Hey everyone!
Welcome to the Blender Together Apart event Good to see all of you again
So we are usually going to start with a warming up Can I hear everybody from the Netherlands? Germany? Ah, okay that is not going to work You know, last year the Blender Conference
was amazing and I was looking so much forward to do it even better, more spectacular this year We even had an event lined up in Los Angeles
and wanted to do something fantastic in Amsterdam and then the crappy thing happened, the corona crisis.
So yeah we have to make the best of it and I think we will do this by making it a year
of introspection and renewal. A couple of things I would like to mention
One is the Blender organization has been restructured and I find it very important to have the Foundation
and the Institute to work even more tied together so we split off the studio. The Institute
and Foundation is becoming one unit, taking care of the Blender project, the Blender technology.
The studio is going to take care of the Blender project as well but then for content, for
testing, for pipeline and for a lot of creative commons movies. The second thing we’re working on was the Foundation
mission, and the team. Like: what we are doing here, why we are together, what is the mission of
this project. And what I come back a lot to, is the theme
to call it “The Freedom to Create”. It’s the freedom to deploy software.
That's the core of the free software mission of Blender anyway.
And we want to have all this fantastic technology. The best stuff you can have to make films
or games, and make amazing things with it You should be free to do that You also want to be free to apply creative
resources It is not only the mission of creative commons,
but it is also our mission because we want to have the rigs, and the characters,
and we want to have the textures. We want to have everything so
you can become a successful artist. And the third thing I want to work on specially
next year is the freedom to participate in the markets. So even though, when you have everything, all the
technology, all the stuff you want to make the reality is that for the film and game
business it’s all in the little pyramid at the top where they decide what will happen and maybe
hat trickles down to your studio so you are “allowed” to make something that they decided. But there is not enough access to the market
for people. I want to work on ways that
you can get better access and of course we started that with our own access
to have the Blender Studio and the Blender Cloud to be very strong entities
to produce fantastic content for everyone. Also the Blender project itself is under introspection.
We already started last year a process to improve the quality and look at ways
of how to become more professional as an organization. One of the main themes is that we want to
have engineering standards and code quality documentation and that’s not so much to create more
bureaucracy or to have a big threshold for people to come onboard
It is just about communication. Developers have to communicate together
and developers have to communicate better with the outside world. And my personal thing is that we want to have
more software design. We have to have product designers, product managers, whatever you
call this but we need to have better product design focus for the Blender project. And third, I don't want to be a software company.
So whatever we do here at the Institute, the purpose is always to give it as quick as possible
to the open source project Blender because Blender will remain a community
a community of contributors So I wanted to keep it short. We’ve collected
a fantastic set of videos from all over the world in the spirit of the Blender project I hope you enjoy it and I wish you... Oh wait there is one more thing! I want to talk about what happened to me this year but I will do that in the closing video. Enjoy the show. Since I haven’t met a lot of you guys I thought I would introduce myself I am 22 years old and I live in Fort Worth Texas I work as a Hardsurface modeling artist and
I live with my boyfriend Matthew and my newly adopted kitten named Lux. I got him when he
was like three months old so he was still a pretty tiny thing and he’s just as playful
as when I got him. So this year was kind of interesting. I transitioned completely to
working from home and using Blender full time and then also I picked up a ton of freelancing
work this year. In my free time I like to maintain a garden out on my patio. I feel
like gardening has been very meditative for me the last few months and has really been
a nice space to unwind after working. I made a lot of personal projects this year and one of my
favorites was this scifi helmet. First starting off with a very rough sculpt and then modeling
it with sub-d modeling. I also got to try out the new cloth brush sculpting in Blender
which I enjoyed a lot. This was actually the first project that I used it. And finally I put
some simple procedural textures onto the models and then lit it and rendered it completely
in eevee. So thanks for watching, that’s all from me and I am looking forward to meeting
you all in person next year! So much for being awesome in space ! So, I spent the best part of last year working
on a new movie for ESA (the European Space Agency) about space debris. That means spending a lot of time carefully
modeling spacecraft and then smashing them into one another to create this huge cloud
of fast moving debris. Kind of like in the movie Gravity (only this could really happen). A lot of fun there ! But this also means more technical stuff like
feeding real orbit parameters into Blender so that every object is displayed with its
physically correct animation, which was critical for ESA. Working with Blender has been a real treat
lately, with Eevee displaying scenes in the 3D viewport with almost render quality and
rendering 4K frames in a matter of seconds. The only thing that I found missing was real
motion blur in Eevee. But this has been added since then so I guess we’re all set now
and I’m really looking forward to working on a new project with Blender because this
is going to be crazy. So stay tuned, if you want to see the whole
movie, which is going to be available online, but after it has premiered at the European
Space Debris Conference next year, in April. Take care and keep on blending :) BlenderDay has looked like this
for twelve years now. “Hallo und herzlich Willkommen zum BlenderDay 2020”
(Hello and welcome to BlenderDay 2020) This is what Blender Day 2020 actually
looked like for me this year. I'm Vincent. I'm an animation student at Filmakademie
Baden-Württemberg. Long time participant and this year's moderator
of the german BlenderDays. When I got the message that BlenderDay won't
happen in person this year, I quickly decided that we should have some
sort of an online alternative. I got together with the organisation crew
and we made an online meeting for the german community instead.
We had eleven speakers from all around the world to share their knowledge about Blender.
With great speakers like Julian Eisel and Julien Kaspar, who talked about UI in Blender, or
character creation. Talks about rain shaders in EEVEE, a behind-the-scenes look at animated
movies and virtual production in Blender. I think this year's event was quite a success
and hope that we can have an event like that in person again soon. Until then I can recommend
you to go to blender3dschool.de to have a look at the talks, or even organize a community
meeting in your country instead. So, actually 2020 has been very good and also
very challenging for me so far. I moved from Germany to France, I started
out working as a freelancer, I learned a lot of new things - including a new language,
I met cool people, I started working on awesome new projects... yeah... I always loved working in Blender, but due
to my full time job that I had for the last five years, before I became a freelancer,
I didn’t really get to. So when I learned about the Greasepencil function especially,
I really couldn’t wait to get back into it. So I started working on a personal project
around the grease pencil function. It’s supposed to look like a 2D sketch that someone just started
coloring and didn’t finish yet. And to achieve this sketchy look, I layered Greasepencil Strokes on
top of geometry and I sculpted them varying thickness, opacity and position to achieve
a more sketchy look and I also used mixed materials out of emissive and diffuse to have
this more flattish 2D look. I talk a little bit about it - if you're interested
- on a “BlenderToday Live” and I have a more detailed breakdown on my Artstation
page as well. Den här, den här hästen använder Maya
så hennes dator har krashat Oh hello, I didn’t see you there. Hi.
Hello. I used to work as a character and creature
artist at Goodbye Kansas Studios but now I have switched to game development.
So now I’m working for Embark Studios here in Stockholm.
Embark is a corporate gold contributor for the Blender development Fund and we are also
using Blender as one of the main applications for creating game assets.
Other than that, I finished “Sharing a Dream” which is a big personal project that I created
in the beginning of the year. I also used it as an example to make some
youtube tutorials about handling multiple shots in Blender.
I’ve been coding in other 3D applications a bit before, but this year I started to learn
Blender’s API. Thanks to Sybren’s amazing Python tutorials on the Blender Cloud.
One of the add-ons I coded this year was a vertex color baker that is free to download.
It bakes standard passes like diffuse, roughness, emission, ambient occlusion and so on. Under
the hood it’s using Cycles as a baker and then transfers the pixel values to vertex
color by sampling a temporary UV map. You can go to my youtube channel to find more
information about the add-on if you are interested. I also got the chance to make a little colorful
fox for the splashscreen of Blender 2.90. It was great fun to make and I’m always
happy when I get the chance to help the developers at the Blender Foundation with this kind of
stuff. That is all for me. Thanks for listening and
I hope to see you all at the Blender Conference in 2021.
See you there. Blender is dope, yo! I'm based in Queensland, Australia, and I
am a creature artist. I've been using Blender since I was 12, - I got it because it was
free and easy to get, but I've stuck around for the quality. Over the years, I've watched
as it's expanded and grown into a major industry player, especially with Blender 2.9, and I
can't wait to see what Blender 3.0 holds. For me, most of my time in Blender this year
has been trying to improve my animation skills, and digging into methods to bring an extra
layer of realism to my characters. For this character, I spent quite a while
digging into ways to simulate the floppy membranes on the wings without making it look too much
like cloth, but I also don't want it too stiff either. I found it important to combine all the tools
at my disposal. In this case, I'm also using shapekeys alongside the cloth
to help maintain a natural shape Where is that record button again? humm... Oh! it works! Ah, it's been a strange year, we've been in
quarantine most of the... Oh Wait! The 3D cursor is still visible, and I'm in
edit mode, AAh, sorry, sorry, sorry I have to de-activate the overlays here, wait
a second. (click) Ah, now it's better! Alright. Yes, we're inside the viewport, EEVEE running
in real time! Blender developers you did a great job! So, I was saying... I was in quarantine most
of the time, but you know I'm a freelancer, and for us, it's not much different than normal
life ahah. So most of the time I was at home, playing
the piano and making stuff with blender's greasepencil
tool... Other stuff with greasepencil ... Even more greasepencil... Well, greasepencil is my favourite feature
inside blender, so I like to create stuff with it with it and who needs a girlfriend when you can just
make ART? Huh... Okay! more seriously. It's been a fantastic
year for me. With the power of blender, I could make my
imaginary world come true. I also made a music video for a British band, another music video for a Colombian record
label... And, I have a lot of others projects on the
pipe now, some are just small personal stuff and some
are paid commissions, so I'm still trying to make a living out of
my own art, but I'm not really worried about the future because I think I can create anything
with blender now! And this is because of you, the community
! All the resources you make available on internet, all the tutorials you post on youtube, you help us all to progress, so, thank you everyone, stay safe, and keep
making awesome stuff! And goodbye everyone, thanks for watching,
see you soon! Hi This is Campbell,
I'm in Geelong Australia and Ton emailed me to say what’ s been going on in the last
year and to show my setup. This little one's got away - but I think she's
the biggest thing that's happened in the last year Say hello Marietta Yeah, not sure? Umm, anyway, we'll just head inside. I think I'll have to record this later because Marietta really likes turning my computer
on and off. I hope she'll get tired of it, but so far
it's really all she wants to do while she's in here. This is my desk, using Linux, my development
environment is Emacs with Vim emulation. This is what I typically use each day - bug
tracker, chat and some windows for development, maybe a terminal. Over the last year, I've worked on mostly
just general development, fixing and patch review.
But I did do some user visible stuff: The transform object origins.
Using menu searching rather than operators, rather than the full operator search.
Some UV improvements: UV rip and path select, things like that.
Edit mesh optimizations to bring it closer to 2.7x speed, we had some big regressions
there. Also google summer of code, and probably
some other things.. Yeah. We moved to Poland last year with Lena and
Lev and even managed to travel a bit in between quarantines. Sea salt is good for your health,
they say. Well, getting stuck at home has its own pros,
I guess. Enough time for Lev to break into the digital art and Blender obviously (for
those of you who have jokingly foretold that). What can I say? Lev is lucky to have Lena
as his inspiration. Guitar is my influence though. Thankfully, our Creative Shrimp business hasn't
been disrupted thanks to your support. On the contrary, we have been trying to expand
and diversify. Instead of one project we run five to ten
different projects at once with amazing creators: Manu Jarvinen, Jeannot Landry, Rachel Frick,
Luca Rood, Eugeny Palamarchuk and others. Aidy is multitasking the whole shebang in
his unique overenthusiastic style, with Eva, Leo and Gio helping to keep the balance. Apparently, the ever expanding Creative Shrimp
universe now includes some drone photoscanning experiments and god knows what else thanks
to our extended video crew in Belarus, Nik and Eugeny, digitizing the abandoned buildings
and other such stuff. And they do it amidst the biggest political crisis in the history
of Belarus. Жыве Беларусь. What can I say? Kudos to them. And kudos to us all in 2020 for making it
through. We are unbelievable indeed. Fortunately life goes on and you keep
drinking coffee, blending, creating talking to Troy Sobotka about gamut mapping and life while life goes on.
Cool, right? Blender has been my only 3D software for the
past 9 years. And as a full-time Blender instructor it’s been a pillar of my career for the
past 8 years. Yet I’ve never been more appreciative of this software as I am in 2020. Because
as long as I have a computer, internet access, and Blender I can do my job all the same,
quarantine or not. This year has made me more aware of this benefit than ever before. My artistic aspiration this year has been
a return to my roots; a return to realistic portrait creation. The first project I used
to test Blender’s capabilities back in 2011 was a portrait. And it absolutely shocked
me that an open-source software could deliver high-res sculpting, projection texture painting,
subsurface scatter, hair grooming and compositing. And while it’s not the best CG portrait
on the internet, for me the experience confirmed that I as the artist was the only thing holding
back Blender’s potential. The tools were there, they were competent at the very least,
and getting better every week thanks to the active, transparent developer community. That’s
when I fully transitioned to Blender from the usual commercial apps. I then promptly recorded my first Blender
tutorial course about creating a realistic portrait with Blender and I’ve been teaching
ever since. So you can imagine that portraits hold a special place in my heart. This year
my passion has been re-ignited. In part because I welcomed a new daughter into my family and
I spend a lot of time enjoying her face; doing anything I can to make her smile or laugh.
But also because I want to explore new features like random walk subsurface scattering, the
newly re-written multiresolution sculpting, the cloth brush...all of which I can do safely
from home. So thank you computer graphics; Thank you Blender. What to say about Gianluca?
He was a great professional and he was a great gentleman I met Kino at the Blender pizza. Soon after we were in Amsterdam for one of the first
Blender Conferences. I showed some of my works Kino was among the first who told me
my works were nice and cool Now I live thanks to Blender. Gianluca along with several other people in this audience has changed my life. Thank you Kino. Particularly, there is one sentence that stuck with me Open Source gave me work. Or, to
say it differently, during all my life, I’ve worked thanks to Open Source.
This is a statement that he repeated several times, during meetings and conversations and...
Well, I would like to remember Kino for this, Ciao. So long Gianluca and thanks for all the polygons In 2019 we started a show called
"bhurji wale chacha" on youtube Its an indian animated comedy show, people
liked it so much... that in several months we reached from 0 to 300k subscribers The idea was to shoot a real footage and then
add a 3d character where these characters, talk about current
social events, does movie review and make people go die laughing, and we did
this all using blender Using Blender these guys have made 45 episodes. And that is around......20 .. umm .. no no
.. 40000...minutes of .... Ohh my gaad Don’t Mind him, it's around 3 hours of content 1 year ago when we started, it took us 20
to 30 days to create 4 min of content. since then we are constantly finding a way
to reduce the production time, for that, we created 360 poses for each characters,
and many small scripts to speed up the workflow, This way we end up doing each episode in 6
to 7 days. And no matter who ever animates the scene
quality will always remain the same This pandemic actually hit everyone so hard,
but as it has negative effects, it also has a positive one, For us, All the ongoing
projects were cancelled. Because of that we started working on bhurji
wale chacha full time We shifted to our home town,
Faced communication issues No internet
So it became tough to work together But on the other side our content was recognised
by many famous youtubers And india Celebrities,
that thing encourages us to make more of it. In the future , we are looking for introducing
more characters, better scripts, longer episodes, and more collaborations we will keep making these videos for as long as we can and we hope that people will keep supporting us Thank you for listening to us. What if I told you an entire short film can
be made by only you. That’s what I did, what had started off as an end of the school
year project ended up turning into an entire quarantine short film. The thing that makes
this short film so special to me is that, everything from character design to rigging,
and even all the little models were created entirely by me. This short film has really
challenged me to practice all types of skills there are in the 3D world and yes there are
a lot of them. I want to express the importance of learning and practicing all areas of 3D.
If you’re anything like me, I had been stumped for the longest time of what skill I really
wanted to pursue and get better in. I would spend hours trying to correct lighting for
one of my scenes, or fix a glitch in one of my rigs, but from this whole experience this
just inspires me to learn and get better at that skill. At a glance a short film does
sound like an ambitious project, but when you really think about it, having freedom
of artistic views of what you envision and imagine can really enlighten your passion
for a project or future career. Especially with blender at your side. So with that insight
go out there and learn every skill there is, find pure enjoyment in what you do and explore
your horizons to find what you’re most passionate about. Thank you. I’ve always wanted to make these letter
balloons in Blender Why? Hmmm, I’m not really sure…
But it seems like the perfect ‘stay at home’ project, now that Blender supports cloth inflation. You see, my wife and I just bought a house,
and I wanted to make a cool image to share our exciting news.
Step number one was to type the letters. That wasn’t too hard…
Step number two is to figure out how to get the right settings
to make the letters inflate perfectly. Wife: Hey Jack, we need to paint the house! Step number three was to figure out how much
paint we needed to buy, by making a rough model of our new house,
and calculating the surface area. And I totally nailed it, by the way!
Step number four was remembering to keep the balloons pinned in place
so they didn’t fly around during the cloth simulation.
And the last step was giving them a beautiful material.
All that was left was to take the photo, and add in the digital balloons.
I’ve been making fun ‘happy birthday’ messages for my friends and family too! Oh yeah, and these balloons?
They are just totally just composited in. The real ones are too expensive… Probably because of inflation! and action so, what? let's start, “hora de morfar”, right hello everyone my name is Dalai and I'm Pablo Welcome to Blender Today Bcon 2020 edition virtual, everyone is online, everyone is at home hopefully in the company of their beloved ones Yes and beloved comfort box
if you got it in time luckily you can be wearing or enjoying - I don't wanna give any spoilers (laugh) you can smell it Dutch? Does it smell Dutch? Cut What a year, what a year such a casual segue
'what a year' 2020 Blender for 2020 had huge plans, 2 conferences, 1 in LA 1 in Amsterdam
We were going to Siggraph, CTN, Annecy This year we would've contributed so much
to global warming No, but we had so much planned and 4 releases
Which were also part of the plan to be done at some time during these events, it was crazy.
I think that in a way or another we did achieve a lot of those goals.
If you think about the conference the goal was to connect, to reach out, to find more
people that can be involved in the community in more ways
And every one of the activities that happened throughout the lockdown: the whole Blender
Open Up, the Settlers project, Scripting for Artists - Code Dives!, the Blender Every days...
I got to interview some of my favorite artists and ask them stuff
that was amazing It is one to remember
We started with 2.82 even before the pandemic started here in Europe
then at 2.83 completely done online and this was such a special release
And it is still part of everyone's lives people still download the Blender LTS everyday
It was the first long term support release. What is long term support? Well Blender long
term support means that you are gonna ... it is gonna keep getting more stable for two
years, no new features, just fixes already there are there 8 releases and there
are more to come Hopefully not that many because Blender is
not that unstable come on, how much more stable do you want
it? I really like to think that this amount of
certainty we know that it's going to be in our lives for two years to come if things
go well according to plan. Yeah, it is something you can actually, you
know, hold on to it - 2.83 Maybe it is a good metaphor for your life
It's a good thing to maybe stop with all the travelling, going around just focus on the
software 4 releases: 2.90
2.9, 2.9! We had 2.9 this year We changed the numbering system
2.90.1 came out 2.91 will come out next month
and next year we already have 3.0 (planned) so big plans ahead
for me 2020 was a big year personally I moved to Amsterdam
got my contract renewed ... yesterday, for 5 years
5 years? fist bump. 5 years? Congrats man
Yeah, thank you (big laugh) And we see like, despite everything, the good
things that happened this year they were good and I will bring them with me for the years
to come So I kind of look forward for 2021
Definitively I'm also looking forward to see what all this year
we reached 5000 subscribers on the development fund
plus all the millions of people that are downloading Blender
It is 12 million downloads in the last year only last month, only the windows installer
was downloaded 1 million times These people are using Blender, are learning
it, and I can't wait to see what they can do next year
Alright, everyone, see you next year Can I shake this? No
I guess now we can open it and see what is inside
No! No, no, no, no Good bye
Ciao At Ubisoft, we use Blender in tons of different
ways. We have prototyping teams that use Blender in order to quickly convey concepts for games,
to explore new user experiences, and to inspire production teams. Last year, the Ubisoft Strategic Innovation
Lab hosted a Blender JAM. Over a weekend, students and Ubisoft employees worked hand
in hand in order to deliver the best projects they could. It was a great opportunity for
Ubisoft to explore Blender’s potential and to share our knowledge and experience with
students. At Ubisoft Film & Television’s Paris office,
we produce animated series and films. We wanted to approach production in a new and original
way, and Blender was the perfect fit to support us. We put Blender at the heart of our upcoming
projects: we trained our artists and developers, with the help of the Blender Foundation and
we initiated discussions with other Ubisoft entities, as well as external partners. Blender became our main 3D package and we
enriched it with additional features, from small tools to bigger extensions. We began
by contributing some developments to Blender’s VR components, and now, we’re proud to fully
embrace the potential of open source. For example this summer we published Mixer,
an add-on for real-time collaboration between artists. We are continuing to develop it,
and anyone can check it out. What's more, Blender is the backbone of our
current production: a 70min Rabbids Invasion TV special episode. Here is a sneak peek at
an add-on we are developing to manage its previz. At Ubisoft, we believe that open source can
bring incredible opportunities, and we are excited to work with Blender on even more
projects in the future. Hi everybody!
Alan here, unpaid intern to Captain Disillusion. Ever since he and I accidentally delivered
the greatest talk in the history of the Blender Conference the other year, I don’t think
I’ve used the software all that much really. I mean, there have been a few instances.
I imitated this fake viral video and then my version became more viral than the original.
Did some stuff in a zombie movie. Interesting water simulation for this sciency
video. All bunch of shorts explaining imaging technology
principles. And this wagon wheel effect thing.
I reconstructed a Korean theme park ride with it. Oh yeah, I used it in a Emmy winning Youtube original series.
And did a whole virtual set episode and also did visuals in a TEDx talk with it.
I don’t even remember that. Then there was the video about the
moon UFO sighting. In which I tried to imitate the style of an actual Blender god.
And I guess I used it to explain the very physics of light.
But mainly, I would say I’ve been using Blender as a sort of fidget tool.
You know how sometimes you want to take a break from the effect or animation you’re
working on by working on a different animation? I’ve been playing with Blender’s Grease
Pencil tools and just doing these little silly practice sketches.
It’s really quite therapeutic. I have to admit I’m not very good yet, but
I think I’ve been improving. So far, my crowning achievement has been an
accurate animation of one of my cats - this one - throwing up.
Now, I’m sorry, I didn’t have time to do proper sound design on this, so I’m just
gonna have to provide the sound effects in real time. Here we go.
<accurate cat noises> Well there you have it! Whether I’m working
hard or slacking off, I just gotta say: Blender Foundation, Blender Software and Blender Community:
Thank you for making it easy. Hello Blender community!
I’m Claudia Hernández Ascensio I’m a digital artist and foundation member
of the G-Blender Community. I have to live a 2020, that changed my whole life. My husband dies of Covid19, my partner for
almost 21 years. We founded the G-Blender community in September
2004. We had the opportunity to do many productions,
give courses and conferences about Blender. Awaking other minds to how rewarding it is
to be part of a free software community. The day my husband died, we received messages
of solidarity in different languages. Many expressions of affection and beautiful
memories of people who lived with Octavio in different
locations. These treasures will help me then, when our daughters grow up,
they’ll know the work we did with the beautiful community of Blender.
Currently, I’m giving online courses. I’m still passionate about teaching,
and producing with such complete, professional and beautiful software.
But, above all, I carry in my heart the strength and resilience
that the support of the community gives me. Hi everyone, I’ve been using Blender since
December 2018. I’m an artist and musician. Here’s some of my work. Well this is what passes for a Blender Conference this year You sitting at home probably in your underwear
watching a pre recorded message of me through a screen whom you already watch
through the screen, right? But there wasn't all bad news this year there
were some good news for example millions of people who suddenly
found themselves locked at home possibly unemployed decided to start learning Blender
So the moment the lockdown came into effect the traffic to my donut beginning series
doubled and it hasn't slowed down
In fact, thanks to covid, we have 1.1 million more Blender users today than we would have
had without it. Heck, even prisoners are learning Blender and I should know because I went and
spoke at one There's one, actually the closest one to me,
believe me or not, that is teaching blender as an important skill
to enter the creative industry and I wanted to see what the inside of a maximum security
prison looks like without stabbing someone obviously
and it was kind of inspiring what they lacked in hardware and internet connection
they made up for with time because you'll never guess, but inmates have a
lot of spare time and they are using it to make rap videos, cars, towns, nature
come to think of it, some things that some of them may never get to see again
which I guess it is kind of sad but also kind of cool that they can make it and explore
in VR, eh? And over at Poliigon, we have been busy trying
to solve the biggest problems that plagues 3d artists today
by creating a blended toolbox add-on that automatically takes new downloaded zip files
and creates a ready to use material with one click so you can get photoreal materials
and do your thing faster we also developed all sort of photoscan plants,
rocks, grounds and procedural generators which you can read more at blog.poliigon.com if
you are so interested and while I'm looking forward for international
borders reopening so I can fly to Amsterdam next year for 'business', I'm enjoying time
with the kids in the meantime In February we had a healthy little boy which
really confused my 2 year old but so far they have been getting along great when I'm not recording videos or podcasts
I'm acting like a dork to make them laugh So from my family to yours here to a better
2021 I’ve made a fictional hospice in Blender
called Die in Heaven. Currently 9 characters live there, and they are somehow closely related
to death either through illness, age, or tragic accidents.
I’ve made Die in Heaven, because I think, that death has become an overlooked subject
in everyday conversations. Therefore the story unfolds in a hospice, while I’m trying to
make death an easier subject to talk about, without it being too serious or scary.
Right now, I’m the only one working on it, and that’s both challenging and time consuming.
At the same time, I can’t help, but keep working on it, because the project embraces
everything creative, that I like to work on. If you want to know more about Die in Heaven,
you can visit their Instagram or their website. “Or you can write to me, Alan, at hello@dieinheaven.com.
I’ll be looking forward to hearing from you.” So here we are: together apart.
And thank god we don’t need anyone else to do our stuff in Blender, right?
Oh wait! Actually, I need a lot of more people, because for the last few years, we have been
working hard on an animated short film, fully made in Blender, titled “Roberto”.
It may seem that the pandemic must have been a hard blow for the project, but the truth
is that it has been a great help to finish the film on time and with the quality we wanted.
Between us, it helped us to work 24/7 without suffering the reproach from our families.
What has complicated things is the arrival of these 2 beautiful beasts in the middle
of the production. And of course the launch of version 2.80 of
Blender. Despite the months of getting stuck with unstable
versions and the delays of the stable one, we are really happy to have risked upgrading
the version of Blender in the midst of the process.
We have grease pencil to incorporate special effects in some impactful scenes .
And of course, we have killed the render times thanks to the EEVEE engine, which has worked
great with the aesthetic of the shot. Let me tell you a small secret.
When we had rendered about 1/3 of the movie, we realized that we had forgotten to remove
the timestamp. It was like a crazy panic moment, and with
another rendering engine it would have been a disaster, but with EEVEE, we were able to
repeat again and finish on time. So thank you guys for being there. We, the whole team of Roberto, hope you like the movie. And stay safe. See you soon. Hi guys.
The last scene is from our latest movie about a group of time travelers from medieval time
to our new modern time. My name is Johannes Ewers. I'm a member of a hobbyist movie making group from a small
town in Germany, Ahrweiler. There are roughly 30 actors, a director, of course cameraman and me who is responsible for visual effects. and my main tool - of course - is Blender. We were looking for new ways to do our film
and what we did was a lot of green screen work.
I want to show you a little bit how we did it and what the results are.
First step was to transform a cellar room into a green screen studio.
Then we did shots, actor by actor to keep them apart.
Actors were then put together in a scene not in the compositor. As Blender objects:
videos on planes. As you can see here, you can do quite complex scenes.
The reverse was also used: having virtual actors in a real-world environment. Interacting actors with objects is somewhat tricky. But then you have these wonderful Mantaflow
explosions. We are super excited to be part of this very
special edition of the Blender conference. This year has been strange for everyone and remote
work was a big part of it. In this context, Swann's research knew
a big step up in terms of community involvement and development. Real-time collaboration is a hot topic.
The whole thing about the multi-user add-on is to bring people together on a common creative
goal. Thanks to an amazing support from the Blender
community we are pushing the boundaries of collaboration The video you are about to see will give you a glimpse of the possibilities.
It was created in real-time by people across the globe I’m a 3D artist, and a
Blender user since 2005. The last industry work I did was working on
the feature film ‘I Lost My Body’, by Jérémy Clapin, owned by Netflix.
And I had the opportunity to work with those awesome people
from Gao Shan Pictures and Xilam Animation. I actually got that job when I met one of
my old 3D teachers at the Blender Conference 2017.
I get back home and I get an appointment with Arnauld Boulard,
the director of Gao Shan Pictures, and I make the animation department, switch
to Blender. When my job was done, I actually shake his
hand to say ‘good bye’, but he did not let me go.
And he said: ‘I need someone like you, to continue on
the project, as an animation TD’ I say, ‘why me?’, and he actually responds:
‘I know only one ‘Blender man’ on the Indian Ocean area’
And this wings my head like crazy. People didn’t call me ‘Blender man’
since high school. So, I just continue as one of the technical
directors on the movie, and at the end of it, I just became the Blender
reference on the project. Because the two studios were asking me about
the ‘Blender way’ of doing things. After that, the Indian Ocean Picture Institute,
the animation school we have here on Reunion island called me to do a workshop.
And with all of this pandemic stuff, Blender was actually the perfect match.
At that point, the school just let me add more Blender into the curriculum.
But what strike me the most, is that fact one of the almost graduated 3D student,
actually uses Blender now for his graduate movie.
And I am super proud about it. I’m just a Blender user, like you,
but maybe on your side, you are the Blender man also,
because you are taking care of the people. In 2000, this book was published, even subsurf
wasn’t in render yet. Then a short movie was made.
And now 20 years have passed. Hi, I am Shigeto.
For the last 10 years, I have been working on things like parametric modeling.
These have been presented several times at the Blender Conference.
Of course, it’s a very interesting field, and continues to evolve. But I am reminded of this book I made a long
time ago. And I am creating a new world for myself. This is a world like holts, that follows one story. And now there is a new technology.
As you know 3d printing is an amazing technology. I don’t have any plans to publish anything right now. But I look forward to sharing my work with
you again, someday, somewhere. I hope to see you again soon, bye. Hey, welcome to the Blender Studio!
I want to tell you all about my 2020 but... let’s do it another time!
Here is what the team has been up to in the past year So! In November I created a tutorial series on
the Blender Cloud showing the creation of a monstrous Angler fish from start to finish.
This was a first for me because it was entirely done in Eevee so I learnt a lot on that project.
We dove further into the world of Eevee on Coffee Run, which was our next open movie project. I did lighting
and compositing on that one mostly. It was entirely NPR-based, so we had to develop a whole new bag of tricks
for it. Then I did some artwork and explorations for
Cosmos Laundromat, the second cycle. I did some lighting and rendering on the side
for a little promo clip that one of our animators - Pablo Fournier - was animating with the Rain character.
And I also had some more fun side projects. Which is making the music for the Blender 2.83 and
2.90 feature reels. Now I'm doing modeling, look dev and art direction
for the Sprite Fright project. Our team is so talented and it's growing every day, it's
amazing to be part of it all! My year 2020 actually started with moving
to Amsterdam to work at the Blender Studio, which is awesome!
One thing that I’ve been working on since then is creating a procedural shading course
on the Blender Cloud, which I put a lot of effort into.
And, of course, I’m also working on the film projects here at the studio. In the beginning
of the year there was ‘Coffee Run’, which I helped out with the shading a little bit.
Then there was ‘Settlers’. And ‘Settlers’ was great because we could do some more experimental
stuff. For example we solved a lot of the issues we had in the shader level and then
hooked the shader up to the rig to make everything work together.
And now, of course, there is ‘Sprite Fright’ which is super exciting! And, uh yeah, I’ve
been doing a lot of shading work on there, there’s loads more to come but it’s already
super fun! And yeah, that’s gonna be very cool to follow,
so keep an eye out for that. Oh, and something else that’s coming up
really soon is Nodevember. So, get ready! Hey! So to recap what I’ve been doing this
year: I helped to find the look for Coffee Run. I painted all the set pieces and got
to see how the team turned them into 3D spaces that still feel a lot like illustrations - super
neat! I got to then also design tons of characters
for the Settlers project. We kept it pretty open when it comes to what a Settler even
is and we got to experiment a lot with simpler, sillier designs and shading styles for each
character. This one was a really good refresher since
the goal wasn’t really perfection but a lot of things in a short time and throwing it out there
for people to play with and enjoy. Then I joined the team again for Sprite Fright
and I helped to design how the characters move and emote. I also got to design a lot
of forest creatures and environment pieces. That is to be continued! And that’s pretty much it from me. Enjoy
the online conference and see you all in person next year, hopefully! Bye. Started the year animating on Coffee Run,
being just two animators, I had to animate a big part of it, so that was super cool. After that I made some animations for the
Settlers project. This animation was more funny, and I was able to experiment with a more
cartoony style, that allowed to make more crazy timings and also crazy smear frames, that was
really fun to do. After that I was in charge of making an animation
for the release of Rain's rig, this time I had to do something more realistic. And now I'm busy doing some animation test
for the new Sprite project, still in early development but already doing some interesting
things like walkcycles and stuff like that So that's being my year and I hope you had
a good one also. So against my expectations, actually a lot
of stuff happened this year. It started out with me working on the last
modeling bits of my course, the Stylized Character Workflow with a full retopology chapter.
At the same time I was modeling for Coffee Run which then ended up becoming a full on
Blender Open Movie Project. Then the quarantine started and we transitioned
to the Settlers project where I ended up modeling 4 characters and environments in pretty
unique styles compared to what we did at the studio before and I ended up recording and commentating
almost all of it and we put it up for free on the Blender Cloud.
And now I am modeling and sculpting a full colorful character lineup for the latest Blender Open
Movie Project “Sprite Fright” which is being directed and led by really talented artists
like Matthew Luhn and Ricky Nierva. So even with zero traveling a lot happened
and I'm really excited for what’s going to come next! For our Coffee Run film I developed the story,
experimented with various animation styles, finished the layout for the entire film, created
a flexible rig for the city that the story takes place in, recorded video reference for
the main acting performance, finished all of my animation tasks, taking the animation
all the way from blocking to polish. I also added some background animation. Designed
the Coffee Run poster, from mockup to final high res version. For the Settlers project I made various walkcycles
for the Gabby character, blocked out the scene and animated it. And then I did the same thing
for the Pip character. For the Sprite Fright project I had a lot
of meetings with Matthew, recorded scratch dialogue, recorded and collected various sound
effects for the project, trimmed and fixed audio as needed, reworked the amazing storyboard
drawings from Dirk. But my main task has been to be in charge of the edit, combining everything
into one unified animatic. I'm currently creating the floorplan and preparing for the layout
phase. This past year has been full of interesting
challenges for the Rigging department. Starting with Coffee Run, is where I learned what the
animators here want and need in their rigs, which as it turns out was not this. Also during Coffee Run I started developing
CloudRig, my Rigify feature set, which I used to rig all the background characters. And
it worked perfectly except for a couple of times. After Coffee Run we released the Rain 2.0
rig, which some of you guys made some really awesome stuff with. Then came Settlers where we went a bit experimental,
and also a bit crazy, because of the lockdown. And now, Sprite Fright is ahead of us, probably
the studio’s biggest project so far, and they expect this guy to rig the whole thing. Can you believe it!? What a year, what a year this has been. Wow.
But very busy. Personally, I've been excited about the area
between shooting pictures of something and having a digital representation of that thing, for
indie filmmaking and stuff. And that includes mapping footage that you
shot onto geometry, which I think is a really fun way to be able to composite, because the
footage is actually there in the scene. I've been doing a lot of photoscans, too,
and trying to rig them all up so they can move and things. Some of them can be, like,
really uncanny valley, but I'm slowly figuring it out.
I've always been scared to do digital people, and they're still- you know, a little eerie
at times, but I'm really excited. But recently I've been working on the HyperBole!
It's the sport of the future. It's high speed, high stakes, high... high body count.
Meet Razor Ranger! After a life-threatening barbed-wire incident, he dedicated his life
to the art of HyperBole. He's the bad boy of the group, and a real rough-ridin' son-of-a-gun.
Don't wanna get in the way of his 36 shooter. Then there's Dylan 2.0. A bad boy cyborg with
a Deathfist and a need for speed. And this gal's the maroon- the burgundy blitz!
She’s uh- she’s blind! And a veterinarian. And of course, Lil’ Tim. Bad boy of the
group! Just 15 years old but he’s already making his mark on- oh no Tim!
Popcornbot. And of course Junkrider! She’s the bad boy
of the group with a nimble rocket and nimbler reflexes; look at her go! And of course Brutalist.
Bad boy of the gr- look it’s a buncha bad boys!
And bud! He’s a freaky one! Gonna put this head on him- it’s a photoscan of my friend
Nate. And there’s the aviator guy, his head’s
a scan of this head. And the big cheese, she’s yellow.
Honestly the entire HyperBole video’s only a minute long anyways, so you’ve just kinda
seen the whole thing, but yeah! I miss all of you, and good luck in the coming year,
and I can’t wait until we can all hang out again. Peace! Welcome to the Blender Conference.
I’m here to speak on behalf of Tangent Labs and Tangent Animation. Obviously, the Blender
conference this year is quite a bit different given the pandemic that’s rolled throughout
the world. So, it’s very unfortunate that we can’t be there in person, but hopefully
we can provide some updates with regards to what our companies are doing.
So, as I think everyone knows Tangent Studios itself is a Blender company We did Next Gen using Blender
and our current project that we are working on with Netflix is also utilizing
Blender in basically the same matter all of our layout, animation, modeling, surfacing
etc. One of the most exciting things we have done
on the Tangent Animation side is release the hydra delegate version of cycles into the
open source, it is possible to hook it into other applications as well as utilize it with
USD input from a variety of packages. Over on the Tangent Labs side we’re getting
ready to launch our new product LoUPE, a cloud-based animation production pipeline tool. LoUPE
includes Asset Management, Production Management, Review and Collaboration Tools, Render Management and real-time reporting. This is our opportunity to take all that knowledge
of all the people who are working within Tangent Animation and Tangent Labs and bring it to
the public and allow people to concentrate on the artistic parts of it and let us deal
with the underlying technical issues. So going forward over the next year we are
looking forward to working with the Blender Institute, Intel and others on improving and
supplementing the USD support inside of Blender and we are also doing some work with Intel
on looking at integrating their open VQKL Volumetric Rendering technology into cycles
as well which we think will have some great benefits for cycles in Blender. And on a personal
note, hopefully next year I can see people at the Blender conference in person, in the
meantime stay safe. Nowadays they use procedural textures. What
is depth of Field? There’s still 10 buildings to be done. The textures are too heavy. What
about the lights? Do I need to use color correction. 5 minutes animation is impossible, what did
I think? Maybe if I use motion tracking? Yeah without selling a kidney. I was almost there. (presentation in Italy) And look at me tonight, I’m explaining this
to you. So thank you a lot for your attention. At the end of February like everyone else
we had to stay at home. The cat, my wife, my two children, the third was almost born,
my two jobs, my goals, my dreams, everything… everything in the house. Our garden has become
the children’s playground. While the attic was used as an office by my wife during the
day, and by me at night. Everything froze in February. The dream of my animation movie
had stopped. After the script and after the first teaser, while the crowdfunding campaign
was almost ready to go. And there I went into my hibernation And then there was a beautiful beginning.
Yeah. The budget isn’t there yet. Maybe being
able to just animate one scene from my script. Blender 2.90 is out and the time I spend with
Blender leaves me happy. Oh nice, so you guys actually have it? And
the cloths as well? Nice. And eeeh, can I use it? Oh, okay? And the old server room?
With green screen? Nice and aah, yeah I can buy the license for the software, of course. Since this global pandemic has forced us to
redirect our lives, it also has left us time to reflection. The lockdown has allowed us
to realize the value of time. So, in this point the combination of both lockdown and
Blender seems to have been positive. As a team it has really been in virtual reconstruction
projects, that we are developing, that we have realized how far Blender has come with
the new implementations. Being aware that it will continue being an
essential tool in our daily work. Like a Roman villa Alicante, Spain we are virtually reconstructing
and where I have participated with photo realistic prop modeling and texturing. Personally I really appreciate the social
part that blender carries with its amazing community, I feel very grateful to be part
of six years now. And that is why I cannot end this video without a mention to one of
the best persons I’ve ever met in my life and it was thanks to my first Blender conference
in 2017. Elf. He passed away on August 5 in Barcelona, Spain. He was a great professional of Blender,
user and lover and above all a wonderful person. We will miss you so much. Hey Simeon, what are you doing?
Hey Marc, I'm currently in Blender and I use the OpenXR features from Blender to inspect
a scene in VR for a VR app for our clients. And Falk, what are you doing there?
Hey, I'm testing our new camera rig for virtual production, and of course we use Blender and
Vive controls for the tracking data, to get the camera movement right into Blender. And Sebastian, what are you doing there?
I'm currently working on the Astoria VR scene in Blender and doing the shading, lighting
and rendering here. So, let's see what our colleagues are doing! Hey Micha! Hi! Hey, what are you doing there?
Oh hello, I'm just doing the training. Hi Silke!
Hey! Ah, you're animating Alfred! And there's Clemens, the master of doors Hi Before the pandemic I went to UK Then I came home and moved to a different home I also started to weave again
And I even got married. I think you and the flowers make a lovely couple! Many happy years. Thanks, Captain! But to be honest, I’ve spent most of my time just working from home and trying to
find inspiration in simple things all around me Welcome to my home office in New Jersey. Fun
fact: I modeled this attic in Blender when I was helping my contractor do a remodel.
I'm a volunteer Blender developer. Lately I've been working on New Booleans.
Here’s an example of a Boolean difference - a cube subtracting a kind of handle thing
that is in the same plane as the top of the cube, and pokes through the bottom of it.
Old Boolean doesn’t even try to handle coplanar cases like this, and gives this bad answer.
The new Boolean does try, and succeed, on cases like this, giving the correct result.
Here’s how new Boolean works. There are 4 main phases. In the first phase,
we triangulate both objects, because that makes the next two phases much easier.
In the intersect phase, we find where every triangle in one object intersects triangles
in the other. Then we subdivide the original triangles.
We use a special constrained triangulation algorithm that ensures that the intersection
segments and points we found earlier are part of the triangulation.
All coplanar triangles are handled together, using the same constrained triangulation algorithm.
Because we use exact arithmetic and always reuse vertices with the same coordinates,
the previous step has joined the two objects together, with shared intersection points
and segments. In the Boolean phase, we need to figure out
which volumes of space are inside each of the original objects. We start by finding
patches. A patch is a set of faces that are connected,
but stop when you reach an edge that has more than two triangles attached to it.
Then we can find cells. Each cell is a volume of space enclosed by a set of patches.
Now finally we can find which volumes are in the cube and which are in the handle. Start
with knowing that far outside is in neither. For this cell, crossing over a cube patch,
from the outside, we know that this cell is in the cube but not in the handle. Therefore,
this is in the final cube minus handle boolean result.
Finally, we dissolve all the edges and vertices that are only there because of triangulation.
And that’s it. I hope you enjoyed this inside look at new Booleans. So, I think the fact that this year has been
challenging sorta goes without saying at this point. I’ve been trying to keep as busy as I can.
I feel very fortunate though that in April I started a new position as an Art Lead for
a company in Edinburgh. I’ve been learning a lot there and it’s the first time I have
started a new job and worked 100% remotely with a brand new team as well, so it’s really
good. That comes with its own set of new things to learn. Personal work, I’ve been making, I’ve
had a lot more time for that. So trying to focus on the positives, I’ve been making
these little critters. I just, I really love animals and I really wanted to sort of share
a little bit of positivity even if it’s just a brief, brief respite from people’s
day to day lives at the moment. I live in Scotland and my family lives in New
Zealand, so not knowing when it’ll be safe to see them again or for them to come visit,
that is really tough, so anything that I can do to bring a little bit of positivity to
the world feels like a very good thing at the moment. So I really hope that you like my little critters
and that it brings you a little bit of joy to your day. Cheers. 4 years ago, we found a free special chest
of treasure on the internet That special treasure is blender Now all we wanted to do was create beautiful
vfx shots so when we got Blender, we felt like we had
all the power in the world that was a re-enactment of the first time
we opened Blender and we did not open Blender again because
we did not understand what was going on in that software plus the
interface looked like algebra That was our first time using a 3d software It took us 4 months to open Blender again after seeing the beautiful Blender open movies
and renders from artists in the facebook community And that day we created our first CG render As filmmakers our process of using blender
was by learning as we were creating majorly from youtube tutorials and of course
the doughnut ritual And most times while shooting our projects
we find it hard pulling of certain shots so we spend months tinkering with blender
finding out the very best ways to actually pull them off We made our first sci-fi film in two months,
we made use of blender to create and render a facility which we placed our characters
in This project inspired us to do so much more
that the next goal for us was to give our character a robotic arm.
it took us 7 months to work on this project so few months after putting this film online,
we went viral for making scifi films that were shot on our smartphones Without Blender, that might not have happened And the truth is Blender helped us go viral. 2020 has certainly been interesting for myself
as I expect it has for everyone else. Outside of my family, my young son Marvin, who is
just now two and a half, my other focus has been on my small brewery. I own a small brewery named Sandhills Brewing
that is a little neighborhood taproom. We can seat about 50 people comfortably, (it can go up to 74).
It is very small (this is the whole thing!). 2020 has made it particularly interesting, what
with the shutdown orders, because the entire business is based on selling beer over the
bar; high margin, low volume (if you can be open.) That has certainly made things a little
interesting to try and make it work but for me it has also been a lot of fun because ultimately
brewing is one of those things that is the perfect marriage of the arts and sciences.
And so, it gives me a chance to express my creativity, focus on the technical aspects, and make something
that has nothing to do with the digital world but is something that also brings people together
and creates a sense of community that hopefully people can enjoy. On the Blender side of my work I have been
almost exclusively focused on Blender Market. Some of you may know that we started Blender
Market as a side project of CG Cookie back in 2016 and since then that has basically
been my full time focus. Admittedly I don’t use Blender all that much anymore; I still
love to dabble and I keep an eye on releases and all that but my core focus and what I
do now is on helping other people, creators on Blender Market, create their own businesses
and create (ideally) an independent livelihood based around blender while giving back to
the open source development of Blender. Really just helping to bring a financial ecosystem to the Blender community that allows everybody to contribute, give back and ideally create some sense of independence for themselves and their family. Hey there, it’s David from Theory Studios!
Thank you so much for watching our world premiere of our brand new cartoon series Bugs Buddy.
It’s going to be on YouTube Kids later on this year. Now before I let you go I have
a special treat. I ask some of our best artist on the team to share their top Blender tips
with you. So without further ado, Ben, Keith, Jennifer, take it away. This is Ben McDougal, lead shading artist
at Theory Studios, here to tell you always check the bit depth of your normal maps. Use
16bit or higher to avoid artifacts. This is Keith Morgan for Theory Studios compositing
team. Did you know that you could reduce overhead by replacing whole objects with sprites. Hi, I’m Jennifer, the lead animator at Theory
Studios. Remember to always to use video reference to make your animations look even better! Hey everybody, Sean Kennedy here. I still
work at CoSA visual effects but I haven't been in this building since I think March.
Just like everybody else now I work from home which happens to be a four mile (6.4 km) walk that way so come on, I'll show you some of the things I've been working on. So here we are at my home workstation, and
I got a few clips and screenshots I can show you So this first shot is from the Swamp Thing
tv show. See that liquid spilling out of the bottle as it slides along? That’s just particles.
I used the alpha channel from the particle render in compositing to darken the floor
and add reflection, which instantly makes it look wet. It's all in the next shot, too,
where it all catches fire. Next up is an explosion from Lethal Weapon,
which is no longer on the air. Our FX dept did most of the work here, but the supervisors
wanted to see a bunch more glass behind the actors, which was really easy to crank out.
I also added a little textured interactive light on the wrecking ball in the foreground. Here's another Lethal Weapon shot where I
added a bunch of falling debris behind the actors. For this shot from Station 19, I used a combination
of a Blender smoke sim and a sim that our FX dept did. I then added a few floating embers
in there, as well. For the tv show Pennyworth we did this really
cool house explosion. This shot was really fun. Our FX dept was really busy doing the
fire and smoke sims for this shot, so I was asked to do a lot of the debris. I made lots
of different passes and I handed them off to my friend Jeannie who did all the compositing.
Most of it is brick or rock chunks, and there's a few floating paper particle systems in there,
as well, and I used the Fracture Modifier branch of Blender for the shattering door. Here's another shot on Swamp Thing where I
used ClothFX to show a vine tearing through a guy's face. And finally, here's a couple shots on Pennyworth
where I did some head tracking to put in some gore effects. And that’s all I’ve got! So, I hope everybody
is staying safe out there and I can’t wait til we can all hang out in person again! And
til then, swing by the website and say hi! Well, this year was “fun”.
Especially if you are Lebanese like me, with protests, counter-protests, a huge economic
downturn and then a nice massive semi-nuclear explosion to top it all off.
The massive economic downturn meant that none of the credit cards in the country worked
anymore. I couldn’t even renew my Netflix subscription.
You know what doesn’t need a subscription, though?
Praying daily at my custom made Clément Foucault altar, thanking him for making EEVEE, which
has allowed me to work throughout the year. This project, directed by Nadim Shoufi
The clips that which I’ve showed you at the beginning of the video.
I rendered 60,000 frames in 2 months. Still rendering.
Blender is brought up by the love, kindness and passion of the Blender Community.
A few days after the explosion, glass was broken everywhere around me,
I was interviewed by a couple of Dutch news reporters.
After the interview, I was contacted by non other than Bart Veldhuizen.
I am sorry if I’m butchering your last name. He was asking about me. This gesture really
touched me. And he told me if there was anything I could
do to help. We started talking and I had the chance to show him some of my writings I did
before for local publications about Blender. One thing led to another and now I’m writing
for Blender Nation as the new Blender development Editor.
So Blender has really been with me through thick and thin in software form and in creative
form. The Blender Community, Blender, Bart, everyone
out there: thank you for helping me through this and happy blending ahead! Hi, my name is Raymond Neoh.
I’m the founder of CG Global Entertainment ltd, in Hong-Kong China.
We are working with Blender Institute to localize the Blender Cloud into Chinese.
We also have an institute called the Krystal Institute,
for creativity and production technology, to promote open source solution to digital
content creation industry globally. In addition, we run AGM China, a global anim
magazine, to help promote the industry. The localization of Blender Cloud is a monumental
task. At present, we have already
translated and subtitled over 7000 minutes of Blender Cloud materials
into traditional and simplified Chinese. During the labour-intensive subtitle making period, our team also created a video tagging and
search system. Using this video tagging and search system,
our team can assign keywords tagged to specific segments of a video content.
Using this tagged searching engine, the result UI will show the relevant search
result of video, along with a timeline visual,
which is linked into every course where that word, text or question to is answered it.
The linking visual are referring to the meaningful time segment of the video.
User are then able to play that specific time period of the video
directly from the search result. This video tagging and searching system further
enhances the functionality of our search engine.
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learning material for our users who want to master the software. Hey. Oh hi! I’m Matthew Luhn. And for the last 30 years, I have been animating,
storyboarding and writing on a number of different movies and TV shows. From the Toy Story films
to Monsters, Inc to Finding Nemo to Ratatouille to Up to Cars to the Simpsons. Lots of great
movies, TV shows and specials. But for the last 6 months I’ve been working
on a project with the talented team at Blender that I’m so, so excited about.
It is an animated short that I am writing and directing called “Sprite Fright”.
Hmm... what is Sprite Fright? Well, the origin of Sprite Fright begins with
my curiosity and love for the mysterious creatures that live in the forests and the woods and
the mountains. Everything from gnomes to trolls to pixies
to... ehrrrm... these little guys. And also... these guys! Remember these?
And one of the things that I’ve always loved about these mysterious creatures is that they
usually have a cute and cuddly side, but then they also have a creepy side.
whoo-oo! And that’s what Sprite Fright is all about.
It’s about the cute and the creepy! And I’ve written up the script. Not just once,
twice, three times. I’ve written up many times.
And then we have storyboarded it over and over and over again. We end up getting our
creative team to build the characters and the environments and the props and the animators
start testing out our characters. And the lighters and shaders are texturing and lighting
to be able to put that Blender touch on these characters.
Now the cool thing is that you can go online and you can check out all the work we’ve
been doing. You can check out the characters, you can check out the props. You can even
check out our story animatics. This is something that most studios don’t
want to do, because they don’t want to share aaaalll of the behind the scenes. But we’re
going to share it all. And we’re doing it because we want to get
you excited about Sprite Fright that ends up getting released, online, next year. Right before the pandemic started, I came back home to Germany after
spending 6 months in Montreal lockdown basically started right after we got back.
Luckily, I didn’t feel constrained by the lockdown initially, because working from home is something I’ve
been doing for years now and I am pretty much comfortable having my own workspace, it’s
actually the best in some ways. However, being bound to just the four walls of your home
and not being able to see your friends, with the occasional grocery store trip being the highlight
of your week, can become pretty tough over time. It resulted in me losing track of time
entirely. In my mind, I am pretty much convinced that we are still in March. Still, I decided
to make the best out of it and decided to focus on my final year at university, spent
the time I have on learning new skills and try to plan my future for 2021, even though there
is still a lot of uncertainty about it, still. In some way, Blender has been my constant
companion during this time, the comfort zone I felt like I really needed. Another thing I also realized about me
and my art is that I felt a lot more motivated to create outdoorsy places this year, probably trying to compensate
for my lack of travel and exploration in the real world Not being able to
make my initial travel dreams of 2020 come true. So I fueled all that energy into my art
instead. In some way, I do feel like I still had my fair share of adventures this way,
despite being at home for the past 7 months. Years ago I used to do makeup effects,
then I directed some movies I directed Death Machine Blade The Last Minute and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. And then I got sick of all that Hollywood stupid stuff. So I went to Burning Man. So then I thought
I’m gonna make some more movies. I mean the money is good but... Hey! I’ll make my own movies.
You can do it. Digital cameras and nanana - but I’ll need to do the effects, do the editing,
color correction, 2D, 3D... Bleeendeeer, oh my god. So I started doing tons of effects.
I did effects for my friends low budget movies: Well Word, Haunted Swordsmen. And I just got into all kinds of techniques
for these low budget movies that I was trying to do. The electronic puppets, photoscanned heads... The first one was a total bust,
the second one was a semi total bust the third one appears to be working out. So I got some awesome actors involved and robots so I’m nearly done with it.
And it’s been just amazing. I hope you’re gonna like it. Maybe one day it will actually get finished and you’ll be able
to see it but right now it’s still in production, eeem... And so thank you so much to Ton
and all the developers. It’s unbelievable what you have done. Blender is soaring right now
and at a certain point that’s gonna be the gold standard for everything.
It already is, we know that! Just everybody else has got to catch up. I think it is a quite common effect in films Imagine, you are standing in the middle of a waterfall it's noisy, it's messy, it's colorful, it's wet you see everything is falling down suddenly stops, the jets are coming down you see a bit of splashes you are standing there in the darkness on a black mirror that's how it feels when the doctor tells you
you have leukemia on February 24th, this year
I was urgently hospitalized because I was developing bruises all over
my body I started bleeding in my mouth. The doctor said: "go to the hospital Ton we
have to examine you" At midnight I got the infamous bad news delivery by the doctor that I have acute leukemia
of the quite rare kind it is called APL which is not very common but it is very lethal so usually you don't survive two weeks with this.
Unless, of course, the treatment works So that's what happened They immediately gave me blood transfusions
and chemotherapy and luckily after a few days I was recovering so I quickly moved from the critical phase
to the phase of that you may get cured four weeks later I was released from the hospital I was strong enough to join the rest of the
world in the ... lockdown staying at home. After five weeks I had my first bone marrow
test which was extremely good and cancer was in remission the doctor said,
so we are going to take you to the next phase to cure you fully and that's called the maintenance phase maintenance, right? then she said: well... it actually is 7 months of treatments in which you have to be 4 months
in the hospital. Not full time, but imagine in the afternoon you go to the hospital,
they hook you up with a bag of poison, you wait 3 hours you get sick you go home go to bed, in the morning you feel a little
bit better and in the afternoon you go back to the hospital they hook you up and you get sick again that's for 4 weeks and then you get 4 weeks
to recover another 4 weeks getting sick and 4 weeks to
recover another 4 weeks to get sick another 4 weeks to recover another 4 weeks to get sick! And that was last Friday! The last of the chemotherapy. And then, this morning I went to the doctor again
to discuss the tests I had and luckily my blood is fantastic the bone marrow is looking really good I could be declared cured but there was one little test they are still
waiting it's the DNA test which will take another 2 weeks to get but the doctor said I shouldn't worry about that I'm recovering extremely well so basically, I've got my life back! so ... and oh, how much I would have loved to celebrate that, today, at the conference with everyone because if there would have been a conference and we would have thrown an enormous party not this year so I'm telling you this because this whole
experience has had a profound impact on me on my personality on my life of course plus I had time to think And I learned a couple of lessons First getting cancer and surviving it is not a fight it's not something you win or something you
lose you only need one thing a little bit of discipline of course to take care of yourself eat well, do some exercises but what you need is luck and I was lucky I was lucky that science found the right treatment
for me this is only 15 years old this treatment for people with this kind of
leukemia I was lucky to have family and friends around
me to stand by I was lucky to have a team here in the company
to stand by and to have Francesco Siddi to replace me for 8 months doing fantastic job on it And I was lucky to live in the Netherlands where there is a universal health care for
everyone there was not a moment that I had to worry about
what would the treatment cost and the doctors didn't have a moment to think
other than what can we do for Ton to help him to cure him and to make it as good and easy as possible
for him So next time if you see people having cancer don't wish them strength - in Dutch "sterkte" - just say good luck and I wish you well or a good day or a good evening other things that I learned was that I want to start taking better care of
myself and I want to I have a feeling that I was sacrificing myself
too much so I want to put myself more forward and also take care better of myself in a way that I can pay myself a little bit better so I can afford, for example a little house outside of
Amsterdam with a garden. I also mentioned last year that at some moment
I have to step aside from Blender for the future to allow other people to come
in and that process is being sped up, but not so much that I want to step down but to get very strong people around me to help making Blender strong and keep it strong and move on and step forward because the main thing I learned was that I was really, really not ready to let it go I couldn't let go of Blender because that's my life's work Blender is life, right? Blender is the community it's the team of people here it's everybody who is contributing the developers the bug fixers it's the people who make add-ons it is even the people who complain or the people use Maya and don't like Blender it is the forum trolls and even the people who want to have the
game engine back so all of them are the people I love and all of them I feel like is my family and I would never let go of that family So... enough drama, right? I want to end with a little more happy note as you all know 2020 is not very nice it's a year we are going to forget but the happy message is that 2020 didn't get me down and I want to spread that
positive vibe with everyone so please take care of yourself take care of each other and a little bit of Blender and I see you next year in Amsterdam or somewhere else bye bye cut!
