Blender Foundation was active on Siggraph 2011 in several areas.
Birds of a Feather meetings
- Sunday August 7, 2-6 PM
- Ton Roosendaal gave an overview of Blender Foundation, past year work and plans for the future.
- Highlight plans for 2011-2012: Blender 2.6x series (lots of new features), Blender Proceedings (documentation project), Blender Network (partnership program) Mango Open Movie (Ian Hubert directs!)
- Download the slides of talk here.
- In discussions after presentation some concerns were expressed about future of Game Engine in Blender. Definitely an action point.
- From 4-6 PM many artists demo'ed cool work they did with Blender.
Sintel in Animation Festival
Tradeshow booth
- During three days, 9-11 August, Blender Foundation presented Blender + art showreel at 6x3m booth at the tradeshow floor.
- Watch the showreel in YouTube here.
- HP provided us 4 fast workstations and 30" displays.
- 100 Blender shirts and 1500 Blender DVDs were handed out (also thanks to sponsors Lumikuu & Renderfarm.fi)
- Demo DVD made for FMX by Francesco Siddi & Sebastian Koenig & Thomas Dinges, thanks! ISO download is free to spread and use.
- Booth attracted visitors from all over the world, all over the industry... including artists from Pixar getting personal demos.
- Our OpenCL (Cycles render, compositing) projects attracted visitors from all main Graphic cards vendors (Intel, NVidia, AMD/ATI). They are seriously committed to help out with Blender testing and advising us on best usage of of OpenGL and OpenCL features.
- Early demos of motion tracking did people's head turn too. It appears we're providing the first cross platform free/open tracking tool for film makers here.
- Met with author of MeshFlow, a Blender based research paper accepted for Siggraph.
- Had a good meeting with Khronos, discussing our COLLADA support and established tight connections to get further support.
- Talked to many journalists; including 3D World, 3D artist, Renderosity.
- Interest from new developers, among which Ari Shapiro of ILM/R&H fame
- Several film/vfx/animation studios interested in integrating Blender in pipeline, but they need consultants to help them. (will be via Blender Network)
- In general: so cool to see so many artists dropping by who already were using Blender professionally and with great results.
After hours we attended the Open Source VFX, met with Matt Pharr, Larry Gritz. People from OpenShading, OpenImage, OpenEXR, OpenColor, Alembic, Ptex etc. were there too. All projects Blender is into (or going into) as well.
Special thanks for helping organizing it all: Mike Pan, Dalai Felinto, Nathan Letwory, Julius Tuomisto, Nathan Vegdahl, Bassam Kurdali, Colin Levy, Ian Hubert, Joe Eagar, Janne Karhu, Oscar Beachler.
Ton Roosendaal
Blender Foundation, August 17 2011.
