Lightning Talks
& Suzanne Awards
Eleven community presentations from BCON25 — five-minute snapshots
of what people are actually building with Blender right now.
The Lightning Talks session is one of the most energetic parts of Blender Conference — a rapid-fire sequence of five-minute presentations where community members get to the point fast. No lengthy intros, no padding: just a thing someone made or learned or figured out, shared openly with the room. The 2025 edition brought eleven of these, ranging from production pipeline tools in Brazil to a very quick project built entirely from cards.
The Suzanne Awards — named after Blender's iconic mascot monkey head — close out the session, recognising outstanding work from the community across animation, VFX, short film and generative art. Watching both back to back gives a useful cross-section of where open-source 3D is right now: technically sophisticated, geographically distributed, and still driven mostly by people who just wanted to make something.
Talks in This Session
- Christoph Lendenfeld — Jam Jam Jam A fast-paced look at a jam project built under time pressure — what survived the crunch and what didn't.
- Jonathan Lax — Thriving with Blender On building a sustainable creative practice around an open-source tool in a largely proprietary industry.
- Vincent Burmeister — Animated History Autotroph Blending scientific illustration with motion design to visualise biological processes.
- BCON Austin recap A brief look back at the Austin edition and what carried over into the 2025 conference.
- Nathan Vegdahl — Not Colors A talk about what colour actually is (and isn't) in the context of digital rendering and perception.
- Rafael Vallaperde — How Blender is Empowering Production in Brazil Real production stories from Brazilian studios that have moved to Blender-centred pipelines.
- Pirmin Neyer — Cards of Plenty: A Very Quick Project Presentation Exactly what the title says — a fully self-aware five-minute talk about a project made in less time than the talk itself.
- Alex Chamberlain — Tyrannosaurus Rex Skeleton Detailed paleontological 3D reconstruction work — methodology, reference sources, and the modelling decisions involved.
- Yiming Wu — Our Paint On Blender's painting tools from a contributor's perspective, and where development is heading.
- Kyle Johnson — Splatting in the Sandbox Gaussian splatting workflows inside Blender — capturing real-world scenes as radiance fields and bringing them into a 3D pipeline.
- Prisco Vicidomini — Blender at School Teaching 3D to secondary school students using Blender — what works, what doesn't, and why the open-source model matters for education.
About Blender Conference 2025
Blender Conference is the annual gathering of the Blender community, held in Amsterdam. It brings together artists, developers, educators and studio professionals for two days of talks, workshops and project showcases. All sessions are recorded and released under Creative Commons licensing through the Blender Foundation's PeerTube instance at video.blender.org. More information about BCON25 at conference.blender.org/2025.
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