3D News

Looking back on 2006

Bart ·

final.jpgIt was a busy year for everyone who is involved with Blender in one way or another. The Blender Foundation been extremely busy with finishing Elephants Dream, organising the Siggraph Open Source Pavilion and the Blender Conference. But that’s not all: the community has also really gained speed this year. More websites, tutorials and books have appeared than ever before.

Let’s look back at some what we think were the major events this year.

Best wishes everyone, and see you next year!

Elephants Dream

The release of the world’s first Open Source movie had a significant impact on Blender. Not only did it propel Blender’s development beyond anything we have seen before, but it also placed Blender in the spotlight of the press and of 3D professionals.

While it was a fantastic work of art, there was also some criticism: its dark storyline requires multiple viewings to be fully understood and during the movie you can see the improvement of the skills of the artists. Still, this was the first movie project of this team and they had to discover their way through it as they went. To me, it seemed that professionals recognized this and their reviews were, for the most part, extremely positive.

At this moment the Blender Foundation is researching their options for a new ‘Orange’ project, hopefully on a more permanent basis.

Siggraph 2006: the Open Source Pavilion

For the first time since Not a Number went bankrupt, Blender had its own booth at Siggraph. It drew more attention than many commercial booths and put Open Source, but Blender in particular, firmly on the map for many 3d professionals. The booth featured continuous live workshops by leading Blender artists. A particular highlight was a visit by mr. Jim Blinn himself!

BlenderNation was present as well and prepared daily video reports of the event:

We recorded the following live tutorials:

Also, be sure to check out the Siggraph 2006 Blender Demo Reel. For a full list of all our Siggraph related articles, check out our Siggraph news category.

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.
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