Swim Merlin Swim! and Fraka! in magazines!

Howdy! ufff more than a month without updating..  ok.. let’s talk a bit about how things were in this time.

After some problems with the argentinean post system (surprise!), I finally have PSD Mag in my hands!, It even comes with 2 CD’s!

The image appears in 7 pages (!), including the frontpage, and printed in 2 CD ROM’s. Swim Merlin Swim! en optic format
To be honest I *never* imagined something like this, I’m really happy/shocked with this.

Following this, now Fraka! just appears in another magazine, this time is GoMotion Magazine, wich is about Animation and 3D only.

Here below an screenshot of the article already edited and ready to hit the streets. While I wait for the printed version to travel here

Festival of VideoGames NLGD

On the other side, also during 19/20th June, the NLGD! festival of VideoGames wich occurs annualy in Utrecht, Netherlands. Where people and companys get together to see how the “videogamer-ers” industry is doing in Europe.

Utrecht is beautyful!, just 20min train from the Amstel station in Amsterdam, at first sight is very similar to Amsterdam, but you can see how old it is, it has this awesome church! ghotic style veeery nice, it started building somewhere in 1300 , and is the taller old tower in all the Netherlands.

Our Stand was just in front of Nokia’s, I almost almost win a N81! I finished 2nd, and then 3rd in a racing cars game . At one side we had Autodesk showing up Maya and Max, and on the other side the Nintendo DS guys. A lot of interesting projects around, and a lot of people interested in our game! and Blender, people couldn’t believe this was made with totally free and open software and also Open Content (like Big Buck Bunny and Apricot). And, like every big event, it finished with people drinking everything from the bar, in my case it was Corona (yep Corona!: )

Blendiberia 2008 in Barcelona!

Just like you read it! For the very first time I could assist to the 6th Blender Annual Conference for spanish talking users, this year it took place in Barcelona, Spain.

I’d never expected to go Blendiberia in this travel, and I’m glad to say that this was one of the greatest travels I made!. I met some Blender celebrities like Klópes or the big Javier Belanche (yep, this guy that made the Guia Rapida) himself!, I stayed in Carlos (8tintin)‘s home, and went to the Pepe School Land, the animation school by Daniel Martinez Lara!, wich by the way I didn’t see in sunday so from here I send you a big tackle-hug!
The videos from his great talk are in 3DPoder. Click here.
I met a lot of people that I only knew from the internet, and also met a lof of new people, new blenderheads and other people from other software feeling like migrating to blender, of course I was there to convince people like an evil marketing guy!

But this was not a vacation travel only! (ok, yes, it was : ), I had to pay the trip somehow! So I started to prepare my talk for Saturday afternoon, titled “A Plumifero in Amsterdam“.

The idea was to give this “A Plumifero in Amsterdam” talk and share the other Apricot talk with Pablo Martin (Caedes), but he didn’t travel Barcelona so I had to give the 2 entire talks, luckily the two talks were one next to each other so I could mix them, making it easier to cover the 2 hours of talking (actually too easy, they had to tell me that my time was gone!), I was happily showing the characters and the new GLSL previsualization goodies in Blender.

The day after, Sunday morning, was time for 8tintin to present the new features in Blender 2.46, but there was a last moment issue, and it was time for the rescue team to save the conference, “guys, Carlos can’t give the talk, you think you could…” microphone in hand.. “ook let’s do it!”. Showtime for the rescue team: Klopes (also known as Carlos López), Mars Attacks (Belanche, remember me his nicks!), and me.

We ended up giving a quick tutorial-tour through the new particle system, Sculpt/multires, and even soft raytraced shadows!

Once the Blendiberia was finished, we went to a nice restaurant close by, they fill the table with all kind of food!, uff..

What better way to end this fantastic weekend?, I was just in time to see the final between Spain – Germany for the eurocope, and they won!, so I enjoyed the celebrations really close. Sharing some beers with Jandro, Klópes, and 8tintin.

Apricot Open Game

Uff this blogpost is getting huge!, ok, making the long story short:

In Apricot, we released a playable demo (prototype style), for people to test it, and they did, really well by the way! a lot of detailed feedback that help us a lot, in wich we are basing our tests now to release a new demo soon more complete and stable, that’s how Open Source works!

A lot of controversy just because we released for BGE (Blender Game Engine) only, but is just more faster and more accessible for us artists, perhaps the Crystal Space guys will release something later this week, that’s the idea, but is much more complex than just opening a blend file and press “P”.

This deserves a separate blogpost just for this, wich I will do soon. You can always be up to date visiting our project’s site: apricot.blender.org

Anyway, that’s all folks! , what a long blogpost!, I owe it after long time (hope to not to take it as an excuse for non updating soon).

En fin, eso es todo amigos! , que post mas largo!, lo debía después de tanto tiempo (espero no tomarlo como excusa para no escribir por un mes o más..).

Hugs!
venomgfx