Looking Back on BCON

Here’s all my thoughts on BCON, my experience, and would I recommend it to others.

I had little sleep for the two nights of the conference. It wasn’t even for a fun reason: my hotel didn’t have a great bed. So I ended up skipping the evening socials or leaving early, despite my wanting to network for longer.

I had moments of a second wind. But if you saw me during the conference and I seemed really tired…that’s why.

“How did you get to present?”

Honestly, I wish I knew. But I’ll list a few factors that likely played a part:

Portfolio. My presentation and workshop highlights my most recent work: add-ons, artworks, my animated short. There was no getting around it. If the quality was bad, it simply wouldn’t have been worth presenting.

Street cred. I currently work at DreamWorks. You may not have known that; I’ll explain why. For anyone advancing their career, simply working at a big company does wonders. You learn a lot, absolutely.

Networking dramatically improves too. Before my working at DreamWorks, a website moderator paid minimal attention to my videos, artworks and add-ons. But after I mentioned my job once, this moderator starts talking me up to others: “Oh absolutely, I’ll share your content. Hey everyone, this guy works at Dreamworks. Here’s what he makes.”

It’s especially ironic for me as I don’t even share anything I do inside DreamWorks; my public portfolio has none of that.

So I try to avoid mentioning it — unless I know they may not listen to me otherwise. But all in all, having a big company’s name on my conference badge likely made a difference, whether I like it or not.

Who you know. I had kept in touch with some employees of Autotroph leading up to the conference. Many are involved in Blender Market, where I’ve asked questions or otherwise supported things they’ve worked on.

Being a “familiar face”, ideally an in-person one (in my case, it was completely virtual), can be in your favor.

The Presentation

Unfortunately, the third party recording the presentations didn’t do a great job, so many presentations had to be re-recorded.

Here’s my presentation, “Weaving Code and Art Together”:

I was really nervous. Thankfully I had practiced a lot leading up to the trip. I even talked to a few “bigger” presenters beforehand that were also nervous for their first time. But overall, I think it went well. I got several compliments afterwards.

The Add-on Workshop

I got great feedback when telling others about the workshop. I think I was the only speaker that was diving into add-ons at all (fellow developers - share your knowledge at future conferences!).

The most vocal audience members were ironically the ones more familiar with Python. But it helped ensure that the right questions were being answered.

Unfortunately my recording lost the little interactivity I had in-person. But hopefully you find it just as useful (timestamps in the YouTube comments).

The Networking

The connecting with fellow Blender users is worth its weight in gold. I saw so many content creators and companies. I know I’ll do a disservice missing any from this list, but I’ll just list the biggest ones you may be familiar with:

• Ton Roosendaal and Francesco Siddi

• Andrew Price/Blender Guru

• Captain Disillusion (well, his intern)

• CG Cookie and Autotroph teams, including Kent Trammell, Jonathan Lampel, Paul Caggegi

• Sean Kennedy

• Colin Levy

• Ian Hubert

• CG Matter

• Jared Owen

• Company representatives, including RenderTree, OTOY, DillonGoo Studios, Roblox, King Studio, Barnstorm VFX, polygoniq

This isn’t just locals. People around the world were coming to this conference. So if you want to get to know and rub shoulders with the biggest names in the Blender community, I can’t think of a better group.

“Should I go?”

Leading up to this visit, I talked to many that were tentative on attending. Obviously many factors can come into play: travel expenses, distance of travel, or simply time. Some factors leave creators with little choice.

Again, the most valuable part is the networking. If that’s all you want to do there, it will be worth it.

Some said they’d only attend if they could present. The biggest benefit to presenting is that you don’t have to start the conversation with everyone. If your presentations are impressive and relevant, some will come to you.

While I certainly relate in that desire to be the center of attention there, I hope it doesn’t hold you back. I’m already considering when to attend again, and I don’t have anything planned to speak about.

Other tips:

• Take pictures with others there. I’m not one to initiate taking pictures, and I regret not taking more. But the few I did were worth it.

• Go sightseeing. I only had a couple nights to see the city, and even the nights of the conference were limited (thanks to my lack of sleep). Make the most of it.

• Don’t worry about seeing all the talks. We knew the talks were being recorded (albeit without issues), so that left everyone lots of time to just talk in side rooms and hallways. Just watch your most anticipated ones and spend quality time networking.

• Bring snacks. They could only supply water outside of lunch time, so having granola bars saved me many times in between meals.