The first tutorial I chose to attend this year at OSCON was Introduction to 3D Animation with Blender.  It was something I wanted to attend for fun instead of for work.  The instructor was Matthew Momjian, a 17 year old high school student who has been using Blender for four years.  His experience with the software showed, too.

The version of Blender available in the Fedora 13 package repository is 2.49b, but the tutorial focused on the beta version of 2.5, which has a redesigned user interface and new and improved features.  A Linux version was available on the internal cache website offered by OSCON, but it was 32 bit.  I ended up downloading a copy from the Blender website (the conference wifi doesn’t start to get really bad until Wednesday).  Unfortunately, Blender proved unstable and would frequently crash with a segmentation fault.  Matthew had provided files to serve as starting points for each section of the tutorial, so it was relatively easy to follow along, even if I didn’t complete the previous section.

Matthew walked us through generating a simple animation of a flying saucer approaching a planet and hitting it with a beam of light.  We started with simple shapes, two spheres, one flattened, for the saucer, a cone for the beam of light, and another sphere for the planet.  From there we learned how to apply surfaces and textures, manipulate light sources, and perform a simple animation.

All in all, I think the tutorial was worthwhile.  If I had launched Blender without it, I would be lost.  I’m still lost, but at least I have some semblance of an idea about how it works.