Happy 2009! (^)

but.. what was 2008 all about? in a few words…

Plumíferos
(February/March)
Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Back in February I re-started to work on this movie again, although it was supposed to be finished by 2007, nowadays I’ve been told that its almost in the same state than when we stopped working on it in October that year. (we as in pixel-workers

An old frame from Plumiferos, back in 2007.

At the start, Tanda and I worked much faster than before, due to the lack of Directors mostly, since there was nobody to tell us what/how to do, so we were in a: “Does it looks pretty?, OK, next shot then” attitude. It incredibly speeds things up, but you have to be aware that shots can look a lot more different from each other now, since there is no one looking everything from the outside, having the big picture instead of focused working on just this or that shot.

Anyway, March was my last month working on Plumiferos, but there was another project in the making, and guess what.. with Blender!

Apricot Open Game Project: Yo Frankie!
(April/August)
Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Apricot Team!, /me drops a tear :')

Yo Frankie! Open Game Project

Got to fly to Amsterdam! to the Blender Institute precisely, dream came true!
The project was already started when I got there, but we found our ways with Chris Plush (blengine) and Campbell Barton (ideasman_42) to leave all the old concepts behind and start all over again, we ended up gliding and throwing innocent animals with the Blender Game Engine!, big joy for lot of people, big surprise for some, and a huge experience for me! :c

Final, Yo Frankie!, a completely free videogame, in all senses.
.pacman http://www.yofrankie.org

Europe!
(April/November)

Is amazing how many people is interested in learning, showing off, and working with Blender and other free softwares in Europe!, I would love something like that happening here in America (the continent not the country =)

Some events here and there made me spend lot of time in airports.

Spain:
Barcelona, Blendiberia.
Gijón, Blender and Blender Game Engine Course.

Denmark:
Aalborg, Game Development Camp.

Norway:
Trondheim, Blender Course at the University (NTNU).

the Netherlands:
Amsterdam, help and teaching in an animation project, MediaLab Amsterdam.
Amsterdam, Blender Conference.
Utrecht, NLGD.

Suiza:
Aubonne, Colaboration on an animation project for RGBProd.

I had to let some invitations left, next time I gotta go to Toulouse and Portugal to say Hi and blend something of course! (B)

Blender 2.46 / 2.47 / 2.48 / 2.48a

Blender 2.46, 2.47, 2.48 and 2.48a

Blender also got its upgrades during 2008, starting with 2.46: Bunny Release, thanks to Big Buck Bunny, and like in every big release, there was a bugfix version after, 2.47. And to commemorate the additions to Blender during Yo Frankie!, there was a 2.48 release, with all kind of new features, mostly Game Engine stuff and OpenGL visualization, however due to a little big bug in Python that sneaked into the release, a 2.48a version was released right after.

That’s it! was just a few words.. rolais
I’ve been also working these days on some other things, a daylight version of Frakas Dream scene (which I documented and have almost all written already in a kinda Making Of article, will upload a PDF and HTML version as soon as I finish it, but it is almost all written and some screenshots too), and also I’ve been making some tests with the Sculpt tool (an ugly guy but will blog about it soon too, I was gonna blog about it today but decided to talk about the past year first).

Cheers!

Pablo