Presenting Blender at my university

[Antares]

Before christmas this year i am going to present Blender at my university of applied sciences in Landshut/Germany in the first semester of computer science.

The presentation will be done during a regular lecture. The main purpose will be attracting students to work with Blender in any possible field (3D in general, python, source code, compiling it with optimizations, ...).
For higher semsters this might result in doing projects with Blender.
Every student must do a 1 year project at my university starting from the 4th semster. Topic can be chosen freely but a Professor needs to support it.

The professor who gave me permission to use her lecture for presentation would support such projects. She already asked me , whether i want to do exaclty this project related to Blender. Unfortunately i am already in the 5th semester so i already got my project.
She also asked me if i want to do my thesis around Blender. I am still playing with this thought
This means a thesis is possible as well.

The same professor also holds a multimedia lecture in the 7th semester. The lecture is connected to a practical training were student have to write their own raytracer and work with OpenGL.

The faculty (especially the Dekan) supports all this as well and i have permission to use some resources of the university (room, PCs) for further work together with other students in future.


So now my question:
What should i present? What would be best to attract people?

Since i am presenting Blender to computer science students, i *could* go into some *minor* technical details. But again, what should i tell them?

The only things i did so far with Blender was mainly using it (guess what ) and compile it with an intel compiler wor windows to speed rendering times up.

Your help would be much appreciated

[-efbie-]

I would speak about blender's UI design that i find innovative and brillant.

[halibut]

I would speak about blender's UI design that i find innovative and brillant.

I would be careful about this, I only say it because blenders UI seems like it needs some more polishing yet, eg, making it clearer which are toggle/radio buttons etc.

[calli]

Hi Antares,

I am about teaching computergraphics for the fifth time using Blender at the FH-Koblenz now. Thats a 50 hour course mostly practical lessons and exercises.

It shows that the realtime graphics is the thing which attracts most people.

So I guess a nicely textured object performing some realtime animation with interactivity would baffle some people.

Regards,
Carsten

[CubOfJudahsLion]

Not bad. There's a good number of things blender can boast, packing many fantastic tools right out of the box, thus becoming a true alternative to many commercial packages.

-Raytraced shadows and reflections. Just to show them that Blender is serious about shading. Then comes the rad stuff.
-Radiosity and GI (the last one, together with Yafray) that yield realistic quality. There are fantastic samples in gallery sites. Specially lip-smacking are the caustics.
-Non-realistic shading (toon shading) is a big thing nowadays.
-Different BRDFs.
-IK--you just gotta have it. You could animate an armature with IK
-Metaobjects--same thing.
-Particles and particle interaction--"so you paid $500 for that plugin. Me, I got it out of the box, for free." You can do a lightshow, or mix them with metaobjects in another variation of the 'forming puddle', the 'cascade', 'lava' or whatever suits your fancy.
-Edges and UV unwrapping: a preferred solution for UV-mapping complex objects.
-Fresnel shading (IOR+ramps). Show team a motherpearl, a girl with jet-black hair and iridiscent gleams, or soap bubbles.
-mesh morphing (i.e., mesh keys)
-environment mapping--good for HDRI (I know there's a plugin somewhere)
-particle interaction.
-programmability (Python API)

Actually, there's a million features you could boast. Going over them, I'm still flabbergasted that this all fits in a package less than 5 megs. The blender coders are the closest thing I can conceive to "heroes of programming".