Photographic report: BlenderDay 2011, Day 2

In the morning of the second day of BlenderDay 2011, everyone gathered in the lecture hall again, a little bit more tired than the day before, maybe, but just as curious.

Curious, of course, about what Oliver Schömann was going to say in his talk about Character sculpting inside Blender.

What he had to say was indeed quite new and extremely interesting: He showed that sculpting an already weighted and animateable mesh isn’t only possible, it even gives you access to areas that are normally hidden (like the inside of the mouth) and even renders most shape keys unnecessary because you can sculpt in all deformations a joint can have, giving you quite a good influence over how it deforms. The skin creases of the elephant he used as a demo character stretched amazingly realistic.

After a short break…

… most people joined this year’s modelling contest. After the topic, “Insect”, was announced by Andy Goralczyk, everyone had an hour to create a scene that would please the jury (no materials, no light except for GI/AO). The three best renders and the most creative result got a “Blend & Paint” DVD training. I have no photos of the contest (and couldn’t take part) because when everyone worked hard there, a small group of people did a comparably difficult job in a different room: they (we) founded an Association to legally represent the German Blender forum and organize the BlenderDay in the future. There’ll probably be more information about that in a few weeks or months, as at the moment, nothing’s finished and fixed yet.

Afterwards, I did my presentation on my experiences with photography, what I learnt about composition and image editing in the last year and how I think these experiences can help to improve Blender-created images as well. Obviously, there are no photos from that, either (can somebody help me out here?).

So let’s move on to the last presentation of this year’s BlenderDay: Gottfried Hofmann, showing us the possibilities of the Blender smoke simulation in its current development status. After showing some basics, he moved on to some more detailed explanations of settings, showed us an example of how to set up a nice fireball simulation and even found a bug in the process.

Even though that was the last piece of official content, with dinner to come and a lot of talking still to be done, it was not the end of this BlenderDay. Although the faces got a little less alert …

Sooner or later, we all had to go home. In my case in beautiful weather (again).

I want to use this possibility to thank all people who created the BlenderDay in the first place and organized it, as always in an amazingly perfect way, for bringing the German-speaking Blender community together in a way that wasn’t possible before this event existed. It was the last time the event was organized by the “Schülerfirma” BlendVision, it might have been the last time it took place in the rooms of the “Erich Kästner Gymnasium” in Eislingen/Fils, but we will find a way to continue what we started. Also, I want to thank everyone who was there for making the two days as interesting as they were and making everyone feel like we are all a big family.

Again: How other people saw the second day of BlenderDay 2011:

Thomas Dinges

Gottfried Hofmann

> Day 1

Some other stuff:

• You can use all these images in your blogs and on your websites, regard them as CC-BY.
• If you want to have any picture of you in full resolution (even if it’s not in here but you know I took it), please contact me.
• If you want an image removed from this or the earlier blog post, please contact me.
• If you have pictures of me or my talk, I’d be happy to see them or even integrate them here, attributing you and linking to you of course.