I've been working with Blender for almost seven years now, with 3D in general for almost fifteen, and with coding, imaging and animation for almost twenty-five. I've been active in developing for Blender and working with the Foundation since it became Open Source five years ago. Despite that, until this year I had never talked face to face with even one of the tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of Blender artists, coders or contributors from around the world.

SIGGRAPH 2007 is this years' edition of the annual world-wide convention of graphics and animation technologies. The convention centers around a massive three day trade show where everyone from household names like Pixar, Google and Disney recruit and evangelize, to lesser-known niche application touting their new technologies like Luxology and MASSIVE software. There are also classes, lectures, ironman animation challenges, get-togethers, dinners, parties and demonstrations of wild new technologies.

San Diego

Early!Joy and I flew out to San Diego two days before any conference activities were scheduled, so I actually got to see a bit of the West Coast. San Diego is a neat little city, and the Gaslamp quarter where we stayed was very cool. We went up the coast a bit to La Jolla (that's pronounce "La Hoya" for you gringos) which was beautiful and quite amazing. It's a rocky coastal area frequented by scuba divers, kayakers, snorkelers and harbor seals. It's also home to hundreds of thousands of tiny little hermit crabs, fish, anemones, rock crabs and, of course, gulls. As far as I've seen, there is nothing like it on the East Coast. You could just walk out on the rocks and hang out with the wildlife all day if you wanted. No graffiti or litter. La Jolla was probably my favorite thing about being in California.

We went a couple of other places (like Torrey Pines State Park and Del Mar), but the rest of the time I was at the conference. Adventure!Joy saw a lot more of the area than I did: San Diego Zoo, Coronado, Point Loma, several of the beaches. She also got in a gang fight in Tijuana! I warned her about wearing tank tops and showing off all of her Spanish language prison tattoos, but she's never been one to take advice from me...

SIGGRAPH 2007

The conference itself, which is where I spent most of the day Monday through Wednesday, was a blast. The Blender Foundation had a small presence at this year's tradeshow: two workstations at a kiosk in the Khronos booth. We were on the "lame" side of the floor, next to Houdini, and pretty far away from the heavy hitters like Autodesk and Pixar. That said, we still saw a lot of traffic.

People I met there were: Ton (of course), Joe Eagar (joeedh, developer) [edit -- fixed Joe's name; sorry dude], Bassam (slikdigit, animator, who I'd met before), Tony Mullen (bugman_2000, Introducing Character Animation with Blender author), Chris Want (cwant, developer), Lee Salvemini (LohnS, artist), Tim Formica (reporting for Blendernation.com) and Jason van Gumptser (fweeb, of Hand Turkey Studios). Of course, there were many more Blender folks at the Birds of a Feather meeting and stopping by the kiosk from time to time, but these were the people who were there really putting in "Blender Foundation" time.

Ton brought a small pile of The Essential Blender books to sell, but those were gone within about twenty minutes on the first day. I was asked to sign a few, which was pretty weird, because I'm just this guy, you know? With all the requests we had at the kiosk throughout the week, I think we could have sold at least a hundred of them if Ton had had space to bring them along.

For the most part, it was myself, Ton, Joe and Bassam hanging around the kiosk and doing demonstrations. I'm sure that other people pitched in from time to time when I was off eating or something, but I think we made up the majority of the crew. Of course, Ton didn't really demonstrate the software so much as he enthusiastically grabbed people who were giving us even the slightest bit of attention as they walked by and got them interested for real. Honestly, though most people were already quite interested in what we were doing.

Some had seen Blender before, and a handful had used it. Ton would give them the song and dance, do the person-to-person stuff, then hand them off to one of us for the actual demonstration. Generally, people wanted to see the modeling workflow and the character animation tools. I also had fun showing the sculpt modeling tools, the fluid and rigid body simulators and the compositor. Some of the people kept saying "And this is free?!"

That was the best part, really. Most people had a hard time believing the capabilities of something they had probably thought of as a "crappy shareware program," if they ever thought of it at all. Ton pointed out to us that the smaller 3D packages like Truespace, etc., were dying quickly. I have no doubt that it's in large part due to the advances Blender has made in the last few years.

I also received a lot of great feedback about The Essential Blender. A number of people had worked through it and said how much it helped them. As I've noted before, while the book was based on contributions from a number of people, in the end it was my name on the cover and if it sucked... well, it was my name on the cover. The word is, though, that it doesn't suck. In fact, quite the opposite, which makes me happy. I mean, yeah, I'm happy for myself that it turned out well, but I'm even happier for the large community of people who want to learn 3D, and Blender specifically, but who didn't want to wade through a million online resources, looking for the gem in the turd pile (or the turd in the gem pile, if that's your bag).

I had dinners and drinks with a number of people, many of them previously mentioned in this post. Crusty rice one night with cwant, slikdigit and Ton; beers and appetizers with a whole giant crew of Blender monkeys, where it was observed that "Americans are reaaaalllly loud when they're drunk. But not 'manly' loud. It's like a bunch of twelve year old girls." Which: true. Also, I had dinner with several writers (including Tony Mullen) from Wiley/Sybex, and learned some interesting tidbits about different aspects of the industry. There were Maya and MAX people at the dinner, but have no fear: Blender got respect.

There were a few glitches. The computers that the Foundation had rented were naked HP Windows XP boxes, with default video drivers. That didn't play well with Blender, but we got it fixed. Also, due to Ton being unbelievably busy this past year (he's hiring a producer next year to take the pressure off and let him focus on the technical stuff) there was no updated set of demonstration files, so we spent the whole show building up a better set of demos. Next year, we'll be more prepared.

Odds and Ends

Lee and I checked out the Emerging Technologies show, which had bleeding edge graphics and imaging tech. Two things that stood out for me were: 1) a little booth into which you could put your arms (or your hat, or whatever), and have them appear in a virtual space along with a spring-loaded jack-in-the-box on a screen behind the setup. Whatever you made your arms/hands do in the booth area, their virtual counterparts would also do. The cool thing was that you could make your virtual limbs interact with the jack-in-the-box on the display, smacking the thing the around or abusing it in any manner you saw fit. One neat aspect of this, and I experienced this same effect at Soarin' in Disneyworld, is that when you swing your "hand" at the thing in virtual space and hit it, you kind of feel it connect. There is no real force feedback, but if you're mentally dialed into the sim, you feel it, just because you expect to.

And 2) a 3D display. It was the size of a larger big-screen TV, but it was in 3D. Nothing fancy, no goggles. Just 3D. Pretty wild.

All in all, it was a great trip. We got to go to a neat city, see some cool sights and meet some interesting people. Will I go next year? Well, the trip was expensive, and next year's conference is in LA, which is a big strike against it in my book. Hopefully, though, I'll have something new to show, either BlenderPeople enhancements or a new book. We'll see.