This weekend I attended the first NYC Blender conference at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn. The two day conference brought together some of the best Blender artists on the East Coast. For those that don’t know, Blender is free open source 3D animation program that can be used for everything from modeling and animating, to creating interactive 3D applications. Blender is available on all the major operating systems and is similar in scope and depth to other high-end 3D software such as Softimage|XSI, Cinema 4D, 3d Studio Max and Maya.
The breakout sessions were amazing. There were presentations on character modeling and animation, as well as introductory lessons for the newbies like myself. I had only played around with Blender slightly and didn’t realize that it was truly comparable to the major commercial 3d packages. It has a wide array of tools and is extremely customizable. I am now actually considering using Blender as the tool of choice for the 3d animation class the I am proposing at LaGuardia. I figure that our students would greatly benefit from exposure to 3d design, and especially without having to incur the cost another expensive commercial software application.
The International Blender conference took place earlier this week in Amsterdam and there was no way that I could attend. Fortunately a group of like minded digital professionals and 3d artists must have been in the same position and decided to put something together in New York. This was great because I had been waiting for awhile to attend a conference like this one. I made some good contacts at the conference and learned that some of the attendees are starting a NYC Blender User’s Group. If this conference was any indication it looks like the NYC Blender group is gonna be good.
