In the October 2007 issue of 3D World magazine (Issue 95), there is a review of the Advanced Blender Fluids training DVD that Hand Turkey Studios produced with CmiVFX. The training DVD received a rating of 8 out of 10 stating that “for pros who need the option of realistic fluids in Blender, it’s a must.” Go to your local bookstore or magazine stand and to buy the magazine and read the rest of the review!

We’re quite pleased with their assessment and even happier to announce that we’re working with CmiVFX on the second advanced training DVD for Blender in that series. Look for an official announcement of the DVD to come in the near future!

As we did last year, Hand Turkey Studios participated in this year’s Red Hat High program. Jason van Gumster traveled to Red Hat headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina for one week to teach 3D animation with the open source program, Blender, to a group students with ages ranging from 13 to 15 years old. Jason assembled a team of artists from the Blender community to co-instruct the class, including modeler and tutorial creator Jonathan Williamson, 2006 Suzanne Award-winner Sam Brubaker, and Elephants Dream director Bassam Kurdali.

The Digital Animation track at Red Hat High was the most popular track with students in 2006 and had the largest class size this year with 15 students attending. Other tracks at the camp included Audio, Illustration, Digital Darkroom, and Programming featuring other open source tools such as Hydrogen, Audacity, Inkscape, and The GIMP.

Red Hat intends to expand the Red Hat High program to other locations throughout the world and is in the process of developing materials to aid teachers in developing curricula that suit their needs. The team of Blender instructors is actively involved in this process. As part of this, Jason will be giving a QuickTake presentation about Red Hat High at this year’s SIGGRAPH conference in San Diego.

More Information

• Video of student work on Sheep-dot
• Article on Blender Nation
• Red Hat Magazine Articles
  • Red Hat High 2007: Getting Started
  • Red Hat High 2007: Update
• Red Hat High flickr stream

Hand Turkey’s Jason van Gumster will be at the Defrag Ohio Conference April 12th until the 14th at Lorain County Community College in Elyria, Ohio (just west of Cleveland). He will be exhibiting some student work from last year’s Red Hat High summer technology camp and at 2:00 PM on Friday, the 13th of April, there will be a more in-depth presentation on what was done during last year’s program, as well as some of the plans for this year’s camp.

On the last day of the conference, attendees will be able to participate in a small presentation on “Connecting Families, Kids and Students Through Digital Media”. Jason will be doing a short run-though on modeling with Blender while Steve Simmons of EDR Media will be discussing audio gaming and Ted Jordon of Funutation LLC will give a session on computer game creation.

The Defrag conference is held quarterly around Ohio and is geared toward offering “an integrated, multidisciplinary approach to address our innovation imperative in rich media, with a focus on education and workforce development.” They’re really interested in open source software as being a part of that equation.

We tweaked our website. Overall, it might look about the same, but we’ve packed it with quite a few new features and niceties. For instance, this news page now generates an RSS feed which you can Live Bookmark in Firefox or add to your feed reader/aggregator of choice. And speaking of feeds, you can now catch the latest headlines from sheep-dot and Blender Nation in our sidebar. Also in our sidebar, you might notice that we have an event calendar, showing upcoming dates and times for events that we will be attending (or presenting), including our Workshops.

We’ve also reorganized our animation and print portfolios to be more attractive and easy to use, as well as incorporating the more ubiquitous Flash video codec for showing our animations (rather than storing 3 different formats). You may also notice that we have a new section on our site for training, too. There you can get information on the various workshops we offer, training DVDs, and even individualized training/consultation services.

As you can see, there’s all kinds of interesting new things going on here. Have a look around and check out all the fun stuff!

If you’ve been following sheep-dot, you may know that two Turkeys went to Boston for this year’s SIGGRAPH conference. In the course of this, we were fortunate enough to be able to demonstrate the fluid simulation capabilities of Blender on the exhibition floor. A video of one of these demos was recorded and has been posted to Blender Nation, an excellent news portal for Blender users. Big thanks to Bart, Eugene, Spiderworm, and the rest of the BN team for doing all of the recording and reporting they’ve done.

Also, more information and links regarding the SIGGRAPH trip can be found on sheep-dot, our side projects blog.