Blender conference cool videos

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21

Yeah that part gave me a chuckle as well. Awhile back I got some flack for implying that Ton really just wants to be a movie producer, which all the more power to him for it, and as such someone else should be heading up the development aspect. This leaves him free to test blender and push films, separate, from the development side of the BI. Anyways my claim seems a bit more credible now I hope.

All that said though, I think all the “drama” or rather vocal criticism from the game artist out there had an effect. The convention had a much larger game centric approach, which is a good thing. I think some are starting to realize that particular pipeline is where Blender can shine the brightest in, and where the funding is as well.

There’s progress, but its just so unnecessarily difficult/slow at times.

22

Some good points and observations SaintHaven :slight_smile:

23

Then contribute to the development fund instead of Gooseberry. The two are totally separate. Blender Foundation runs dev fund. Blender Institute runs Gooseberry.

Precisely this.

24

This does seem a bit like suggesting that rather than donating to the production division of the Blender Studio, just donate to the R&D division.

25

I will not comment on the Valve/game engine since I don’t read much on that issue.

But the key point here is not about which part doing what, its about how the money get spend.

To help explain this, let me make a scenario:

Ton loves 3d printing. So he made a ‘Goose 3D’. Everybody donates there. There also development donation. There are also people donates here. Even though if the donation is separate, if every release you saw tools related to 3d printing is getting the focus (which inline with Ton own project) while the rest is neglected, it didn’t mean much which part you donate.

Long long time ago, back when IClone was 1.0, I always wonder why Ton didn’t try to capture the machinima market. Modelling is there, game engine is there, and some of the functionality is useful for game modeller too. Funny that Unreal is capturing this market faster than Blender, CryEngine too (with CryEngine cinebox).

Again, as I said, some people want to contribute whatever they want to code, eg: 3d printing, camera tracker, whatever and if it inline with what Ton wanted, it will be included and supported.

But there is also problem with what Ton DOESN’T WANT which won’t be included no way no how - eg: Reset to Default, to a certain extent.

My main point is that some people can’t donate if they saw they are being neglected. And even if you grouped together and hire a developer, if it not inline what what Ton wanted, the only place that functionality is available is in its own build.

Maybe this is the main reason why some people are not willing to set up a support business. Sometimes a company might want something that Ton hate, and the only place it can be is inside the company own build. I think this was mentioned is some of the Ton talk, about not worrying about the trunk - just build a version for the company. Now if there is 10 company wanting different stuff, there will be 10 version of Blender. Just because Ton was kind of ‘my way or the highway’.

so instead of blender is getting more powerfull, we just getting hundreds of version of blenders. unless someone forked blender and take all this changes and combined it into one.

-will add more later, got something to do quick-

ok. i’m back again.

of course, other limitation doesn’t help. but you know what, i think I’ll stop here. I don’t see Blender being a machinima tools in a long run. Its only now that Ton decided to integrate more the ‘realtimeness’ of blender.

–some tidbit–

I think Ton was half wrong in two key point:

This is not meant exclusive or to keep people out – everyone can use Blender freely and become a user. I usually state this provocatively to explain that I’m not much interested in “getting more users”.

Stagnant number of users equal to stagnant number of donations, and stagnant number of developers. The thing with patch issue and ‘my way or highway’ development style doesn’t help either. This cannot help improve Blender. Blender will stagnant.

Nor am I much interested in supporting Maya users, Sketch-up users, or the forum trolls who don’t use Blender anyway.

First of all, it is not a promise that those who paid yearly to AD, once start using Blender, will donate the same amount of money to BI/BF instead. But they are a group of people with cash. And also expertise. Also high quality work. Also studios with programmers. Heck, if Blender was more game development friendly they would have probably gain a lot of developers - specially in the open source days before Unity / Unreal came and killed a lot of open source game engines.

Wait… people who don’t use Blender are now forum trolls? People who uses modo and think saving before quit / coloured wireframes / complete render engine is a smart thing is now forum trolls? We are here because we want to support Blender so that it can be a software useful for many people (instead of just Ton and Ton’s open movie artists), and yet we are trolls? Should BlenderArtist become like KickStarter in a way, with amount of donation/contribution next to someone name so that their opinion weight more?

Sigh… I think I’m done for this topic. At least for now.

26

Man I give up. Mods if you are reading please close this thread(I am the OP so I believe I am entitled to make this request), the thread title was “Blender conference cool videos” and my leading question was “what cool video stood out to you” and most posters have understood the spirit of this thread it was supposed to be about talks that inspired you where you watched and you came out thinking you learnt something.

But the usual suspects have taken this as opportunity to yet again engage in a bout of Ton bashing. I suspect if left to its own devices this will soon explode into giant walls of text and into the usual back and forth quote feast.

So yeah kindly please lock this thread.

27

I would say that splitting some of the post into their own thread would be a lot more constructive.

@tyrant monkey
I understand that your original post was about cool stuff observed at the Blender Conference - I’m with you. But isn’t it equally important to bring out and discuss things observed at the conference that gives frustrations ?

It is a bit ying & yang. But (as mentioned) it could be split into 2 different threads.

28

I don’t know - I was talking about AMA & BI & BF videos - which covers development, BI future (going into studio mode) and Ton own words that he want to focus on creative side, and not on the development side (but STILL want things to go his way) and expecting others to build something ala Red Hat. So he was right with setting up BF and making sure Blender stay with its current license.

Maybe the only best future for Blender is for someone else to set up something like that, fork blender, hire all the developer, and leave Ton with his open movies.

—edit—

I understand some of the open movies were to fulfill some of the funding legal requirements (it has to be a movie) but on the internet side, it should be feature funding ala krita.

but since ton himself has admitted, i guess its a done topic.

someone need to step up.

29

Would be sad to have this thread locked, but I understand your frustration, tyrant monkey, I feel the same. A thread split would be great. I hope we will continue to get good tips and interesting remarks about conference videos.

30

I think this is where you lost the spirit of this thread. where these really the coolest(see the title of the thread) and most inspiring videos you watched? If the honestly enough were than fair enough. I doubt it I think the were just the most inflammatory to anyone who doesn’t agree with Ton’s opinions.

Maybe I was quick in asking for a thread closure maybe a split.

Today I want try and watch Andy’s robotic garden talk. Working full time means I get so little time to watch what is on the BF’s youtube channel.

31

I’m not going to split the thread. The off-topic discussions made in this one already have threads of their own. Please use those threads if you want to continue beating that drum.

I’m going to keep this thread open a bit longer in the hope that it returns to being on-topic… and here’s my contribution:

I really, really enjoyed all of the talks and presentations that had novel and unexpected uses for Blender. The 5-minute lightning talks were full of them. Dalai’s talk about using Blender to choreograph drones was another fantastic one. As was Andy’s 3D printed robot garden. It’s really quite incredible to see how many fantastically crazy places that Blender gets used… and it’s really quite inspiring.

Of course, the animator in me holds a warm spot for Hjalti’s animation talk, too, so there’s still some appeal to me in the “conventional” uses of Blender. :slight_smile:

32

I love Blender as much as I love grid computing (world community grid) and Kiva (long story). But here is the thing, personally. I was a student in 1998 - in computer science. And I love everything about computer graphics, from demo scene to computer games to animation. But then while there is open source compiler (from ASM to C/C++), to open source graphics library (open gl) but lacking on open source 3d software. Long story short, I was the purchaser of 3D World #2 that included blender (back then Ton hope it can be used to make PS2 games). I kinda like Blender. Then came the news NaN was shutting down. Then the open source. Back then I was just a student without credit card - so I couldn’t contribute. But if you know the pricing of 3D software in those days, you knew it was un-affordable. No person in their mind would do 3d as a hobby. So I made a promise to myself - I will support Blender as much as I can, so that it other people just like me BACK THEN (people who loves 3d but couldn’t afford it) now have an outlet.

Then came the machinima movement (red vs blue, fraps, quakecam, etc) and also half-assed tools made from Doom/Quake source code. I really wish Blender capture that opportunity. If Blender were to ‘capture’ (not necessarily move to that direction and forget the rest) and open the blender market and let people sell 3d models like ICLone market, Ton would gain a lot of income to help develop Blender. But nobody eyes on that market. MovieStorm and IClone of course move from version to version, showing that real time app and 3d models for it do have a market. (currently iclone is coming with version 6). CryEngine also moving to CryCinemaBox or something. Unreal, knowing how much people ask for it in UDK, throw in the tools in Unreal Engine 4. No royalty for machinima, no less.

But Blender still have a problem (more or less) with FBX, and in supporting closed source plug-ins (allegromithc texture painter, etc).

So I ended up owning Modo 401, LW10 edu (which I purchase once BI was ‘abandoned’ (as in no more development except bug fix) back then, and Cycles is still in its infancy. Because I need tools that is stable, feature complete, and compatible with other tools. 2010 is not 1998 when it come to 3d software pricing. Also Houdini Indie, for once, allow me to be able to put it in my toolbox if I was interested.

And here is the conclusion. There is still ‘old me’ out there, big eyed kids who looks at 3D with wonder, but couldn’t afford commercial tools in order to make commercial product. I am here for them, because I knew how it feel to be one, love 3d so much but couldn’t afford a tool.

In a simple example, imagine a 3rd world country where many people still ride in bicycle and moped (small engine motorcycle). car is expensive. sports car even more. and porches goes without mention. imagine what happens when it rains. people riding bicycle and moped get wet. and did you see images on the net where a family of four or even more on a single moped?

then i got lucky, and managed to own a sport car. maybe i couldn’t afford a porcshe, but a sport car ala those drifting movie is okay. but if someone came with a solution for a simple car, i will support it, even if I doesn’t plan to ride one myself - because I already own a sport car.

In conclusion, development videos interest me more because I care about Blender development. As for other videos (tools), I prefer reading and watching tutorial on modo more since I plan to upgrade to 901 (or whatever next version). it sound like they are really focusing on game engine now, looking at the official forum). And I’m also thinking about adding Houdini as part of my workflow (but might test the free version first).

But of course, people like Ton think that the likes of me are troll, because I don’t use Blender anyway. But how compatible are Blender with Unreal? How accessible are Blender for people who loves machinima? (I own IClone 3.0, and upgraded to 4 and 5).

I don’t want to brag, but running world community grid caused me to have to pay on electricity bills, and kept putting money into kiva that i doesn’t plan to take out. this is because i can stand behind them. but i can’t stand behind blender development. too chaotic. too disconnect. i donated back in 2.3 days, buying manual and books, and a couple in 2.5 days (pre and post). but i stopped supporting other than testing bugs to see if I can reproduce it and provide input.

the reason is whatever i wanted, its NOT inside Blender.

TL,DR - yeah, Blender development videos interest me more, because that is the topic I care about.

33

Hi,

I’m surprised nobody mentionned Bartek’s speech about texture coordinate for Cycles material. You can find it here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAUmLcXhUj0

What Bartek created and the way he manipulates texture coordinate using color mix is simply brillant ! That was the most inspiring talk I saw this year. Everybody with an interest in material creation with Cycles have to see it ! :slight_smile:

34

Actually the LOL is on you.

Bug fixing is a rather huge part of releasing code.

You people need to stop playing it smart, its annoying, seriously you are users you have no clue about coding. Respect people hard work. If Psy - fi could release so easily the 20% you think he would not have done it by now ? And of course I dont even know where you get your numbers certainly not from Antonis presentation that I watched few hours ago.

I can assure you as a developer myself even 1% of the code can take 100 times more than the rest 99% . Getting stuck with few lines of code is neither rare or even unusual. Things will be read when they will be ready, you dont like it , plenty of software out there that “suck less” then Blender and “listen more” to their users. We can live without you and your rants believe it or not.

I have watched many of the talks I plan to watch all of them , most of them I found very interesting. My favorites are the Matte painting and Scientific visualization.

35

This one was just brilliant. I’ve seen Bartek do some crazy things in Cycles, but that was something else. Just awesome.

36

I’ll echo the sentiments about Bartek’s talk. It was kind of magical. I started out taking notes but in the end I just had a list of things I’ve always done that I didn’t know were wrong. Even just the basics of how the different coordinate systems work is much, much clearer to me now. The first half of that talk almost ought to be transcribed into the wiki as the basic documentation of coordinate systems.

37

did someone already mention https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlL0qiPORA0 . The joy of animation

really great talk. along with barteks one of my favourites

38

Bartek one is great, I agree!

39

Oh wow, thank you for this tip! An hour very well spent, what a great talk. It’s a joy to listen to someone who is well prepared and knows what he’s talking about, as well as knows how to present complicated topics in an understandable manner. Bartek’s tip about blurring a texture via high frequency noise distortion is genious, and running us through the evolution of his wood grain texture was fascinating.

This talk also makes clear that some node inputs that have a specific function, like color, are just values/numbers that can be used as such in math operations. Another node like this (which Bartek didn’t use) is the vector node that can also be used as a node providing 3 numbers.

Great talk, bravo. I have to go try some node magic now. :slight_smile:

40

sebastian Koenigs talk on tracking and vfx was definitely 55 minutes well spent :slight_smile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_MXkTP73CI
i really want to get my hand on the track match 2 series now :smiley: