Report: Blender at the Pink Cow cafe bar, Tokyo

Tony Mullen submitted the following report of the Blender user meeting in the Pink Cow cafe bar in Tokyo in September.

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