- Blender Workshop - Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe -

- Nov 05 / 06 / 07 / 08 / 09 2007 -

Blender is the premier open source package for modeling, shading, animation, rendering, compositing, editing and game creation. it is used by hobbyists, professionals, studios and institutions around the world for a large variety of applications ranging from architectural design, commercials, motion graphics, illustrative art up to full blown cinematic movie productions.

For students / (emerging) artists like us Blender is especially interesting because it gives them the full flexibility / power of the movie industry to realize our projects - without depending on student licenses and / or large wallets. In this workshop we explore all the things that blender can offer… and more.

- edit: workshop over, some pics-

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just thought i might share some work i did for the upcoming creature factory tutorial DVD published by the blender foundation.

blender conference visitors might be familiar with the character.

other than that, no time to play… work work work, peach peach peach…

enjoy!

.andy

last weekend at the blender institute we finally swapped out the shabby old carpet in the STFU corner with a new cosy one. now it even has a nice zen garden feeling to it! out of pure boredom i decided to record timelapse videos: 1) me painting the walls between 8 pm and 2 am (13.9 megs) 2) ton roosendaal and me putting in the new carpet the next day (22.2 megs)

back to DVD recording!

.andy

a very quick image i came up with last night.

edit: wireframe and closeup added.

enjoy!

.andy

today i was moving random stuff around in the institute and discovered a rather huge pile of our old elephants dream artwork. fellow blender institutionist bassam kurdali helped me to scatter them around the table for a last photoshoot and a minute of memorial silence.

on a more related note: yes, i’m currently working at the blender institute in amsterdam. aside from helping with blender e-shop orders, cleaning stuff and preparing for peach, i’m also recording a special video tutorial DVD for the blender foundation. in a few weeks peach is going into production… and the countdown starts. exciting times!

.andy

“At last! On that beautiful summer day the Grey Toad presented him with a heart. (…)

Little did he know about the foul business of The Toads; and this one was particularly wicked. Forgotten was the contract he had signed and the oaths he had taken. But why should he care?”

- Leaving Everything Behind And More

created in blender, gimp and krita.

I decided to convert my site to a wordpress blog. the advantage is undoubtedly that this makes it substantially easier to update. The big disadvantage is that I have to update my site now… sigh.

1:00 am: I’m sitting in the train back to Karlsruhe… and yup, that was day one.

In the morning I got up really early and went to Stuttgart to get my first taste of FMX as a speaker dude. Got my badge, ticket and goodies all nicely packed up in a 255;0;0-colored (really, amazingly, mind-bogglingly red) FMX shoulder bag.
The first talk I attended was on the making of Monster Samurai, a really funny short film/feature/tv series by the some of the people behind Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. The style is very unique: stylized characters, shapes and surfaces, but also lot of attention to detail.
Dug myself through the schedule to find out which talks to attend and courses to take this week. Saw the session about The Ugly Duckling And Me and about CG movie creation on a limited budget, something that’s going to be kinda important for me soon (hint-hint). Still have to prepare my workshops for friday!

The weather was really nice, so I went around the city for a while, too. After all, May 1 is an official german holiday (no shops open and a lot of people walking around eating ice cream) and Stuttgart is sorta nice.
In the evening I watched the re-screening of the SIGGRAPH Electronic Theater show 2006, which got me cringing once more (after having seen it at SIGGRAPH the year before): an awesome compilation of the best digital artwork in the world… argh, I need time to work on my own projects now!
Later that night I managed to meet with Nadine and a bunch of guys and gals from the German Film School. We had drinks and did some talking, but stupidly I had to leave earlier for my train. (Note to myself: get a train ticket next time that doesn’t require you to depart on the same day again).
Also briefly stumbled into Geoffrey Niquet from BUF Compagnie (whom I’ve met at the Future Film Festival and amazingly enough he recognized me). He’s going to give another talk about the marvelous CG imagery in Arthur et les Minimoys on wednesday morning, definitely not gonna miss that!
To sum it up, for the first day it wasn’t really that exciting: Couldn’t meet who I planned to, didn’t see many new things, but learned a few new tricks. Most of the fun stuff starts on wednesday anyway, bring it on!

.andy

fmx is one of the leading events/conferences for computer graphics and animation in europe, featuring all the major players in the cg industry: 3D app companies like autodesk, pixologic, etc but also famous studios like ilm, pixar, dreamworks and sony imageworks will show off their stuff.

and - guess what - for the first time blender will be there too, officially! twice!

there will be two workshops on friday, may 4th:

from 2 - 3 pm: 3D for Free! Creating High End Computer Graphics The Open Source Way
which is a general thing to show off cool blender features and how to use the software without going insane.

from 5 to 6 pm: Making Elephants Dream - Creating the world’s first Open Movie
which tells the exciting story of the creation of… some movie.

both workshops are brought to you by some weird guy with spiked hair. more info on the conference can be found at the official site, friday’s schedule is here.

just thought i’d let ya know
.andy