Report on Blender Conference Kingsport, Tennessee

August 2 & 3, 2008

Well we did it! The first Tennessee Blender Conference in Kingsport was a great success thanks to all the wonderful presentations and donations from the Blender community and the Kingsport Art Guild. Thank you to Martha Beverly and Beth Estep for all their help at the Renaissance Center. I would also like to send a special thanks to Blender Nation for publishing notice of this event, and Ton Roosendaal, for his encouragement, publicity on the www.blender.org site, and the donation of a huge box of fantastic door prizes for the participants.

The Friday evening pre-conference activities started with a Bluegrass Music Concert downtown, Kingsport, with the band, “Rough Edges.”

Saturday was our big day with set up at 8:30 am and starting at 9:00 am with introductions, and a sociometric activity using a spectrogram to describe the groups comfort level with Blender on one axis and Art on the other axis.

George Bowen from Florence Alabama, video taped most of the presentations and is working to get those up on the internet for anyone who was unable to attend the conference.

Trey Bowen, from Florence, Alabama, presented a very informative demonstration on using the node editor for both materials and for compositing. He included examples of some of the pitfalls as well to help those of us who are new to the node editor.

Claas Kuhnen, of Kendall College of Art and Design, presented on the topic of Blender in the Academic Environment. He pointed out some of the misconceptions, that the general public has about open source software, and how to counter them.

We stayed together for a lunch of pizza provided by the Italian Village restaurant, Greek salads, shrimp, mushroom, and broccoli quiche, and Key Lime pie.

Byron Kindig of Kingsport gave a demonstration of the UV editor. This demonstration started with a simple character mesh, adding seams, unwrapping, rearranging the UV islands and the use of pinning, the paint tools and texture painting mode.

Sam Brubaker of Ashville, North Carolina, then demonstrated how to use Blender’s video sequencer. He highlighted some of the features and effects that are possible with this tool as well as some of the less known viewing options such as the chroma vectorscope, and the Luma Waveform.

Matt Runion presented a very detailed demo on the use of the Hair particle system, even including files for the participant to follow along with him. This presentation can be found at his website http://www.bigpony.com/art/index.php .

Claas Kuhnen gave another talk on the subject of the use of Blender in Industrial design and jewelry design. He gave a demonstration of many new and rarely used modeling tools, before we broke for the day.

After a two hour break for dinner, most of the participants along with family members reassembled downtown for the Sculpture Walk tour, led by Ann Vachon of the Kingsport Arts Council.

Sam Brubaker, took the opportunity to physically interact with the art.

Kneeling Communications Tower

By the end of the tour the sun had set and it was starting to cool down from the near record heat. We took the opportunity to gather at Discovery Ice Cream, who had also provided a door prize of a gift card. They have the only robot in Kingsport that has the ability to serve ice cream to the customers.

We all had a great opportunity to chat, eat ice cream and get to know one another better.

Sunday morning we started again at 9:00 am with another presentation by Claas Kuhnen on the use of the displacement modifier as well as creative ways to light a scene.

Byron Kindig gave a talk on setting up a work station for comfort and ergonomics. He also demonstrated some gentle stretching techniques for alleviating muscle stress.

Sam Brubaker gave another talk on Creative Thinking with Blender and explained some of the principles of design that he uses in his Web Comic Us the Robots at www.ustherobots.com .

We ended by repeating the spectrogram exercise to acknowledge how we had added to our knowledge during the conference and with a short panel discussion where the presenters were asked for pointers on improving our projects and on what we might want to do next year. We had a short time for a group photo before saying goodbye to new and old friends.

To all who came to Kingsport, this first week end in August, I thank you. You all made this conference a great success.

Byron Kindig

Most photos, courtesy of Claas Kuhnen