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I just got back from the 2006 Blender Conference in Amsterdam… man that was a great experience. I can barely recount all of the great stuff that was there. Well, here’s a start: the official conference page on blender.org. There were some really great presentations and workshops and a ton of excellent and talented blenderheads to meet and talk with. I highly recommend people going to this conference next year if you have the opportunity. Some highlights from the conference:

• The Making of Elephants Dream with [nearly] the whole team there for questions and brain-picking.
• Tony Mullen gave a presentation on his upcoming (March 2007) book: Introducing Character Animation with Blender. Not only was this informative, but it was inspirational. I think I’m going to write a book. More on this later.
• Bassam Kurdali gave an intense presentation on rigging for cartoon animation. I got a ton of ideas from this that I’m just itching to experiment with.
• A great deal of Bassam’s rig, as I understand, was inspired by the way the Plumiferos team rigged their bird characters. They gave an absolutely incredible presentation on their project… and WOW those were some incredible rigs. Hats off to Ivan, Manuel, malefico, and that whole team. I can’t wait to see their finished film.
• Blender runs on a PocketPC! I saw it. It’s awesome.
• There was a great presentation by Riccardo Covino about the use of Blender for special effects in a short movie using a [very] high-end motion control camera called a Milo. I’m kicking myself right now for not writing down the title of the film. I’ll have to watch the video streams they recorded from the conference to find out. Edit: The name of the movie is minDrones. You should definitely go check it out.
• The Blender Education Board is moving along quite well. I’m excited to see where it’s going to be this time next year.
• The Suzanne Awards! There was some really strong work in there. Congratulations to the winners, they deserve it.
• Blender Nation covered the entire conference and I’m on the internet again; this time talking about the blender.org gallery (and scratching my neck way too much).

Needless to say (but I’m going to say it anyway), I had a fantastic time. My favorite part about the conference is the laid-back nature of the whole thing. Everyone there is friendly and interested in what everyone else is doing. It’s quite easy to pick a corner or a table or a place on the stairs and talk with fellow blenderheads about just about anything. The dinner and after-confernence times were particularly great. I definitely want to go back next year.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 24th, 2006 at 3:48 pm and is filed under Blender. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.