Blender's open season

Host of Blender Today, Pablo Vazquez, gives 3D World the lowdown on Blender’s Open Up initiative

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Community is at the heart of everything Blender does and any avid member of that community will know Pablo Vazquez. He’s been using Blender to create CG masterpieces for 18 years, and for the last 12 of those years he’s been working at the Blender headquarters in Amsterdam. Among multiple other duties at the Institute, he hosts Blender Today, a weekly live show covering community-driven news from across the world of Blender.

In March 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic put most of the world on lockdown, affecting people’s daily lives and forcing most to stay in the safety of their homes. In order to turn this into something positive for their vast community, Blender announced the Open Up initiative, a promise to deliver daily free content for anyone to access. Vazquez began hosting daily video streams, whilst his colleagues offered up tutorials and an intriguing new open project called Settlers. Vazquez took a break from his numerous exciting projects to chat with 3D World about his journey with Blender, the Open Up initiative, and the exciting times ahead.

How did you become such an integral part of Blender and its community?

I’ve always been making characters and publishing everything I could online, so I always tried to be present. Three years ago at the studio, I was about to tweet something and I didn’t know exactly how to spell it. I asked around and then I realised that at the studio nobody spoke English natively.