NYC Blender Conference

Today I took the DeCamp in town and the A train to the Polytechnic University in Brooklyn to attend the NYC Blender Conference. I only have one photo, since the batteries of my camera were drained and the spare ones not charged. But it happens to be of the start of the talk I found one of the most interesting. In the middle you see Nick Porcaro, one of the organizers. That talk by Jonathan Williamson actually was not really Blender specific, but dealt with how to build heads. And he builds them real fast and they look great.

Geek alert: skip this paragraph if not into 3D. He insisted on using only quads (polygons with 4 vertices or points) because they subdivide better. I was actually really happy when subdivision surfaces became feasible to work with so that whole terrible NURBS stitching of rectangular patches of quads was over. But he had a point in having his edge loops follow the lines where muscles would be, and how that makes for an easier to adjust mesh.

There were a lot of interesting people there to talk to, like Elephants Dream director Bassam Kurdali. Learned a lot about blender as well, even build a head. A really ugly one. Wish I had time to attend tomorrows sessions as well. And maybe even make the head look good. Did get answers to questions I had, albeit not always the ones I hoped for (it is indeed not possible to animate parameters in the material nodes editor, darn). Had a great day!