Another year, another BCON! It was amazing as it always is and here’s a wrap-up of what happened:

Arrival to Amsterdam

Those who didn’t want to take a painful 13-hour train ride, which was pretty much everyone, took a plane from Prague to Amsterdam. Unfortunately, we had to wait for a couple of hours due to delay. When the chilly air hit us we knew we were back in Amsterdam for another BCON.

Day 1 - Thursday

The Blender Conference was held in the beautiful Felix Meritis building.

BCON started with a keynote, as it does every year. Ton Roosendaal emphasized the importance of licensing code and assets properly. It was reassuring to know we use licenses correctly.

There were so many amazing talks, and here’s a highlight of our favorite ones:

Attributes: Making Geometry Smaller and Faster

Hans Goudey

Hans Goudey, Blender developer, talked about a huge internal refactor of how meshes and other geometry data types are stored in Blender. The whole refactor is an on-going project for almost 2 years now. While we are enjoying continuous speed ups in every new Blender version since then thanks to this refactoring, the whole effort comes together in Blender 4.0 which changes how geometry is stored in blend files which results in smaller files. This technical talk showed interesting insights from Blender development and discussed some design choices of internal representation of data structures.

Towards the Star Trek Holodeck: The Future of Rendering

Jules Urbach

This talk was outside of our World, absolutely state of the art tech, deep knowledge and art. Some of us are big Star Trek fans and seeing all the versions of the Enterprise how it evolved throughout ages was truly amazing and made us question why we’re stuck with archviz. Also, the greenery in some of the rendered animations looks truly real, we have plans to bring something like that to botaniq in the future. Maybe we should finally port our assets over to Octane! We also heard many of our users ask about this so it might make a lot of sense, right?

Accommodation

As the day ended, we got to our accommodation which had 1 star rating on Google. Yay! Well, it wasn’t as bad as we expected. But hopefully, we book our accommodation sooner next time.

Day 2 - Friday

The Photorealism Mindset: What About The Physical Camera?

Polyfjord

Asbjørn Lote, also known as Polyfjord, had an amazing presentation about setting up a realistic camera. How to think about camera? Do you use a professional camera or your phone camera? There were so many great tips and we will definitely use some of those in our future artwork. Also, we were happy to see botaniq and traffiq in his video demonstrations!

The process behind architectural visualization

Filippo Zorgno & Tommaso Sergi

Blender and archviz from start to finish. A lot of people wouldn’t think about Blender being a program to make architectural visualizations in. But they haven’t seen this presentation with some beautiful showcase of how and why to use it.

CZ/SK meetup

There was also a CZ/SK meetup! It was lovely to see how many Czech and Slovak people are working in Blender. We met our friends BlenderKit , Polyperfect , or Martin Klekner who also made interesting presentations on this year’s BCON.

De Balie

The evening ended in De Balie, a bar where Blender Conference attendees always go to to have a good time and network more. The night was fun and we recommend visiting De Balie if you ever go to Amsterdam.

Day 3 - Saturday

Booth

Saturday was a big day for us! We had a booth in the marketplace showing our work and revealed a new open-source add-on engon. More about engon on our social media . We got a lot of positive feedback and we want to thank you all for visiting us, it was nice talking to you.

On top of that, we didn’t miss great presentations we want to share with you:

From Hobbyist to AAA: A Deep Dive into Tools and Techniques in Game Art

Amanpreet Bajwa

Amanpreet is a senior environmental artist who worked on multiple AAA games. He gave us an insight to standard pipelines and workflow in game art and how to work with Blender as a professional tool in such field.

Creating Running Shoes in 3D - Open Footwear

Juraj Suska & Josef Trojan

Footwear Designers showing us useful features in Blender for footwear prototyping and designing. And what more, you can download files to their open-source footwear and make your own pair of running shoes!

Closing

Saturday was a short day with a lot of things happening. The event ended with Ton’s closing talk. On Sunday, some of us visited the Blender Foundation Headquarters in Amsterdam Noord. We could see Ton’s office and the whole building the foundation resides in. And then, off home we go!

We enjoyed the whole conference to the max and we’re looking forward to see you next year!