BCON 2025
TL;DR: It was a blast, three days of excitement and inspiration; if you’re considering attending next year, do it! Here’s the recording of my talk about Squishy Volumes:
Algebraic’s Squishy Volumes is an extension for Blender that allows you to simulate squishy stuff through the power of the Material Point Method (MPM)! We suspected that we were flying under the radar of potentially interested Blender users. To get our extension out in the open, I attended the Blender Conference (BCON) and gave a talk about it! Indeed, just a couple of days after the conference, we had new users eagerly creating their own simulations and exploring the limits of Squishy Volumes!
It was my first time at the BCON. I was definitely nervous, not only because presenting tends to be nerve-racking, but also because I had yet to meet the attendees IRL. Shoutout to blender.science Discord server! Connecting beforehand gave me much-needed confidence.
Any worries I had were (of course) completely unfounded because the Blender community is absolutely fantastic. I experienced an intense mix of collaboration and shared fascination, met so many awesome people, and it was packed with really cool art! The venue itself was also beautiful.
My talk about Squishy Volumes and the extension itself was really well received. This feedback is obviously very motivating. The fingers are itching to make tutorials, add more features, improve usability, and maybe most pressing: implement GPU acceleration!
While the main goal was to share Squishy Volumes, many of the other talks were very interesting to me. Highly important are the recent updates in the realm of physics simulation within Blender itself and this related talk about Hair Simulation:
We will follow this development closely. At some point it may be possible to integrate MPM (or Squishy Volumes) into Geometry Nodes directly! The future will tell. And while it is currently impossible for extensions to define new nodes, there might be some very cool interop at the very least.
Apart from simulations, I’d like to mention these two talks in particular. Real science meets Blender. The kicker is that we are helping science along just by interacting with Blender! Apart from that, this demonstrates that large numbers of MPM particles will work just fine.
And one encounter was especially inspiring: William the Wunderkind. He created a full-blown piano with keys, hammers, dampers, and more, all in Blender, all by himself. Not something you would expect from the average child! The piano isn’t just for static renders, no. Using the knife tool and Blender’s native physics, he created an eye-catching animation: the piano goes into an industrial shredder. Amazing! We got to talk about Squishy Volumes, and I don’t think anyone at the conference asked questions about the extension with such genuine interest. The piano-into-the-shredder-scene is a really tough challenge for Squishy Volumes, and, of course, now it is a mandatory Milestone to reach. Thank you for this inspiration, William.
Another thing that cannot be overstated is that Flow, and Blender by extension, won the Oscar! We got to pose with it, how cool is that?! Here are two pictures, and BTW all these people are actually members of the aforementioned Discord server.
After every conference day, and before the first one, there’s a semi-official meetup at this cozy bar: deBALIE. This is a very accessible way to continue that important discussion or to just relax and reminisce.
As usual for me, two days after the conference, I’m in bed with a high fever. It seems that it also got a good number of other attendees. Another thing in common, I guess.
I attended the conference with the hope of inspiring others. I’m happy with my attempt and am eager to continue on this course. I found myself returning with a head full of fresh ideas, new friends, and a glowing soul. I can barely contain my excitement! ❤❤❤
PS: if you haven’t, please try Squishy Volumes and join our journey!
