Planet Blender

Birds of a Feather, Sunday 21 July

• 2:00 - 2:30 PM Blender Foundation - Community meeting
  Ton Roosendaal will give an overview of past year's work on Blender and the plans for the future. Blender developers will attend as well, feedback from everyone is welcome!
• 3:30 - 5:00 PM: Blender Artist/Developer showcase and demos
  Artists and developers will give short demos of work they've done with Blender. Meet with many renowned artists! Everyone's welcome to show as well! Check contact info below.
• Note: BoF sessions are free to access, also without registration.

Exhibits Fast Forward. Monday 22 July, 3:45 PM

• New for this year, each exhibitor gets 40 seconds to present their work, we'll do our best to stand out and blend in!

Tradeshow exhibit, Tuesday 23 - Thursday 25 July

• Blender Foundation has a 10x20 feet booth (#102), very close to the entrance! Here we will demo Blender on four stations, show videos/tutorials, and just have a lot of fun meeting with everyone.
  Check below for free tradeshow tickets.

Open Source Panel, day/time T.B.A.

• We have been invited to be in a Panel with Disney/Pixar, Dreamworks, Sony Imageworks and ILM to discuss and feedback on the state of Open Source for 3D creation and development.

Animation Festival - Daytime selects

• The well known short Blender film Caminandes has been selected for Siggraph Animation festival. Makers of Caminandes will participate in the BoF Artist showcase as well.

Free Exhibits tickets

• As exhibitor we can give away free tickets for everyone who wants to see us and the tradeshow. Use this link to register and get a pass.

Help wanted & contact info

• We can always use artists with good general knowledge of Blender who like to help us demoing at the booth.
• Contact info, also for press and business appointments: foundation at blender org.

( читать по-русски | Russian translation )

Suddenly I’ve got a letter from Shuttleworth Foundation:

CONGRATULATIONS!

You have been nominated by Jonas Öberg to receive a Shuttleworth Foundation Flash Grant to work on your projects. … We tasked our Fellows to seek out and nominate an impressive change agent, who may not be able to concentrate on their brilliant idea yet. This grant is for the sum of $5,000 and will be awarded to you personally to bring that idea forward.

I was really shocked about this and honestly I would think it’s someone’s joke, if it would not mention name of Jonas Öberg, who I’m happy to know personally. In any case, the money are here now and I’m enormously thankful to Shuttleworth Foundation for such an amazing act of trust and of course to Jonas Öberg for recommending me.

What does it mean. It means that at least the next half of the year I won’t need to waste my efforts on doing commercial jobs to make my living. Instead I can use all my time to concentrate on my animation-related open-source activities. Consequences will follow.

Where the money will go. Considering the analysis given in my LGM report, it’s pretty logical that those money will go for Synfig development. I am going to put them for establishing the full-time development. It was mentioned that Synfig doesn’t have a “human resource gap” for that and I’m going to fill that gap by myself. Yes, that means I’m moving to Synfig as full-time developer.

This is not an easy decision, because the real full-time dedication requires sacrificing my other projects – at least for significant period. But talking about Morevna Project, let’s be honest – we have no resources to start the production of new episode in closest future. It’s not about money resources only, we have significant technological gaps that needs to be filled before. And the success of activities in Morevna is highly depend on the stability of situation in Synfig. So it’s not really a sacrifice – it’s the necessary investment into our future.

In fact, the decision of me moving to full-time into Synfig was already taken a weeks before today. We have discussed situation with Carlos López González and come to conclusion that I’m the only one who can make this step at the moment. Today everyone works on Synfig in their free time only. My goal is to show  how one full-time dedicated person can influence the development. This should allow to give an estimations of results for a certain amount of sponsorship, which is necessary for attracting an investors and thus establishing the stable funding. The stability of funding would allow to expand the count of full-time employed developers and when this happen I believe  my presence in the project will not be that crucial.

So, it is really important which results I will be able to show during this period. This is an awesome and exciting experiment, and thanks to the Shuttleworth Foundation it’s going to expand to the new scale. In the period of my full-time dedication I plan to make the process of development as transparent as possible. Most likely that will be done in the same way as we did for Morevna Project Demo – in the form of weekly reports. Also, in November 2013 I will publish a report, summarizing the results for the period.

Unfortunately, due to my current obligations I can’t move to full-time immediately – I need time to wrap up my current project and finish some tasks. Thus, my work on Synfig as full-time developer will start on 1st of August 2013. But June and July months will not be wasted! You probably remember another priority outlined in my LGM report? That’s it, as an investment into Synfig development, the part of the funding will be used for producing training DVD! (or whatever medium that will be – DVD looks so much outdated now). The main part of this work will be done by Nikolai Mamashev – he will record all the visuals and make the editing. My responsibility is the content planning, methodical assistance and general directing. And Julia Velkova is ready to give us a hand with translation into English and narration.

That’s my rough plan. Of course life can bring some corrections, but I think you got the general outline. Let’s together celebrate the beginning of the new phase and… back to work! ^__^

I am writing from CGTrader – we run a 3D model marketplace for artists and designers.

Since you have the attention of 3D designers, I wanted to let you know about a competition that could be of interest to them. We have just launched a 3D printing competition for 3D printable models – with some pretty cool prizes, including two 3D printers by Ultimaker, 3D printing of the winning model by 3D Print UK, gift cards from Sculpteo, Filaco, Stash, as well as an opportunity to sell designs in the world’s largest 3D printing store iMakr in London.

In order to participate, the designers just need to create 3D printable models in .STL format and upload them for sale or download to CGTrader. Further information on the competition is available here: http://www.cgtrader.com/challenges-and-competitions/3d-printing-competition-2013.