This year, I only visited the annual Blender Conference in Amsterdam for one day, Friday the 24th. Well, one and a half days - I also went to visit the Blender Foundation on Saturday. 

To catch up on all the talks I missed, I'm binge-watching all of them on the Blender YouTube channel with this handy playlist.

There's 85 videos in total! So it'll take me a while to get through.

But I figured I'd share my notes / descriptions of each video with you, since besides the titles there's not really any description to these videos. Hopefully this will help you decide which videos are interesting to watch for you. 

In part 1, let's look at the first 10.

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Blender founder Ton’s keynote mentions integration of Vulkan, the new Grease Pencil 3 (which will work together with Geometry Nodes now... who knows what interesting developments that will bring), he mentions Node Tools, then shows some really amazing projects made in Blender, such as Flow and a beautiful new Sonic animation. 

Ton then talks about Blender’s Governing Structure as it is now (and will be in the future). He shows some financial numbers, especially in comparison to an open-source e-mail program. The e-mail program gets a LOT more donations! Like ten times more. For just an e-mail program... He appeals to the Blender users to make the user contributions go up to 2% of the user base donating. Let’s make this happen! 

Out of the other 10 videos on this list, this is the most interesting one so far (for me personally). She creates and tries out ideas very quickly by skipping all the obstacles of physical production.

She also talks a workflow that involves using a lot of masks for creating materials (she calls it layered textures). Such as geometry pointiness to create edge wear, and stacking masks on top of each other to build up a material.

Similar to the workflow of in my materials course, in fact. It may seem like a complex workflow but it's actually very organic and iterative, starting from a simple material to something quite realistic looking. 

She also talks about creating her own character-centric brand (like Pokemon, Hello Kitty). I kind of want to try this myself!

She creates clothing, fake photo shoots, everything in 3D to see if people want to buy it, and if there’s demand, it goes to production. Pretty clever. I know plenty of people who have lots of ideas, and can't stick to one thing. Perhaps it's not such a bad thing, if you find the right way to execute it (like with 3D renders in this case).

Can you have a career with Blender?

Yes.

That's the gist of this talk. He gives some interesting advice: Don’t start at the beginning, start with what you want to do - if you want to do animation, don’t learn modelling etc, but just get some cool assets and animate them. 

There’s more to making stuff than just media and entertainment.

Be ready to fire your clients if they suck.

And more... good to watch if you're thinking about starting a career with Blender.

Presentation of an animation studio that uses Blender for an NPR result. One of their tricks is using vertex paint to control the shadows and highlights.

They show a full node-tree like visualisation of the studio pipeline, which is interesting (if you want to have an animation studio, maybe not so much if you're a one-person operation).

Also a demo and overview of a very complex and fully procedural NPR shader. Unusually, they use Cycles instead of Eevee for this.

More a presentation of their studio, not really much information. But could be interesting if that's the kind of environment you'd like to work in.

At first I didn't find this talk very interesting, as on the surface it's just someone's portfolio demonstration for a sports brand. But I kept thinking about it. It's actually interesting to see how little you need to create professional work if you have a good eye for colour and composition, and an efficient workflow. He uses a lot of images on planes, simple geometry and cleverly placed lights. As well as sprinkling some Photoshop magic on it at the end. 

Reading between the lines of his talk, I think his client gives him extremely short notice when they need something, and he's created a workflow that can give him a finished result in a day or so. It comes down to good composition, and focusing on results rather than details and topology. 

I'm not much of a gamer, but apparently this is a popular spaceship game, and it looks pretty cool and detailed.

Their concept art pipeline starts with 3D, not with 2D drawings. He shows a lot of their concept art. 

Not a lot of info about how their workflow works, unless I wasn't paying attention and missed some details. The main lesson is that you should do concept art in 3D to save time. 

As a space sci-fi fan, I'm curious to check out this game!

An interesting video for those of you who create assets using geometry nodes that are meant to be shipped to other people.

GN Gizmos (which were recently introduced) can help the end person using the asset "forget they're using nodes" (hence the clickbaity title), so it’s easier to use Geometry Nodes setups made by others. 

This is set up with new Gizmo nodes. Besides the Gizmo node you’ll need a value node. If you want the gizmo to always be visible, pin it by enabling the pin icon on the value node. 

To set it up correctly, it seems to require a lot of other nodes and some math. It would be nice if these node trees could just be dragged and dropped as node tree assets, without having to build them or download them from someone else, as default included assets shipped with Blender. Maybe in the future this is planned.

A sequel to Lino Thomas' video from last year, "One hour of Greebles", in this video we get a masterclass in colors: why do they work, what kinds of color schemes are there (like the Tetradic color scheme), and how do we read the vectorscope in Blender? 

How to use gradients for profit. Add light gradients with anisotropic volumes. Blocking light around objects close to camera to add contrast. Color stuff! But also tips about lighting, and shadows (after all, these no colors without light).

I'm curious what "one hour of..." Lino has in store for us next time!

What if you could produce a 30-second animated short in a day? This guy has it figured out.

Of course, a lot of it comes down to an efficient workflow.

If you have to do the same tasks again, why not create an add-on for it? That's how Sacha Goedegebure is able to make short films with 1-day turnaround time. 

He did a talk about this pipeline last year as well. How do you start making Python scripts and add-ons as an artist? Some of his tips are: Enable developer extras and tooltips, so you can look at the code of add-on buttons. And use ChatGPT. I actually made a script using ChatGPT myself, it's interesting to try.  

He shares his add-ons on Github, so you can use them and adapt them to your use.

Fun fact: Sacha Goedegebure also made "Big Buck Bunny", one of the first Blender open movies, in 2008.

Presentation about an NPR style animation project that uses Goo Engine (A special build of Blender tailored to anime production). 

Some interesting tips, for example did you know that there's a Geometry Node for having billboards always face the active camera? That seems pretty useful, and I'll have to look into making a tutorial about it... 

This is an interesting talk for people who are really working on a short in anime style, as it goes over some pretty technical stuff.