Keynote

You can’t not do the keynote. Especially when it’s Ton. The big news from this year is that Ton is officially stepping down as CEO, passing the torch over to Francesco Siddi.

Efforts to transfer the responsibilities started as early as 2019. This isn’t a big surprise, at least for me. Ton will still be in an advisory role. But having met Francesco last year and seen his work the past couple years, I have faith in how things will continue.

Inside Blue Zoo’s R&D: Building a Digital-First Toolkit in Blender

A London-based animation studio (also in Utah, where I’m from!)

import bpy: modern add-on development

This is “Blender add-on development for dummies” by the amazing Sybren. If you’ve followed his “Scripting for Artists” tutorial series from a while back, this is quite similar. But if you’d like the basics to get started, this is a great free follow-along.

Love, Death, Robots and a little of Blender

I usually avoid the “big businesses flexing Blender” type of talks since they tend to be more portfolio-esque, but this has some great backgrounds and insights regarding utilizing Blender in the conceptual and art processes, even when the final result is to look more 2D than 3D.

The Optimization Iceberg - Making 3D run on any device

This is more about running 3D on mobile devices like phones and whatnot. But if you want to optimize your Blender scenes, try to give it a listen. It overviews optimization basics. So you can even apply some of this methodology to your own Blender scenes: baking lighting, simplifying or culling geometry, simpler lamp types, reducing texture sizes, texture packing, etc.

Bringing Real Cameras to Cycles

Ever wanted photorealistic, true-to-life camera lenses? Custom camera lenses has been in development for Cycles. I have been following this on the Blender repository, but this is a great summary and demonstration in one place.

Extensions are Coming: Rethinking Add-on Development by Unlocking Python’s Full Potential

Jan-Hendrik and Brady give an amazing talk on add-on extension development. It’s more on the advanced side of things, but full of useful tips. It gives great examples of utilizing GitHub Actions for add-on testing and building.

It’s a bit of a plug because he mentions my talk:

Automated Add-on Extension Testing

Because I was scheduled to speak this year! Sadly my talk got cancelled (screenshot in case you don’t believe me) due to my getting sick a couple days before my flight.

Since Brady’s talk mentions mine and my slides, I recorded myself so others can find it. It has a beginner’s introduction to scripted unit testing, and code examples. Resources are linked in the video description.

Have a great week!