On Saturday I hosted the first RenderMan® Community meeting of Japan, with much appreciated help from Yoshichika Shimamura and Naoki Kondo. It did not go entirely as planned, it was way better than I had expected!
I was expecting the usual unresponsive crowd, so I had 2 hours of blurb ready just in case.
Most of the group gave ideas, even disagreed at points so we ran out of time. In my wildest dreams I did not expect such reaction, it felt like a real community.
A lot was not voted for, but the main thing is the main structure was basically sorted out and I hope not to bore anyone too soon with much voting.
If you want to see what our group came up with look at the minutes at www.rendersan.org, I will be putting them up later in the morning.
Basically we voted on the name, structure, goals, and workings of our new community.
All three main RenderMan® vendors were there, and gave excellent input.
I was happy that everyone agreed it will be an open community, only restricting positions of power to vendors - in the interest of fairness.
An excellent point was made that my idea of allowing vendors to have some commercial input for hosting the group seemed a little cold.
Actually most people seemed happy to allow some commercial input if it was for the benefit of the community.
I may have been a little too much of a hippie in thinking the users would create a totally non-commercial group.
So we will be allowing vendors to add anything to our community. After all they are RenderMan® users too. The users also agreed that using a commercial venue was alright. Even when it came to funding people agreed a small fee was fine.
I had planned to give a small instruction on illumination loops and message passing, but time was against us. In the end we exchanged cards and about 20+ of us went out for a small after drinks party.
It was here over a few beers I got to explain a few of the tricks in the shader I handed out earlier. Everyone, agreed the party was the best thing since shadow maps!
After the party, the real hardcore amongst us went to a nearby darts bar. I think next time we shall plan the after party as it seemed like such a good idea.
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