DIGIPENDENCE - declare yours!

I’ve met tons of people - online and in-person - since getting into machinima and 3D moviemaking, and while they’ve almost all be simply fantastic people, very helpful, supportive and patient, they have mainly been guys.

While I do love the fellas, I’m pretty excited that Angela Guenette, a fellow Canadian and a fellow ‘girl’, as been selected to do modeling, rigging, and animation for Durian, the new Blender open source movie project.

I’ve got a few audio and video interviews in the pike that I must get to, but I’m going to try and track down Angela before she leaves for Amsterdam, and get one with her too.

In the mean time, here’s her KICKASS demo reel:

Earlier this year, CGenie, “the digital artist’s resource”, released the results of its 2009 CG User Survey.

The survey had 2022 responses and the results were quite illuminating, and in some cases, surprising. For example, Blender was well-represented and much-praised by its users. In fact, the open source software stacked up well against products which cost thousands of dollars. After Blender’s strong showing, CGenie interviewed Ton Roosendaal, Chairman of the Blender Foundation to get his views on the results.

CGenie: Blender received overall the highest mark from its user base in the survey, despite it having a smaller share of the market than many of the bigger contenders, it certainly evokes a lot of passion from its customers, as can be seen from the comments posted both on the article and the survey itself.

Firstly, congratulations on the excellent results that you’ve received - if you didn’t know it already, it’s pretty clear you have quite a vote of confidence from your users. Was this expected?

Ton: We are certainly well aware of the passion of our artists and developers for Blender, so that’s not a surprise! What I’m very happy with is that this survey was executed independently of Blender channels or websites, so the results didn’t get polluted by orchestrated internet community floods. It gives us confirmation of successes of our strategy over the past five years -just working hard on getting the program improved and staying loyal to the original concepts behind Blender and to its user base.

And even though there are perception issues - free and open source programs typically are ‘made for the average user’ and ‘horribly designed’ - the results clearly show an increasing awareness that Blender is being made for artists with a serious interest in using 3D on a professional level. Which, like any program you’ve surveyed, just requires time and energy investment to get most of out of it.

Read the full interview.

According to a recent post on their development blog, Moviestorm is losing three key staffers.

left to right: Dave Pajak, Mitch, Philips, Dave Thatcher.

Art Director Mitch Phillips is returning to Ninja Theory where he previously worked on Heavenly Sword cut scenes. Dave Pajak (Head of QA) and Dave Thatcher (Tester) will be joining the exodus and trotting to Ninja Theory who are also still hiring (careers page). When I was the Community Manager at Moviestorm, these guys were great to work with and digipendence.com wishes them well, and looks forward to seeing their new project (currently top-secret, apparently). Perhaps we’ll even be able to score an interviews for the cinematic design category, so stay tuned!

Heavenly Sword follows the story of Nariko, a doomed heroine out to avenge her people, a warrior clan almost destroyed by the tyrant King Bohan. Had Nariko been born male, she would have fulfilled the prophecy that a Heavenly warrior would lead the clan to a glorious future. Nonetheless, Shen, her father, raised her to know the skills of warfare, imparting to her the arts and mindset of the warrior. When her father is captured by Bohan, Nariko is left with only one choice - to take up the Heavenly Sword.