Blender conference cool videos

This is blenderartists.org, right? The goto place for Blender heads. Or am I at a site pretending to be BA. I ask because for the whole weekend there was a Blender Conference going on and there was not a single thread(I lie I saw one thread with a dude asking about the monster on the banner) about it in this forum. I was following on twitter and have been watching some videos on youtube. There is quiet a lot of videos so I doubt I will watch all of them.

Which talks have stood out for you guys?

I watched this one yesterday, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlL0qiPORA0 ,and it had me laughing and found it very informative because I’m busy building a face rig at the moment. Ton’s talk was also pretty interesting.

when ADSK strikes back! you gotta be careful Ton.

can’t find the video, but Sebastians talk / workshop about match moving or tracking gave lots of great tips, and also reminds me to update tracker pies from his repo.

Shouldn’t that text under Blender Institute have “risky projects” circled in red?

Well, now I am more open to the idea that Blender is on Autodesk radar screen… MUHAHAHA!!!

I’ve watched probably half of them. They had quite a few good talks this year. Joy of Animation was probably my favorite talk – good speaker, entertaining, and informative. Developer AMA was good too so I’ll post it:

Many may not be aware of it, but Ton risks his life for Blender!

Maybe people well aware of the conf didn’t posted about it on purpose since here such discussions always derail into crap, the fact the biggest movie project (with biggest development goals so far) has not its own thread here is a good example.

Speaking of contents, really looking forward for Psy-fi work, bit sad Sergey haven’t spoken about Cycles future plans/ideas to get speedup as requested for GB, and Lukas Tonne too…would have enjoyed so much hearing about big projects such as nodification into a dedicated talk. (unless i missed, i had not watched every single video minutes by minutes)

I managed to catch live only the second half of the developer AMA and the conference closing. So far I have watched Ton’s keynote speech. I love watching those, especially the warming up and seeing the diversity in country/profession/blender usage etc of all the people, and of course what’s planned for Blender’s future. Videos about Cycles, Modelling and realtime usage interest me the most, I’m looking forward to watching those soon.

My favorite video so far is the talk about splineIK for rigging. It really showed off some powerful rigging techniques I was not aware of.

I would rephrase that into :

Since here such discussions easily gets pretty heated, and the BA moderators moves in and closes the thread - so no more discussions. The fact that the biggest movie project (with biggest development goals so far) has not its own thread here is a good example.

Anyway, I agree with xrg that the developer AMA is a pretty interesting Blender Conference session. And IMO the one to watch. Gives a good insight I think into the good, the bad and the ugly in Blender land - and by this I mean the good (promise & gratitude), the messy (parts of the code) and the frustrations. Both for users (& independent developers) and core developers perspective. And although Ton at times tries to stay in the background he also has some pretty substantial things to say.

I ended up banging my head into the desk a few times during the AMA video. It just kind of shows the disconnect between the users, the developers and Ton. It’s kind of bizarre at times, kind of like the question and answer regarding the colored wireframes. I’m surprised “ugly colors” are the reasoning for not pushing it… its not supposed to be pretty, its supposed to be functional. Sharing project files with consistent colors is also more important than appealing to one persons desired color pallet. Anyways… thats a can of worms not worth opening again.

It did seem like this event flew under the radar…but thats only if you compare it to the last Blender Conference. The last one had quite a bit of attention given to it due to the explosion and following controversy involving UI and “future of blender” via code.blender.org additionally, this event follows a fairly unpopular push regarding the Gooseberry project. I would say thats more or less why this event felt ignored on BA…not so much due to triggering angry debates. Just my opinion though.

Didn’t they already cover a lot of development-centric topics for SIGGRAPH, if the plans haven’t changed then what new things are there to talk about?

I’m surprised “ugly colors” are the reasoning for not pushing it… its not supposed to be pretty, its supposed to be functional. Sharing project files with consistent colors is also more important than appealing to one persons desired color pallet. Anyways… thats a can of worms not worth opening again.

The only thing I’m not sure about with colored wireframes is how people push for random colorization, how are you supposed to tell what is selected, what is active, and what is grouped if the whole scene is an alphabet soup of colors?

Personally, a more practical alternative would be Campbell’s experimental patch that changes the wire brightness based on the object size relative to the camera, you keep the aesthetic and can now pick objects apart.

THIS.

Also the GUI portion. If I understand correctly (english is not my native language) it something along the line “actually the functionality is there, we just didn’t expose it yet”.

LOL?

Its really really the reverse of 80/20. Work on 80% of it, then stopped at the last 20% so users can’t use it anyway. Or something.

I planned to write a rant, but I’m done beating the dead horse.

I saw that one too and it made me think of all those old school rubber hose animations. I also loved the faking that they did for those animaions with the chefs using an ortho camera.

Is it okay if we don’t have a discussion on anything GUI related. That is all that has been talked about in this forum and I am sick of it. The question I asked was which video stood out for you guys? Surely you must have watched at least one video where you thought geez that is really something or wow that’s amazing.

GUI flamewars are nothing but a black hole of negativity. Three days of very talented blender heads giving talks and all we want to talk about is the GUI.

I am talking about the AMA video. The exchange was like this:

Person A: I need this functionality because I run a studio with lots of people and this helps a lot.
Ton: bla bla bla bla bla.
Some developer: Actually the functionality is there. We haven’t exposed it yet.

And I was like… gah?

The key here is not about GUI - its about development (although in this case, I think GUI template is more like it).
I have said it before and I said it again - I can’t stand behind Blender development style.

I understand Ton have to follow between fine line of open source and maintained software (people tend to code whatever they want to code) but once BI received some funding, Ton really need to follow the 80/20 rule instead of focusing on his open movie and whatever functionality fit his open movie.

And that is my topic. AMA video and its content. Because it shows the dis connectivity of blender development that other poster have mentioned and I quoted.

I think even Ton admitted it in the BI and BF videos - the fact that BI is turning into a “studio”. That what was Ton dream anyway - Blender were just a tool for him to achieve that dream, not his dream itself. He keep saying someone need to start a support business. Its a business opportunity. To be the next billion dollar company like Red Hat, probably?

Maybe someone need to start a “Blender Development” and start taking donations (and probably away from BI and BF) with a tagline “This donation will be used to hire developers to work on features YOU wanted, forking Blender if required! Booyaah!”

Maybe Ton will see future donations for his future open movie will dwindle, because people are donating so that Blender will be improved so that THEY can make their OPEN OR CLOSED MOVIE! And not for Ton to hire screenwriters, graphic artist and whatever to create his own movie.

–edit–

I thought the fact that Gooseberry didn’t reached its target will teach Ton a lesson, but it seems it does not. At least in the talk Ton finally open to making closed movie funded by commercial entity.

People don’t care about your open movie, we donate so that you can improve the tools so that WE can make OUR movie.

You know, like how other software company use money from the software purchase.

—edit no 2–

To the OP, so I guess that is the other video I’m talking about. The one about BI and BF.

—edit no 3–

To be frank, I’ve been thinking about it a lot (but not lot enough) between forking, or starting a ‘ubuntu’ style company, but it keep being circular. to have a successful support business, the market have to be there. But the market is not there (not big enough) because Blender, as Ton said, was merely for Blender users (never to fulfill what the market need). So in the end, instead of spending money on starting a company, hiring blender developers and what not, start a donation drive ala Krita, I just throw the cash toward the foundry and LW. end of story.

I think it’s more about addressing conflicts regarding themes than anything to do with ugly colors.

I really liked the video about projection mapping. Useful (for me at least, I’m tinkering with videoprojectors) and the piece the guy did for a dance show was very clever (only showing the shadows of the dancers, very nice).

When precisely? I’m missing this Siggraph thing. The majority of development goodies i see are in the GB weeklies, but as i said i’ve been a bit sad Lukas had not talked about all the great goals he have on the desk. Nothing dramatic though.

IMHO, cambo was saying wireframe colors could be a straightforward addition like matcaps, go to panel, check “coloured wireframe” and done, you don’t like/don’t need? you don’t use it. Ton instead “push” for a palette solution where you pick a built in color ad assign to what you need to distinguish etc…totally different use case actually and much slower approach.