festival 2008

This is the complete video made to announce the 2008 Blender Conference Animation Festival.

You can find the nominated/viewed works from the festival here.
The videos of the presentations can be found here.

A personal message.

This year I had planned to do something very simple, by myself because I had very little time to prepare, and there was a record number of submitted videos. Just for fun I had a look at Broken's new volumetric stuff in the simphysics branch. And suddenly got Daniel (zanqdo) offering me help. Which was great!

And as expected one thing lead to another. The big downside to using an unfinished branch of blender was that it wasn't optimised yet, and we found a nr of serious bugs. So, we had broken fix the bugs... Which is amazing! Having a coder fix your bugs, just because you're helping test his new features. And remember "very little time, very last minute". So once we had something that worked, we had to render.

The light cache didn't work yet... so it was a bit slow... Well depending on your system. On my old laptop with 1 core... a frame took 30 minutes! On the Blender Institute 8 core monster it took less than a minute! Because of the rendertimes we were unable to do a test render of the entire thing, so the timing/camera work is a bit off.

A bunch of people (check the credits below) from the community stepped up and offered rendering help. Without them it would have been impossible to complete the project! Once again the Blender Community comes through! We ended up having people render in Canada, Netherlands, Finland, Costa Rica, Saudi Arabia... and more...

When I told the people at the conference about our render woes, I got offers of help for future projects as well. People with multi core monster computers & renderfarms. You guys are all way too nice!

Thank you everyone for helping, offering help, and putting up with us!
Dolf

Credits

Blender Volumetric code guru: Matt Ebb (broken)
Cloud creation/lighting/render wrangler: Daniel Salazar (zanqdo)
Sound design: Chris Cherret

Rendermonkeys!