attention…
The interviewers have no idea of the difference between a renderer and blender. Blender can actually *use* povray as a renderer.
Really bad research!
Wow! hear the voices of those two, so professional, so manly, with sharp smart comments. They seem like very cool guys!!
ohh, yeah, and also two arrogant ignorants interviewing them.
Long long ago one of the hosts of this podcast, Leo LaPorte had a show called Screen Savers and mentioned Blender. At the time I was trying to save up the $10,000 for Maya (That’s what it used to cost.) He was doing a segment on Maya and at the end he said or you could get Blender for free. I was right on it and have been Blendering ever since. Thanks Leo for letting me know about this, even though you don’t know much about it. At that time also it was really hard to learn because there was not much written for the beginner. Now so many wonderful people have written great tutorials, books, and wikis that it is so much easier. Thanks to all of you. Most of all thanks to Ton and all the developers who have made Blender so powerful since those early days.
this is cool
Yes, I admitted repeatedly that I’m not a blender user. However, if we limited FLOSS weekly to just things we used every day, we’d be just about done by now.
I’m sorry some of you were disappointed in the interview. In fairness, I can say that you’ll have about 30,000 new people who will now know about Blender that might not have otherwise. If that’s not useful to you, sorry.
Is appreciated that 30.000 people now know about Blender (although maybe they already did if they care just a bit about 3D), and it’s ok if you don’t know much about Blender. The thing is, here we care for developers, we respect them, and I personally like them to be respected. So, for instance, when someone mocks about: “any material known by human”, I say ok, is a joke, but when he repeats the joke and laughs with his friend again, I start to think, do these guys have the right attitude and respect I like Bretch and Campbell to be treated with?
Is just about attitude and respect, I like Blender to grow, but I don’t think Blender or any of its developers need to accept any wrong attitude. Blender doesn’t really *need* one appearance in a podcast to grow. If that appearance means any developer has to accept any wrong attitude I would personally prefer to find other ways, Blender has them, and they are big. Maybe you didn’t hear about Berlinale, as a simple example, or Elephants Dream being included in a New York museum. and those things just happened in the last weeks.
Randal & Leo,
I thought it went very well. It took me a couple years to become comfortable with blender, and that’s with prior 3d & cad experience. And now it’s growing exponentially- I can’t keep up. At least you tried to learn some before the interview. The questions were good. Some of your comments were very insightful. We can’t expect you to know everything. I don’t think you were disrespectful.
I hope we are not disrespectful to you.
Perhaps we forget how vast Blender knowledge is now.
It takes a significant investment of time and energy to learn blender- perhaps that’s why some of us are defensive on how it’s treated. (And also there’s no age restriction on it’s users and blendernation commenters. *ducks*)
You say, “So, for instance, when someone mocks about: “any material known by human”, I say ok, is a joke, but when he repeats the joke and laughs with his friend again, I start to think, do these guys have the right attitude and respect I like Bretch and Campbell to be treated with?”
I’m referring to http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/Every_Material_Known_to_Man – which has only 15 things on it. I thought it was humorous that either there are only 15 things known to man, or perhaps the wiki page is incomplete and is therefore inappropriately named.
And yes, I find that humorous. And I bet some of the audience did too. I could be wrong. It was not meant with any disrespect at all to anyone working on the Blender dev team… in fact, this page seems to be some independent work. I found that page while doing my task of researching for the interview, so I presumed it was a well-known page, and that others had also made that same humorous observation.
Maybe it doesn’t come across if English is not your native language.
Oh, and the reference to the young guy is series of tutorials by “super3boy” on YouTube. Again, no disrespect, but since these were things I found while researching for the show, I figured they would help connect me with an audience.
Randal, I’m in Argentina… the reason why Plumiferos is the first *3D* animated movie here is not precisely that we are cheap.
Molvy, you said “Randal, I’m in Argentina… the reason why Plumiferos is the first *3D* animated movie here is not precisely that we are cheap.”
I think you misinterpreted this as well. I don’t think Leo was implying that making movies in Argentina is any cheaper than making it somewhere else. The point he was making was that by using open source software, you can save money, hence “cheap”.
Again, it’s probably a language thing. I understood exactly what he meant, but I can see that it could be misinterpreted if you didn’t follow what “cheap” was targeted at.
Campbell says: “I think it’s the first 3D animated movie ever made in Argentina”
interviewer says: “And is it because they were pretty exposed to open source? or ahh, were they cheap? hoho haha”
I interpret the interviewer asked if Plumiferos people were cheap enough to choose open source…
Or if people in Argentina is cheap and that’s why we choose open source.
That’s why I said that the reason isn’t being cheap.
Maybe I’m interpreting wrong.
Molvy, I think you’re interpreting it wrong, it was clearly a light hearted self-depreciating joke about users of open source. Give them the benefit of the doubt :) I find that ‘all materials known to man’ hilarious too.
I thought the interview was very good, it was entertaining, balanced, and covered a lot ground. It was aimed at listeners that that don’t already know a lot about blender, who will come away from it with some enlightening info, straight from the horse’s mouth so to speak, rather than from raving kids on blenderartists.org.
Hey guys, relax! Matt, good points.
Leo and Randal don’t know how to use Blender, Brecht and myself dont know how to do interviews :)
I like the fact people who don’t know much about each project are interested to talk to the developers involved.
Yes, I agree. There’s no need to make this bigger than what it is. I disliked a couple of things but the interview had many others that were positive.
I don’t think it’s positive to bring tension just for a few differencies.
I appologize for the “arrogant ignorants” comment. Was not constructive at all, and the fact that Randal and Leo don’t know much about Blender doesn’t make them “ignorants”.
Not to beat the dead horse (oops, another idiom that might not translate), but…
There’s an ongoing theme mostly US-centric about why we choose “Free Software”, since in English “free” can mean either as in freedom (libre in spanish) or without price (nada dinero? sorry, my spanish is bad :-). The “cheap” joke was clearly aimed at that mindset, that the reason people pick FLOSS is because they are not wanting to spend much money.
In fact, both Leo and I have worked with FLOSS for years (even before it was called that), and have a deep respect for the freedoms offered by FLOSS and are fully committed to supporting that. Heck, that’s why I’m putting my time into the podcast… to show how cool FLOSS has become, and how committed the contributors are, and to make more people aware of the true depth and diversity of FLOSS.
But standing from there, it’s a bit of a self poke to simply say “oh, you picked this because it doesn’t cost anything!” We don’t actually believe that… it’s just said in jest.
Whilst I’ve been aware of Blender for a long time, it’s only after listening to the FLOSS weekly podcast that I bothered to turn up to blender.org
Now I’ve subscribed to BlenderNation and will probably download and try the software. So as one of “the 30,000” I think it will prove to be very beneficial to the Blender community (to be featured on the show).
Honestly, Leo and Randall are as sympathetic as you can expect your hosts could ever be.
Keep up the great work, glory to Blender!
Randal,
you say: “Not to beat the dead horse (oops, another idiom that might not translate)”
Here we say: not to make firewood from the fallen tree. Your phrase translates well. I wonder if that’s a good phrase to start with when the other person is trying to make peace. Was the “(oops, another idiom that might not translate)” really needed?
My last post was simply intended to say “ok, lets forget the whole thing, and let’s not bother people in here with any tension”, and I apologized for one thing I thought out of place from me.
You keep trying to explain english to me and don’t seem to realize that my english is fine, check the transcription I made from the interview, I though you were going to get the message with it that I understand enligh pretty well. So I did understand your jokes from the begining, I simply didn’t like them. To mock about something, you first have to love it, or it may be taken as disrespectful, and that is subjective, not a matter of language.
You certainly don’t love Blender since you know very little about it. For instance you don’t know that “Blender 3D: Noob to pro” has been part of the Blender documentation for very long time, it’s included a link in Blender.org’s wiki, and some of the authors (check the list) are Developers. For instance, Campbell, the person you were interviewing, and the one you did the “Materials” joke to, twice. So if you laugh twice in the face of one of the persons that puts a lot of work in Blender and in parts of the thing you are mocking about, I personally dislike it. And more if Campbell, other devs, or contributos are involved.
You say it’s some independent work and it’s not, you are not informed. And if you see individuals collaborating: that’s what open source is about, individuals collaborating together, so they are part of Blender.
Matt can laugh at it, and is ok, because he IS Blender (he is a Dev), there’s love there. Campbell can laugh at it too, because he IS Blender too and also part of Blender Noob to Pro. They are entitled to, I don’t think you are entitled since you don’t love (or even know a bit about) it.
You came out with the “self-poke” thing after Matt said it. I find the good intentions of your jokes, at least, “doubtful”. And you know what they say: behind every joke there’s a part of truth from the one who makes them. It’s easy to laugh about something and then say: “hey don’t worry, it’s a joke”. And the joke about Plumiferos, you can say it was self-poke, but what self-poke is to make a joke on people from a developing country? you are not in one. You may say: “it was about open source”, but there was more than open source in that comment.
I didn’t want to say these things before just to maintain peace, and you refer to me when you say: “not to beat the dead horse”. You may not know what happens in the comments of the news on Blender Nation when people like the news: they flood with nice and kind comments, even euphoric optimistic ones. And the comments on this particular news post don’t look like in those other succesful news. Don’t you think something has happened?.
I want to apologize to Blender people that may feel uncomfortable with this discussion. Sorry guys!
@Molvy: enough already. I think Randal’s comment was perfectly sensible. Please stop discussing this here, you make us all look bad.
no problem
Calm down molvy :P
people should be nicer to leo and randal, it was a good episode, and im sure they know a ton more about blender than any mainstream news interviewers would
I was surprised when I saw one of my favorite podcasts had done an episode on blender.
These guys are professionals, and I know Leo Laporte does many different podcasts. It would be unreasonable to expect them to know every piece of software they talk about inside out.
Overall the interview was very good. The developers sounded tired, though.
All in all I think this was a great interview. Before the podcast I new that blender existed because of the x-plane.org community but I had no idea of what it was capable of. After seeing Elephant’s Dream I’m amazed at the quality and now I know what Blender is capable of. Great work everyone!!
I would just like to say that I revoke my previous comment. It was childish and unfair of me. I have since listened to the whole interview (should have done that first) and think it was actually not that bad at the end. I am sorry and embarrassed that I stooped this low. I must have been having a really BAD day!!!!