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.
There definitely are Blender users in Japan, and the numbers seem to be growing lately. This workshop was very well attended by people with all kinds of backgrounds including CG professionals, a biologist, several interior designers, students, and teachers (one high school teacher said he became interested because his students have been getting into Blender, which was great to hear.)
I really have to thank Universal Marginal Studio and Octet Design for arranging this whole thing and providing such a great environment to teach Blender in. We’re already talking about doing it again, and I really hope that can happen.
I have a complaint: too many pictures of Tony(who’s got some kind of intelectual Jason Statham look going on there), and far to few of an, apparently, very hot japanese girl!
fact: this blog features too many blenderheads and not enough hot japanese girls.
The workshop was two days long on one weekend, five hours each day. So for the first day I spent about a half hour giving an overview of Blender and all it can do, showed people the BF training video trailers, clips of the movies, etc. The rest of the first day went through modeling, skinning, and texturing (using the built in texture paint tool, then a UV material) a simple character (you can see the shape of the character in the last slide I think). The next day we started with that character, rigged it, animated it, and worked with the NLA to put mix several actions together. We got done early with that, so for the last 2 hours I took some “requests” and gave mini-tuts on sculpt mode and setting up a game. A couple of the students went as far as putting their characters into the game engine and setting up action actuators.
So all in all, we covered a lot. Everybody started out complete beginners, only one person had touched Blender 6 or 7 years ago.
@differentSmoke,
I totally agree… the story would have been very different if I’d been the one behind the camera!
Ah, I also showed them some various cool recent developments, like the videos on Farsthary’s volumetrics blog and TK’s videos of freestyle integration. And I told them where to find this stuff on graphicall.org.
Tony Mullen has posted a set of pictures from his latest workshop in Tokyo.
Japan is an XSI nation, they rarely use other packages.
Surprised to see Blender there !
There definitely are Blender users in Japan, and the numbers seem to be growing lately. This workshop was very well attended by people with all kinds of backgrounds including CG professionals, a biologist, several interior designers, students, and teachers (one high school teacher said he became interested because his students have been getting into Blender, which was great to hear.)
I really have to thank Universal Marginal Studio and Octet Design for arranging this whole thing and providing such a great environment to teach Blender in. We’re already talking about doing it again, and I really hope that can happen.
I wish i was in the other side of the globe!
I love the Japanese’s community Blender work! I wish it keep on growing…
Nice pictures! Tony please say a few words about the exercises you developed for this workshop! :P
its great to see blender community grow every where!!!
i read in tonny’s character animation book that he teach in tsuda college, isn’t it means blender has community in japan?
i love japanese blender works!
I have a complaint: too many pictures of Tony(who’s got some kind of intelectual Jason Statham look going on there), and far to few of an, apparently, very hot japanese girl!
fact: this blog features too many blenderheads and not enough hot japanese girls.
Cool!
Tony’s workshops are very nice :). Good for the japanese guys to have him there!
jedihe
Hey Tony!
Great to see you in the zone (and the atendees too!), you’re doing great stuff for Blender there! Still dying to get down to japan for a while ;)
See you soon! (Siggy hopefully.)
Lee
Thanks for the comments!
@EmailMeForMore,
The workshop was two days long on one weekend, five hours each day. So for the first day I spent about a half hour giving an overview of Blender and all it can do, showed people the BF training video trailers, clips of the movies, etc. The rest of the first day went through modeling, skinning, and texturing (using the built in texture paint tool, then a UV material) a simple character (you can see the shape of the character in the last slide I think). The next day we started with that character, rigged it, animated it, and worked with the NLA to put mix several actions together. We got done early with that, so for the last 2 hours I took some “requests” and gave mini-tuts on sculpt mode and setting up a game. A couple of the students went as far as putting their characters into the game engine and setting up action actuators.
So all in all, we covered a lot. Everybody started out complete beginners, only one person had touched Blender 6 or 7 years ago.
@differentSmoke,
I totally agree… the story would have been very different if I’d been the one behind the camera!
Ah, I also showed them some various cool recent developments, like the videos on Farsthary’s volumetrics blog and TK’s videos of freestyle integration. And I told them where to find this stuff on graphicall.org.
Thank you very much for your reply Tony.
Many laughs here about DifferentSmoke’s follow up. :))
Hot Japanese chicks on Blendernation 1+vote.
Ah, Lee! Siggy = Siggraph Asia, of course! (a little slow) Yeah, that’d be great to catch up with you there!