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Blender Conference 2010, 29-30-31 october in Amsterdam Posted: 20 Apr 2010 08:41 PM PDT Blender.org announced Blender Conference 2010, 29-30-31 october in Amsterdam " The 9th annual Blender Conference will be again in Amsterdam, and again we have (tentatively) hold of the former 19th century court building "De Balie". This grand cafe / theatre / cinema is right in the center of Amsterdam, on the Leidseplein, the heart of Amsterdam's music, theatre and clubbing nightlife. In De Balie we will get a cinema/theatre with 160 seats, the smaller "Salon" with 80 seats, and we'll rent a third room with 60 seats, and sufficient informal space to meet, relax and lunch in our own grand cafe. The entire venue has free Wifi. De Balie offers great multi-camera streaming services, and stores most talks on their servers for later viewing. New in Blender Conference 2010 For the 2010 edition, based on visitor feedback, we will try a couple of new things: 1) More developers should visit the Conference: each person with svn write access to the official release can get free Conference tickets! If you successfully had 2 or more patches applied, you can get a free ticket too. 2) A room for meetings on special or regional topics. For example, for Spanish or German user groups, or for Film / Compositing enthusiasts, or for a Physics developer sprint. The conference venue has a third permanent room (cinema setup) for us, this will get a three-day schedule, open for anyone to arrange sessions (no extra fee required). 3) Market place: we will reserve a couple of tables, each with a Linux workstation and 26 inch display, for companies or studios or publishers or whomever to present their work or business. Such tables will be available for an additional fee of 250 euro per day, workstation+screen for 100 per day. The market will be saturday and sunday. 4) Sponsors: a growing conference makes it more expensive, and harder to use volunteers as well. Last year's conference costed about 26,000 euro, of which only 12,000 was covered by conference ticket sales. Blender Foundation can keep sponsoring the conference with 10k per year, but another sponsor would be welcome! Call for papers We invite Blender developers, artists, educators, professionals, scientists, to present work they've completed with Blender, to show great new ideas for Blender or propose to do round-table discussions, workshops, demos or courses. You can send proposals to email address foundation at blender.org until august 15th 2010. Google map to De Balie The conference venue is 20-25 minutes walk from the central railway station. Alternatively you can take Tram lines 1 2 or 5 too (exit Leidseplein). Suzanne Award / Animation Festival "De Balie" has a real cinema with excellent projection facilities. We seek submissions this year to assemble a great 90 minute Short Film festival, which will run friday evening. The quality of submissions in 2009 was that high, that the venue considers to add the festival screening in their program, for three days and with 5 screenings. Submission deadlines and details will be announced later. Parallel sessions/conferences In past years we've had parallel sessions organized by Blender community members in many cities world wide. If you like to organize a day (or two), contact foundation at blender org! Contact ton at blender.org for further inquiries! " Related links: blender.org

Mental Mill 1.1 Posted: 20 Apr 2010 07:56 PM PDT mental mill SE is a complete visual development environment that allows users to quickly assemble complex shader graphs from the provided library of shaders and tweak the parameters, and includes powerful debugging capabilities and shader authoring features for the MetaSL™ shading language. While shaders can be read natively in Autodesk® 3ds Max® and Autodesk® 3ds Max® Design 2010 & 2011, and mental ray® 3.8, mental mill also provides exporters to targeted DCC and CAD software including Autodesk® 3ds Max®, Autodesk® Maya® and Autodesk® Softimage®, Dassault Systémes CATIA®, and customizable back-end plug-ins for HLSL, GLSL, and CgFX. What is new in version 1.1? MetaSL 1.1 support Among the host of updates in the 1.1 release is support for new features introduced by the MetaSL 1.1 shading language, including the Material Definition. A new concept to help you create optimized material shaders, the Material Definition bundles the most fundamental shading characteristics of a shader in one single node. A Material Definition has predefined material components to which the user can link a shader node or an entire shader graph. These material components represent a certain aspect of a material, such as the surface shader or a surface BSDF. Organizing the shader in smaller sub-graphs optimizes the material definition for export to different target rendering platforms. Graph View workflow The Graph View workflow is significantly improved by a wide variety of enhancements including parameter grouping, intuitive node sizing, re-ordering of Phenomenon parameters, reduction of wire clutter, parameter selection, highlighting of compatible attachments and instant parameter renaming. Parameter Editor The parameter editor is upgraded by the addition of three-state edit controls, the ability to easily edit structure and array items, and the ability to group parameters. Toolbox and Shader Manager Recognizing that the toolbox is a critical component in the mental mill workflow, a number of important improvements have been introduced, including a new set of filters for hiding default shader classes, built-in shaders, and Phenomena and shaders that can be stored outside of the default path. In addition, it is now possible to work with search results only. A new Shader Manager tool has been introduced. The shader manager provides users with the ability to search the Toolbox for shaders or locate shader files in which the shaders are defined. The shader manager facilitates managing the shader Toolbox as users can drag and drop search results onto the graph view or into other toolbox folders. Predefined Shaders and Phenomena mental mill SE 1.1 Beta comes with an extended set of shaders and example Phenomena, including examples of the new Material Definition. Participate in the Standard Edition 1.1 Beta program mental mill SE 1.1 Beta is free. The public beta program features a publicly accessible forum for beta user support and feedback to mental images. To participate and gain access to Beta builds please register in the mental mill Forum and download mental mill Standard Edition 1.1 Beta. More information and Download ! Related links: mentalimages.com

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