<p style="text-align: justify;">SIGGRAPH 2011 has just finished (I&#39;m still in my hotel room), but I thought I&#39;d write you guys a detailed summary of my week here in beautiful Vancouver. First some background on SIGGRAPH. Held yearly since 1974, the event has grown to host over 20 000 professionals from all over the world. It has become a place of pilgrimage to all people interested in art, science and technology related to computer graphics. This year marked the first time that SIGGRAPH has ever been held outside of the US. After spending a week here in Vancouver, I think this choice was more than justified. Before I start the blog I will point you out to our <a href="http://www.flickr.com/RenderfarmFi">Flickr account</a> for a lot of nice pictures like this:</p><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/renderfarmfi/6033641693/" title="@SIGGRAPH w/ Blender Foundation by RenderfarmFi, on Flickr"><img alt="@SIGGRAPH w/ Blender Foundation" height="333" src="http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6128/6033641693_86cdb0aa07.jpg" width="500" /></a></p><h3 style="text-align: justify;">Blender booth and news</h3><p style="text-align: justify;">The Blender booth crew for SIGGRAPH was over 10 people, meaning that although everybody had to (or got to do booth time, there was still spare time left for people to wonder around and experience the whole event. During our time here in Vancouver, we were fortunate in that Vancouver locals Dalai Felinto and Mike Pan were able to act as guides. Dalai was housing many of the booth crew while Mike helped me personally by retrieving a huge number of Blender DVD&#39;s that were printed and later handed out for free at SIGGRAPH.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Even though the actual exhibition started only monday, the Blender community meeting and artistry workshops were held on Sunday. Chairman Ton (Roosendaal) of the Blender Foundation talked, among other things, about the upcoming Blender Network for professionals. Ton then went on to announce the director of the next open movie, project Mango, who is no other than the guy behind the amazing <a href="http://www.projectlondon.net/">Project London</a> - Ian Hubert. The movie itself is apparently going to be a short live action Science Fiction story implementing Blender in full visual FX pipeline. Ton also mentioned that the film will implement Global Illumination, which in turn probably means that it will be using the new Cycles rendering engine being coded by Brecht van Lommel. The project will be spearheaded by an invited group of Blender core developers traveling to Amsterdam for a 2-3 month programming stint before the movie production starts. I seriously can&#39;t wait for this project to start. I hope we will be able to start testing the implementation of Cycles as well as it gets integrated into the trunk. Watch Ton&#39;s interview by 3DTotal.com:</p><p style="text-align: center;"><iframe frameborder="0" height="300" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/27519909?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0" width="534"></iframe></p><p style="text-align: justify;">All in all the booth was a success and the amount of people that stopped by to have demonstration of Blender would most likely be around 1000. We also gave out a bunch of T-shirts and basically all the 1500 DVD&#39;s we&#39;d printed. Visitors to the booth actually included many of the Pixar animators and other industry people, with many of them staying to enjoy the relaxed atmosphere for a longer time than average.</p><h3 style="text-align: justify;">The Keynote and the conference</h3><p style="text-align: justify;">The Keynote speaker for this year was Cory Doctorow, an award winning (and Hugo and Nebula nominated) novelist and <a href="http://boingboing.net/">Boing Boing</a> contributor. His background also includes work as the Director of European Affairs of the <a href="http://www.eff.org">EFF</a> (Electronic Frontier Foundation). It was a treat to listen to Cory as his views on copyright law are well known and happen to coincide with my (disclaimer: not necessarily the service&#39;s) own. The keynote took up issues such as DRM (Digital Rights Management) and the speaker went on to explain in detail why he thinks current copyright laws don&#39;t actually work. As Cory explicitly asked people to film and share the speech, it seems likely that the good people at SIGGRAPH felt compelled to release the keynote for everybody&#39;s viewing pleasure. Definitely worth the watch whoever you are:</p><p style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/hfU6e6--izo" width="560"></iframe></p><p style="text-align: justify;">As to what comes to the conference, I have to say I&#39;ve never felt that a week had gone past so fast. It was simply so much fun and so much to see. This being my first SIGGRAPH, I was a little skeptic when people were telling me &quot;choose carefully as there&#39;s just too much to see&quot;, but it turned out to be totally true. I wish I&#39;d had another week in order to get to see and experience more. I can now definitely tell you that if at all possible, I&#39;ll be also at SIGGRAPH next year as the convention hits Los Angeles.</p><h3 style="text-align: justify;">A nice coincidence and some fun</h3><p style="text-align: justify;">Wednesday morning I actually came across Keynote speaker Cory Doctorow on the main street in Vancouver and invited him to join us for a visit at the Blender Foundation&#39;s booth. He was nice enough to come by later. Nathan (Jesterking) actually offered a short rundown on what Blender 2.58 is all about. Even though I failed in my mission to introduce Cory to Ton, I&#39;m hoping Mr. Doctorow enjoyed his time with many other open source minded people. I will try to beat my Finnish good manners (I just can&#39;t barge on to people) and do better next time. You can see a picture of Cory at the Blender Foundation booth on our Flickr feed.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Our booth crew was amazing. It was really inspiring to spend a week around people like Ton, Colin, Ian, Bassam, Mike, Dalai, Oscar, Nathan, the other Nathan (which one is which?!), Janne and Joe. We ended up having the coolest time, going out to eat together every single night. Thank you all. During the night between Tuesday and Wednesday, the guys staying at Dalai&#39;s place went crazy and revived an old add-on originally created for an older version of Blender by Finnish artist Bastian &quot;basse&quot; Salmela. :-) Talk about Old-Skool:</p><p style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/3WGQ6_T6HRA" width="560"></iframe></p>