Blender Course in Venezuela!

Lets summarize what my last few months have been about:

July 15th: Just arrived from Amsterdam!, wohoo! vacations until August 13th.
August 13-25th: Venezuela!, flew together with Claudio Andaur (malefico) and Daniel Salazar (ZanQdo) to San Cristóbal (Táchira) for a Blender Advanced Course, great experience! (which included my right foot growing 200% or so, full of “stuff” inside, thanks to a mosquito or something my body never handled before =/ )

Our humble Patagonian Bconf! yeah we were 4!

Spreading Blender on the southernmost region of America

All this time has been great Blender-Socially speaking, got to meet with some patagonian Blenderheads (from Patagonia region, the extreme south of America – the continent not the country, where I live).

We even had our humble “1st Patagonian Blender Conference” ever!, yeah well just 4 patagonian guys gathered together at home with my computer + 2 laptops, where we had quick workshops and showed off some works of our own, plus a latter pizza+beer , enough for a conference!

During my stay at Río Grande, I also got the chance to give a talk about Blender and Open Content at the university, it was great! I see many Blenderheads coming from that direction thanks to Pablo Lizardo for the idea/organizing it!

Up: Pablo Lizardo holding a workshop! Facu listening carefully. Down: (couple of) Beer at "Belfast" an Irish pub here at my town.

Back to Europe!

Yep! I’m crossing the Atlantic for the second time on this year, (sort-of) schedule at the moment:

• October 22nd: Arrive to Amsterdam, meet the Durian team and get some delicious IJ beers!
• October 23/24/25 : Blender Conference Amsterdam 2009!, this year I will be holding a workshop on Sunday at 13:30, in the Salon room.
• October 26th – November 5th: Italian Alps! will be doing some freelance work on Brunico, hope to blogpost from there !
• November 6/7 : Blendiberia 2009!, the Spaniard Blender Conference in Murcia, Spain. Will be holding a workshop about Blender 2.5x.
• November 9/10: Blender courses in Murcia, Spain. More info here. (Spanish)
• November 11st – Who knows until when!: back to lovely Aubonne, Switzerland, more freelance animation work for RGB Prod, awesome


Blender Conference 2009!

So that’s my schedule so far! I’m glad to be busy again on the Blender road, will be doing my best to close this year as the greatest one so far in a long time! With a lot of traveling and Venom’s Lab!, I’m very happy with how it goes until now, and it can only get better!

Cheers!
Pablo

Will post about this topics later, now the reason of this post.

Sorry for the short post, but this way I don’t spend hours on each one and can update more often!, I plan to release more characters/scenes as Creative Commons soon, free the sources! unleash the happiness of sharing!

That’s it, have fun! (and post your changes if you make some!)
Pablo.

But.. what was 2009 about?, here is a quick overview:

January

Vacations! spent a good time with my family here in Patagonia, first on the south, El Calafate, then went up to the north, through El Bolsón, Bariloche, and surroundings.

February

Time to get back to work!, on Feb 14th I was taking a loooong flight from South South very South America to Scandinavia: Rio Gallegos > Buenos Aires > Amsterdam > Trondheim, Norway. To work on a Blender Game Engine project, the goal was to re-create the “old n’ epically medieval” NTNU building, had to model/texture the entire thing in 2 weeks! was awesome a good skill raiser with such short deadline =)

March-April

Got to fly to Switzerland to meet the RGB Prod crew, whom I joined once again to work on some ads for BOSCH Rexroth New Ingenia and JPM Guides.

May-June

Open Movie Workshop DVD Training Venom’s Lab!, wohoo!, 2 months in Amsterdam got a 4hs Training DVD as result, dream come true!

July

First weeks of July got me packing and sending DVDs all over the world from the Blender e-shop, while at this I took a few days off to give the Blender Store a new skin!, not perfect but definitely more organized, thanks to some thinking together with Ton, I’m glad to have helped the Blender Foundation on this, this thing wasn’t updated since years!.

Enough Europe, on July 15th I was flying back home, Patagonia Argentina.

August

Once at home, got the chance to fly over to San Cristobal, Venezuela! for 10 days, to hold an Advanced Blender Course, big Blender community is getting built there! it was really a great experience.

September

Back at home, some relaxed family time, always blending of course! got some wips continued (evil tease)..

October

Back to Europe!, first to Amsterdam to present Venom’s Lab! on the Blender Conference 2009: AWESOME! , got to meet the Durian team on the Blender Institute: UBER AWESOME!

November

More travelling!, Argentina > the Netherlands > Italy > Spain > Switzerland . First had to go to Brunico, Italy, to work as freelance on an iPhone application project, had to model/texture/rig a Skier and animate him, great experience, really good training! (ok and good food too ), then got to fly to Murcia, Spain, for Blendiberia 2009!, where I held a talk about Blender 2.5, and gave a 2 days Blender course as well. Finally flew to Switzerland for more freelance work on RGB Prod studio, in lovely Aubonne.

December

Back home for holidays!, yay!

2010?

Don’t know yet, more Blender for sure!, Fun, Courses, mmmh..maybe a Venom’s Lab! Vol 2 for Blender 2.6 ?

Share your thoughts!,
Cheers and have a grrrrrrreat 2010!
Pablo

My involvement on this project included character design (based on client requirements, basically an Optimus Prime lookalike character based on the watch they make), storyboard drawing and 3d OGL crappymatic, then moved on to model tweaking and materials/lighting, and finally some compositing for the first few shots and render tests. The rest (and most) of the work is made by my good friend Olivier Amrein.

The software toolkit for this project included Blender 2.49b, Inkscape, Brender (a renderfarm manager made by Olivier), and After Effects.

Back to Europe on February!

Vacations are over, time to work!, will be flying to Switzerland to continue working at RGB Prod, mostly on animation ads, hopefully there is some character animation involved, I’m eager to do that since a while!.

So that’s it for me in Europe the next few months at least, dunno what comes next (ok have something in mind but is mostly hopes.. stay tunned! )..

Plumiferos to be premiered?

Looks like! There are even new (and not that new) images/videos of it floating around on the interwebs, it is supposed to be premiered on cinemas (in Argentina at least) on February 18th, too bad I won’t be here to watch it , so will have to wait for the DVD to see what the new team did with what I left back in 2007. Will be fun

That’s all folks!,
Pablo

Aloha!, great news over here, new character released!
(and he is as free as he can be, under the Creative Commons Attribute License)

BTW, I’m in Switzerland!, working at RGB Prod on a Victorinox project, lots of compositing I’m doing these days, hope to post the results here soon.. along with some *awesome* news I have to share

That’s all folks, take care!
Pablo