LINUX.CONF.AU OPEN DAY

Blender was one of the forty or so projects that were exhibiting at the Linux.conf.au open day, held at the University of New South Wales in a nice glass covered pavilion in a courtyard. With me was Hassan, a Blender user and BlenderNation reader who very kindly offered to help out on the day, and also fellow ex-Elephants Dream artist Lee, who made the trip up from Adelaide.

Armed with a Blender-logo-on-white cube for signage that I’d fashioned out of pasteboard that morning, we had two of our laptops out on the desk, which was quite popular, being the foremost one in the pavilion that everyone saw as they were entering. There was always a small crowd gathered around watching Elephants Dream on repeat play, which many of them had seen before or heard of, and a few gleefully trying out the upcoming Sculpt Mode, by defacing a work-in-progress head model of mine.

The day was lots of fun, and according to the official stats, over 700 people came along, with about 400 attendees from the general public (i.e. who weren’t already at the conference), ranging from little kids to grandparents. We chatted with a few interesting people throughout the day, including someone that Lee and Hassan talked with from the National Gallery of Victoria, who was interested in using Blender for their new media productions. Unfortunately I had to leave early, but Lee and Hassan stayed around until the end, running into blenderartists.org member ‘jumpy-monkey’ who also dropped by.

All in all it was a fun day, if only just to hang out with a couple of other blenderheads. Sydney’s a big city, but I’m not really aware of many Blender users that are living around here (though I suspect there are plenty more in hiding). Perhaps we’ll have to organise more events in the forms of social gatherings or a revived Australian Blender mini-conf to draw you all out of the woodwork!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 22nd, 2007 at 3:34 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous Debris, Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.