Siggraph Journal, Day One: Arrival

Bart · July 30, 2006

I arrived in Boston this Saturday afternoon and went to the Boston Convention Center straight away to check out the status of the Open Source Pavilion and to meet the crew.

While there weren’t any official activities yet, I thought it would be fun to share some footage of the booth being constructed and of the general area around us.

All of the booths at the exhibition floor are still under construction and ours is no exception; the rigging is done, but computers and network need to be set up, presentations have to be prepared, people have to know the work schedule.. lots of stuff still to do.

One of the biggest challenges though is removing the wrinkles from the giant Elephants Dream banner (4.5×4.5m!). I’m sure we’ll get all that sorted out before Tuesday.

At this moment I’m writing from the Blender Birds of a Feather meeting and we’re shooting footage to share as much of it as we can with you. Expect more news today and tomorrow!

Download the video: mirror 1| mirror 2 [Quicktime, 16 MB]

Note: right-click and save-as to store the files on your harddisk

Author Bart

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Community Lead at n8n.

25 responses

sten

30 July 2006 at 18:06

Nice to see you up and running!

All good luck and the greets to the Blender team, from Sweden!

ShiftingClouds

30 July 2006 at 18:16

Hey !
Well done !
This is so great, best next to being there.

Have fun :)

thoro

30 July 2006 at 18:28

Wow, thank you very much for sharing these impressions!

Thorsten

Pitel

30 July 2006 at 18:46

Hmm, they may try to sell the big ED banner in auction, to finance Blender foundation.
I’m offering 5 bucks :D

d.j.spiritdual

30 July 2006 at 19:43

this is a crazy journey i wish that i could be there ! great works guys !

jedihe

30 July 2006 at 19:46

Great! I will keep reading blendernation everyday looking for your reports!

Toonami_Fan

30 July 2006 at 19:49

here it is on you tube!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omaw4dYCyd0

Elubie

30 July 2006 at 20:42

Wow! The booth is looking really cool!
Thanks for sharing this.
Wish you a lot of fun and great success there!

– Andrea

Benjaru

30 July 2006 at 21:35

That was awesome, guys! Right next to ZBrush and Lightwave. o_O We’ll show them!!
Looking forward to the next one!

LetterRip

30 July 2006 at 22:35

I think Lightwave is gonna be seriously uncomfortable – their only significant improvement that we don’t have is going to be ngons. Of course they still have smoke, flame and cloth capabilities which are areas where we lack currently.

LetterRip

Omar

30 July 2006 at 22:40

Thanks for sharing!
I hoped to be at Siggraph this year…

Have a big BuZZZ and keep us informed.

Matt

31 July 2006 at 01:54

Thanks for the update, bart, I’m getting excited already! Looks like it’s going to be a great deal of fun, I wish I could be there, but these excellent video blogs are the next best thing. Really nice to see those huge prints too!

LetterRip: Though they do seem to have been losing their edge as of late, Lightwave still has many significant improvements over Blender, mostly in the renderer, like volumetric rendering, raytraced DoF blur, GI/caustics, lightmap & texture baking, adaptive subdivision for displacement, rigid body dynamics. The quality of those features, i don’t know about, but it’d sure be nice to have that in Blender.

riv

31 July 2006 at 03:17

The BOF presentations were really great. Looking forward to seeing you guys at the open source pavillion :)

Big Fan

31 July 2006 at 06:00

Looks very good with the various banners.
Do we get to know who the kind person is sponsoring the open source pavilion?
I would like to say thanks to them for making this possible.
Keep the reports coming. Don’t pan the camera too fast though :o)

Cubedude04

31 July 2006 at 10:40

Wow the booth looks great i wish i was there!

Haggis

31 July 2006 at 10:46

Looking forward to more updates.

@bart, or anyone – what’s the music in this video? I like.

Jakub Steiner

31 July 2006 at 11:56

It’s rad when artists are involved. It’s looking gorgeous! Such a huge difference to an average free software booth I’m used to :)

Vassilios Boucer

31 July 2006 at 13:13

Yeah!the booth (also the banners) looks Amazing!
Thanks for the Video!
I wish you the best!

SeeYA

Chris

31 July 2006 at 13:32

Bart is doing a great job with the filming for this site and he’s a great guy to boot! Emilie and I had a fantastic time at the BoF and subsequent search for food. Thanks for a great time guys! See you Tuesday!

LOGAN

31 July 2006 at 16:17

Added to Google Video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1897371449911325319&hl=en

If you put this HTML code into your page it should be embedded in the page:

LOGAN

31 July 2006 at 16:26

Sorry HTML was stripped :) But it’s possible nonetheless.

CGuy

31 July 2006 at 18:18

maybe use a hair dryer to soften the banner to remove wrinkles? I’m sure you guys will figure it out! great job!

CGuy

Javier Reyes GuzmÃ¡n - Puerto Rico

31 July 2006 at 18:22

Hi Siggraph BlenderHeads:

Thanks for the video of the Open Source Pavilion. ItÂ´s great to see what happen their in the exibition. And now blendernation is running nearly my time zone and that is also great.

AND NOW LETS BLENDER THE WORLD and siggraph too!

Iner

31 July 2006 at 19:25

Cool looking booth! Those banners sure beat the ones in the Lounge ;-) Be sure to bring us one! Have fun Bart!

86point5

1 August 2006 at 15:26

Re: wrinkles
I couldn’t tell in the video, but those types of banners usually have two ‘pole pockets’ (one at the top and one at the bottom). The top one is used on the pole the banner hangs from, the bottom is supposed to have a pole that supplies a little weight to keep the banner stretched tightly. I couldn’t see in the video whether yours had one, and if it did, if you had anything in the lower pole pocket.

25 responses

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