i took a CAD class this summer at the local community college in AutoCAD and got to know the instructor pretty well. Ive been playing with Blender for a while and SketchUp too. Anyway i mentioned Blender to him and he had me come in and demonstrate it. Now he wants me to do a presentation maybe up to an hour long to a class on Blender.
So what would you do given 1 hr.?
oh and the class is EG 160
Definitely I’ll put focus and emphasis on the modeling speed of Blender first.
After that, I’d show the “known to be one of the best UV mapping techniques” as CGTalk have said, i.e. show them UV mapping power of Blender.
Possibly, animation after that.
Might be too much to do or too hard to do, depending on how much skill you have.
Wolf.
If you’ve only got an hour, you probably won’t have time to teach much Blender technique. I’d go for getting your audience all fired up and ready to install Blender and start digging into it. Bring a load of various kinds of work done in blender: animations, models, archtectural renders, fly throughs, games. From the simple (Calvin’s buzzard) to the complex (Catboy’s horse.) Weightlifting Amy and Super-Wu. Some of Robertt’s work, and enricoceric’s. Show mr_bomb’s ear modeling tutorial.
Show Blender off, maybe do a little modeling yourself, and have the installation files and some tutorials burned onto a few CD’s to hand out at the class for the students to pass around. (Might want the Gimp and Audacity on the CD too, just to round things out.)
basically my plan so far is to show the Elephant’s Dream, show some basic interface things by playing with the cube in a simple scene, play with the textures / material a bit. Then go into some works ive done with some renders and then show some animation ive done.
ive never touched the game engine and my animation skills are very primitave. I am basically competent in the following area
-working with vertices, lines, faces
-editing materials
-mapping textures
-using bones for very simple animation
-rendering / lights
semi-competent in these
-animation constraints
-Nurbs / curves
lost when it comes to game physics excetera
i plan to suggest installing Blender, Python, Yafray, GIMP, Mplayer, and Audacity now that you mention it. oh and of course my favorite browser Mozilla FireFox.
Haha, nice you’ve got all the top open source softwares 
If it’s not to late Being a blender user myself you could use some yafray images using blender as well.
I did a similar presentation only I had 3 min. All I did was yafray…
i need to familiarize myself with Rendering some. For some reason my computer doesnt want to save the images that i am rendering. I dont quite get the difference besides the speed. I will however demonstrate a distributed render if the school will let me access the network.
Just to round out the open source programs, when I did a presentation I used Open Office’s power point type thingy as a foundation. That way I had a smooth guide to follow. You can put in links to video and images and realy get the whole thing going well. Maybee you could do this for the first half, then share some of your hands on Blender knowledge in the areas you know best, followed by elephants dream to finish. Expect lots of questions too. It helps to allow 10 mins or so for question time.
One good trick I did was to practice modeling a very basic head using soft selection and a subdivided sphere. Then add some hair to the top of the head. Make sure to test render times. Thats where the presentation Open Office comes in handy, whilst that renders I’ll just show you this ect.
Good Luck.
i will do one model a couple of times so that i know i can do it quickly. However i dont use OpenOffice since my school doesnt have it (it bit the big one and paid $189) for MS Office:mad:. my biggest problem right now is that im trying to design a splash screen type program to run when the cd i am making is inserted that will have links to launch all the installers and this is very difficult.
I was asked to do a blender presentation for my computer class in a similar situation. The tutorial that I presented to them did not take an hour to accomplish but that was because I went kind of fast and cut a few corners because I only had a few minutes to present. Do something easy. If this class has never seen blender before, they might be amazed at the capabilities. Even little things might surprise them. That is what happened to my class.
When is this presentation scheduled? I would like to sit in. Perhaps this is a great opportunity to kick off the Michigan Blender User Group first meeting.