Blender Meeting # 3 Report

THANK YOU (big one) to all who turned up for the meeting, it was great, Well, I felt great about it anyway.

The theme was modelling and I brought along a little kokeshi doll as the 'live subject'. Here it is.


We had 40 minutes to do our best.

Everybody had a good bash and the skill level ranged from complete beginner to quiet and comfortably advanced. Kris, Walyow, Freen, Ben,
This was great.

There were people popping up questions and shooting quick answers.
There was total concentration on the task at hand.
The more advanced were helping the beginners and it was a beautiful thing to behold.

I asked everyone to submit their finished blend to me by email and this one from Gennedy stood out from the crowd – he has been using Blender since 2009 – nice guy too (and still using 2.49b)

Kukeshi Doll Model – by Gennady – 40 minutes – nice work indeed.

Freen gave a talk about being an animator in the industry and showed us the shots he worked on for Sintel – the raw shots - and my goodness, he is doing well, and told us about the differences between feature and TV/commercial animation.

Couple of points I took from his chat were

1. Average expectation of 80 frames a week in feature production. - that is 80 frames totally polished – ready to be shown at 40 feet tall – no glitches
2. Not so for commercial and TV work – more like “we need these 200 frames by 5pm today”
3. Animating is hard. It is not easy. You may know how to move an armature – but doing it to look real, with good timing and spacing and 'the twelve rules of animation' – it is different.
4. Sintel is an amazing achievement as all work done whilst technology is being developed – beautiful – talk about bleeding edge – wow.

One blender attendee who was invaluable to the meet that I must mention is Matthew 'thewebdesignerdude'– he got the projector working with my Linux Ubuntu and got us up and running on the night. Nice work Matthew.

Kris showed us the amazing work he has done with Blender on manufacturing processes to help both his in and out house clients visually appreciate what will exist

[(KRIS - video here please"]

There were about 12-14 people in total and about half went for a couple of quiet beers afterwards.

Thank you to all of you for supporting Blender and the sydney BUG. Btolputt came down from Raymond Terrace area and Chris turned up from bloody Katoomba – wow – on a week night.

I truly appreciate the support from all of you and look forward to the next meeting.

Yours animatedly until next time.

All from Sydney BUG