An Assortment of Blender Things
February 28th, 2007 by Jason
So a lot of little things have happened in the Blender world… and even a few of them are involving Hand Turkey (a-mazing!). Let’s do a run-down in list format!
- I, along with Bassam Kurdali, Bob Holcomb, and David Millet, submitted a proposal to the Courses committee for this year’s SIGGRAPH conference. The proposal was for a day-long course to introduce working professionals, educators, and students to Blender. Sadly that proposal was rejected. We got generally positive reviews across the board on it, but apparently scheduling and space constraints dictated that our course would not be held. We’re weighing our options to possibly still do it, though in a somewhat less formal format. Regardless, we will take what we’ve learned from this process and submit the course again next year.
- I submitted another, different proposal to the Educators Program at SIGGRAPH covering the challenges and success of the Red Hat High program that I participated in last year (and should hopefully be participating in again this year). That proposal was accepted, so I’ll be giving a short 15-minute QuickTake presentation at this year’s conference. Sweet!
- We held our second Blender Basics workshop here in Richmond last week. The turnout was a bit smaller than the last one, but I still had a good time teaching and I think those in attendance walked away with some good information. We’re hoping to hold the next workshop(s?) some time in April. It’s possible that we may be doing both a Basics workshop and an Advanced workshop. If you want to be kept in the loop about that, definitely keep in touch.
- I’m a writer on Blender Nation now! My first article was published today. Really exciting stuff, too… the developers of Freestyle (an excellent non-photorealistic renderer) are looking for assistance in integrating their code with Blender. That’s all kinds of awesome.
- Bob Holcomb has started the first in a series of compositing contests using Blender’s node-based compositor. The deadline for the contest is the 31st of March and we Hand Turkeys will be serving as some of the judges in it. I can’t wait to see what entries are made.
- I’ve begun working on my next tutorial DVD for CmiVFX. It’s going to be awesome, so be on the lookout for it.
And there’s even more cool stuff coming down the pipe! World travel, more projects, more experiments, and all kinds of fun. But we’ll save those comments for another day. 