From the Past to the Present

so let's start the introduction maybe some people come in on the way that's fine so I'm a mad I strike some of you guys might remember me from some lightning talks from last year and from some time ago when I made a show that I made a hat with blender designed the head that I was actually wearing today I have a different one and last year I showed some of my work in what I'm actually going to talk about now I caught my thing from the past to the present but on hand side it was not the most descriptive name for the course so but you guys are here so it's awesome so what do I do I do what I invented my own job I like to say I call it her artistic historical reconstruction or myself and historical reconstruction artist and what I mean by that is that I don't just recreate the past I like to make it give some aesthetic to it some more value some some feeling into the whole thing and that means that I work with like VR experiences or expeditions to make listings I'm gonna rush a bit to the short intro because otherwise there's not much time for the workshop left so what does it mean it means that we are working with Hollywood and we're making the most historical accurate movies of all time for example take Braveheart it's one of the most like if you see it most historic no it's not it's one of the worst it's actually it's a great movie it's just not a historical movie and the more you get into the things the more you realize it's like all in a DAT things I cannot enjoy actually I cannot enjoy movies anymore it's it's it's it's a curse but what do I do I take paintings drawings like these this is a drawing from the 1616 fifty seventeen 300 from a castle in a Meadowlands that currently is in ruins and I think pictures like these and there are more drawings and I create this so I try to rebuild like you know like how the castle might have looked at some point in time going by the images no way of knowing if it actually looked like this because there's a lot of speculation because but that's like the charm of it I think like the research combined with like using some of your mind like some logic or at this this is a piece from the X museum I haven't actually seen this in person so I or created this from this single image and let's see if it wants to load mister sketchfab there we go so I recreated the whole thing animated there and you can see that I don't actually only look out how it looks but I also want to make sure that I know how it works because that gets a sense of authenticity to it and there's actually pretty amazing things made in the past you all might know that the the pirate pistol with a flintlock that slaps a big of stone forward and makes a spark and this one works different this one has a wheel that creates friction and makes a spark that way or I create castles from this is a cosmetic Sandburg currently - ruins this is a work in progress still in the blocking phase but it gives you some idea of did oh I skipped past one project I'm currently working on a part of Leiden where Rembrandt the famous painter I grew up a lifter and 25 and we're actually recreating his different place so he lived about in one of these houses we're currently rebuilding his house and making a VR experience out of it and I'm working with a few guys that know a lot about it I found some reference painting and actual painting from back in the day and I put it my scene I found the right perspective and it actually matches pretty well so the painter did a good job but I like to think I did a good job but and this is one of going to be one of the windows and actually I did something wrong I made this window of 1650 according to my coworkers instead of 1630 like they know a lot they know which which nails they use in which they it's crazy the window should actually have been like twice as small and twice as many and likely for a house of the time so what are we going to do in our workshop we are going to create a shield and you're all might have heard of the mighty Spartans of the Greek history we are going to create this is a spoiler okay we got we are going to create a shield so let's start with you feasts we're my keyboard wants to activate and well I'm just making out of my mind off I've seen a lot of shields so I think I know what I'm doing so let's delete this part just get it down because it's like this oh you guys can see something and it has it has this rim around it I believe so we just killed this out give it some thickness like this and the Spartans had this triangle on their shield so let's make that just grabbing this these edges iam these edges it's hard to see like this and I'm just done doing it quickly so it's not going to be perfect but it needs to bend with your shield so we're making some loop cuts over here alright and then we use the powerful Mac in the tool we set it to a face snap and then we look from the top move it up a bit and if we move it while holding ctrl it will actually snap to the shield just a bit keyboard come on hey and destroy it totally okay and then we give this some thickness like this move it forward it up so and our material already make one bomb we're done it's a quick shield actually no no no it's not a Greek shield this is some Hollywood invention some weird piece of copper that they made in a circle and put some things on it no it's not a show but how do we know because like it's over 3,000 years ago 2400 years ago I believe so how do we still know how these shields looks well luckily the Greeks were also very great artists so they they made some paintings on places so we actually I have a pretty good idea of what the soldiers looked back in the day so this is face painting is not very high resolution as you can see like the shields are around you got that right but like pretty paintings on it it's not just a simple metal bar and also on the backside there's like these these arm strap it's decorated with some shapes and there's like a little rope in this circle and once you'll even has a like a little cloth on side they use that for for arrow fire like so your legs are protected from arrows coming down yeah so it's actually quite different I mean of course some what I would say it's just the shield don't worry about it okay fair point but that's not my thing but there's actually one more thing there's I think twice - but at least one surviving shield from back in the day copper and bronze actually preserved pretty well because it doesn't rust as as fast as iron dust so if we have had one and it actually has even some organic material in it so this is the shield it's called the Vatican shield because it's in the Vatican Museum and if we look in the UV editor some more pictures here so as you can see it's it's it's not in the best state I don't it's this actually this is okay so there are two shields so there are some holes in it but you can you can get the size and you can get like the shape of it as you can see like it's pretty like Bobby but like it goes straight here and then there's the the rim on the side and it's actually quite thick and the reason why that is is because there's wood inside so it's not just bronze like in the the Triana there's actually wood inside so they they made the wood and they made it actually quite thin like I mean this is like 1 to 2 centimeters and then they hammered the bronze into shape and covered it over and even scientists when the city and this thing they said like they couldn't really figure out how they made like the the bronze curved over the side without getting all the firls we can if you take some fabric and you fold it like it's round and you fold it you get like these frills on the side like a tablecloth hanging over the table so all these details like you want to catch you want to capture them in in the real model to get something like believable also interesting and this also shows that I'm going to try to talk and work at the same time this shows that it's not only like fun to recreate your thing but there are also very interesting ideas that get lost if you only go from like a single view or a single memory so let's this time start out with the circles and we can actually have some more a gear over shape let's get our references on the side let's look at the side view I think it's this one you can get some idea of the shape I like to freehand a bit I mean you can also fill in the numbers and XX measurements which is back if you want to through museum pieces reconstruction which is also an awesome thing but I want to catch like the the feel of it like the look of it so it's fine if it's like a millimeter off or something so it actually goes quite straight up here and this is a pretty sharp edge over here and we're going to use a battlemorph of modifier in a second this is a good shape like waiting the day when I started I used to I used to do a very like precise work and it took me hours to make something very simple like the first thing I made was actually a shield but I was filling in all the numbers to the exact point and I took hours and it was actually a very simple model that give a little bit but so I've learned to like that it's fine if it's if it's roughly the correct shape so let's enable smooth shading and others not too smooth for a second reasoning Nomos so you can actually add another look good hair to make it a little more I think it's pretty great this if you guys have questions in the way just ask and I'll try to answer well while working on it so then we have the rim and it's actually a bit downwards as you can see and this is probably like if you struck the shield with a spear it's not gonna stuck you know on a straight face because there's the curve so we might like slide to the side so it's not gonna stick in the shield which could be a real problem if it happens so what we actually see oh no oh okay so this this second layer is the glass protection layer so we shouldn't model that so it's not as thick as I as it seems from a distance but actually there's a little bump in this part okay I think we're pretty good on the way maybe this is a little word not too much though all right now we're going free inside the inside is not just next to ya do I visit the sites sometimes like I'm not like in the best financial position yet - I can like if it's the other side I haven't visited the Vatican two days I like I find some pictures only from some guy who went there to actually get reference photos but if I can I try - yeah like for example the castle I showed in the beginning I've actually visited the ruins to see like like where it's standing one thing you never get from photos is like for example to feel from I mean someone might take a vacation picture but it's it's always different if you're there it's like you suddenly get things my first time in the in the Pyrenees I was actually realizing that you could take an entire army just on the other side of the next mountain and no one would notice on this side I didn't even realize that like so weird but for that you need to be on site calm keyboard yeah so this is actually smoother curve to the inside okay and we can see on the okay so we can see that the metal actually doesn't go to the inner edge all the way the metal goes to here and then you have this piece of wood so we should actually better look at here do you look it's Kim new kids can be amazing but they also can be frustrating sometimes so we had a little bump because that's where the the metal stops and the wood begins and the metal itself is not actually that thick it's the it's the wood of the shield that gives it the thickness so the reason that I'm like I know more I've said it more about the shields and you can get from the image so it's not like I'm extracting this all this information because I really like this shield so but if it's like objects that I like I've never seen before or only in the glance then we'll actually take the time to study the object or subject and yeah make sure that I become a semi expert on the on the subject so I try to find experts that do know a lot about it or or a dive in the archives I really like archives the Steep books those books that you're actually you have to touch them with gloss because it's the danger of you destroying them there are so many stories in these things okay so I'm not really putting the time in to actually make sure that the the thickness what I actually read about the shield is that the the thickness on the and the center part of the shield of the wood and my picture disappeared it's actually thinner than on the side so they even made some some taper in in the wood which is really like difficult to do like on a in a good way and like in a perfect way so they were quite moving with a reason for that not that I've read about like I can I can speculate about those things reasons might be that like because the glancing off to the side most weapons might be getting more stuck on the side like I I'm for this is just like a speculation and you like to think about it but I won't say that it's the truth or something the what weight reduction yeah sure that's this always the most important but why did would it be make it thicker on the end yeah [Music] I was actually talking about the would not necessarily the middle of it but yeah you're right you're right - by the middle yeah yeah let's so maybe they did the would this way to compliment the metal variation and you know to give the whole strength so this one has a little simpler armrest let's put a 3d cursor somewhere here all right so we can actually see that it's cursed on this side so we use the bevel tool we curve in there and it's actually a little bigger I can just use symmetrize for that let's hide this shield for a second that we can actually see what we're doing here so let's give this a little thickness so my normal work flow like with materials and stuff is actually in substance painter but I wanted to show you to you guys that you can do some some of that in a blender like substance painters a really good tool but banner isn't even greater tool so don't want to think that I but I'm a trained blender or something so if this curve here and then we see that this thing goes actually like two very thin and it's probably because it had some like one side keyboard is a bit of a delay sometimes so currently like I could do this better I could use the spin - bender 2.8 has a very nice ass all new interface for the spin tool so I'm gonna miss use their kind of that but for now we're just gonna wait a bit of hi body are really over the years learn to like eyeball different curves with this face and it's actually nothing enough so we're using the proportional editing tool pretty damn sharp something like this good for now and then we use it's no election I cannot see my x-axis symmetrize need to go from plus to see - why - oh the center of the object is not there I'll just copy it over ooh so for example when I'm working with I'm forgetting to talk like ask questions if you think it's decided but when I'm working for example with on the Rembrandt house I'm actually working with historians they call himself construction historians and it's really great to like like work together with these people that like work on a certain subjects for like 20 years I mean they know everything about the city they live in and I don't live in the city myself so for me it's or it's all new but after like the projects I know a lot about the city so I can I can tell people about about things like some even the citizens of the city themselves don't even know it's very interesting and I hope that I can later in life even do this in other countries I mean there's so much so much interesting things around the world that needs to be either preserved or reconstructed so that's that's good back our shield yeah we actually drifted off a little there oh I still have the magnets let's see what can I talk about yeah so often like a lot of museums around the country like the analysis a lot of museums that's what you get when you have a long history I'm not gonna fall this whole thing but uh a lot of museums actually use bigger companies that don't necessarily specialize in history they are just production companies sometimes even game companies or they make commercials and then they hire these companies because well they do know what they're doing in terms of 3d production but they don't necessarily care about the history or or subject so what you often get in museums is like something that looks fun like a little animation or a little like game for visitors to play with come on keyboard but like there might be errors in it and that they didn't really care about or something and for me like the focus is to give the best experience but also like like tell the truth and and yeah that's something I always tell my clients like I I really take the time to focus on or get on giving this quality and then like I'm a little guy I'm I don't have other people working at my my company but it's the quality that I give and it seems that people like tell you that like not everyone but some of the museums or like government government Heritage Foundation's they valued the the quality that it brings yeah so that's one of my settings point selling points let's see where are we so we have made this part and in our other reference this one you go back to the face spendings we can see that there's this robe all around so let's try to make this but for that we need to decide what the upside is of our shield so if we're going to turn it around yeah so like I'm not gonna put on a little imperfection sure but imperfections are really important for like the selling point and for that what you said like you have to look at the tools that they used to make it like these these bronze shields are actually hammered around the shape that they they have before but also you have the thing like okay then you see some people making hammer looks of metal but they actually were pretty sufficient and making it all smooth and shiny so like you really have to think like through and like people were a lot smarter than we give them credit for in the past and we only see that if we actually look deeply and I do think like what was right there like shields in the Greek period where one of the most important parts of the soldier like nurse is saying like come back with your shield or on it and on it means that you're dead and carried on your shield back home which means and that's because the shields are quite heavy so if you run from the battlefield you had to drop your shield because otherwise he wouldn't be fast enough to actually flee from the enemy who also has shields so that means if you don't come back if you come back without your shield then you have your you've run so yeah it's like the saying like I think the Sparta to set more than the other groups because they famously fight to do that which actually not that much more than the others but they like to think they did but yeah what do you mean with the wooden yeah now see the picture also has this strip in the middle so it's the same thing but this one is like thin here and I think there are so it's different way around but it's actually for your arm it's very arm so the center of the shield is around your elbow yep so the shields that you're hold with your hand those are viking shields like if the Vikings have shield sail the middle yeah all this she'll say where I'm over there arm so the center of the shield's in the middle now it's it's hard to see but it's the middle but it's the middle of the shoe because the photo is a bit and you can actually see here there are little holes for the ropes so you hold that with your hand so the thing is in your arm and you hold yeah but yeah it's a good thing like to consider that like you see an image and you have the physical thing that they found for example like I don't know cooking pot and you see on paintings you see the cooking pot and you see alive in the spike but there are no holes for the handle and on the on the image it has a handle so then like is it from the same place or not or did they just make two variations without them with handle and like you have to think about these questions like just deciding oh I see an image and I'm gonna make it it's not always the the right situation so let's quit the curve is apart do I keep flipping it so like if I look at this image we see that this is the one where he holds it and then it goes to the point here and the point there so if you start modeling this shape of the curve they're not visible this is my background is quite dark but maybe I can disable the the show backgrounds that was in the display oh hey guys that's still dark so we have the hanging part here we can do it with three let's see how it's on five history right and it goes in front of there oh it's cyclic graduation so and like you could simulate this with co-simulation to get the accurate to get an accurate physical hanging which you can also estimate it so like gravity comes from here so this one is actually hanging more like this and this is getting to the place where the handles are and we have here the part that we hold with our hand and then we have the second one which which would actually I don't know how they showed on the image on the image it does it goes straight here see I was almost making it wrong so it doesn't go all the way to the bottom that it hangs off where this shield I mean I'm sure that it there were different ways that everyone had their different shield because they had to let that to buy them their selves so it's probably not super standardized in the in terms of decorations and yeah yeah so it's I don't know exactly if it's if it's also schedules for their house or whatever or if they're just the paintings that they liked or meant something to them and of course there were paintings that has a spirit so meeting and then you have pain of paintings that are actually like the spartans with it the triangle was the thing but it was not a metal part on it it was actually just painted and it's it's a the letter L from Greek and I know Greek people here from la marca de la makedonia I'm actually picturing that but it's the area around like around Sparta and every several city-states had their own meanings or symbols that I use often so for example yeah for the for the Athenians you have the owl from Zeus that you see often from Thebes you have the club like a wooden piece from from here class so you had all the different shapes and sometimes that meant something sometimes they're personal and there was an interesting thing while researching these shields what I what I ran into and that was a long guy decided like you always see when they're talking about the Greeks you always see them talking about battles and the amazing strategies that they use but you rarely see them talk about like what what am I doing here you rarely see them talk about how to actual soldier fell on the on the field and this is a completely different path so he decided well I'm gonna make a ton of these shields from wood and not gonna bother making them pretty or put metal on the top and I'm just gonna get some guys and try to reenact like the battlefield and see what happens and what she actually figured out is that the curvature of the shield is actually pretty important if you remember Viking shields are are just flat flat sheets of wood with a metal part in the center but these shields have a curve and you realize that if you're pushing to shields again G solar that because they're both curved you cannot figure out which which side the other one is going to push which is the suspense for you in this in a way that you cannot see what the enemy is going to do like is he going to push left or right but it's also a nice pen to spew because he cannot do that for you because like there's only one point of contact and not the whole shield so like one of the things you only figure them out to practice you don't like I mean there might be people who have like estimated that from most things like this you only do them to practice which of course you can so it's not the most symmetrical but it's fine for now where the whitish heels for circular yeah it's easier to make a circular thing like they didn't have oval shields yeah like the earlier shields were awful but they didn't wear this like the very early Greeks like before like 500 years before the Greeks we know about they had shields that had an eight shape and were more like in a point in the front and they did use different methods but I think that this was the maybe it was easy to make I don't know like personal preference like cultural thing there are several reasons I mean if I can also chose round shields well they could have made in unity they also had round in oval shields they were actually more prominent than the square ones like the square ones are they used in the studios and all the formations I'm not - first in the Romans as I am on the Greeks but the square shields were actually like specialized vacations I mean you know I know you see them a lot in like if you Asterix and Obelix they only have the square shields you never see any other shields yeah yeah but the Greeks fought different and then the Romans so even though they're both standing in line next to each other they fought different tactics and the shows supplemented we're doing this that's a bit thick so let's estimate that on a three millimeter rope something like that it's a most prettier but like like normally a shield like this would take me like four hours to make but we're not going to see you for hours because you guys will get tired of it what I'm going to do now is going to work a bit on the materials so let's go to my texturing view i've actually modified bender if you like I like to this Dussehra forms little classier than the default phones it might be harder to read maybe should have put it back for you guys but I hope it's fine so I actually have an all texture o1 Partridge you can also see like the wood in the shield was actually covered with hide or fabric I can't really see if this is cloth or leather which is something that survived ages it's really it's really interesting and really rare that like these organic parts like the wood and cloth survived so this thing must have been lying in the LA the mud or like at the bottom of the sea or whatever because that's the best place for these things to survive so I I got a nice all for on the front of the shield it's not mine so I hope that guy on the internet who made it it's not going to get angry it's just for for sure I'm not gonna sell this don't worry and we have some dirt some cloth some metal some paint texture and some wood so we actually have to single out the different parts like there are lots more detail like I didn't make any nails or any like the clips with the hold the wires but you can imagine them there and all these easels are important like if you don't make them it's not going to be as believable and often I would do those in substance painter instead of in actually modeling them so let's say the front of the shield is going to be painted of course there are different way to do it you can use vertex paint maps you can do for now we're just going to do different materials do a second one for this so let's say painted use principle one okay so for this one we're going to use the owl you can actually drag and drop a texture from here to here it's very quick there's little things another thing that I often use for reference is an image empty and if you drag it from here to here and hold control you see it's changed to add empty image and you hold it like this there's your image and empty images don't render so there for there for reference so if I render this see it's gone so yes it's it's like it's really great very quick way oh not rendered new we don't have easy yet we at all and we need the pain let's watch the time went away so we're going to use this as a base texture this material and of course we have to UV did I assign it I didn't ah selected Oh again this sign there you go and we have to UV unwrap this just do it quickly now it's not the perfect circle but Karis okay so we have to paint on here but I actually want to make it blue so we're going to do a little color mixing and put this on the bottom put this on I don't like this is one of the things I have to research but often you see that I think your shields are blue but it might also be the like a common trope like in a lot of games and scenes they like to portray Sparta as red and Athens as blue I have no idea how historically based this is but let's go for it for now and we already need another mix note because we're going to use that as as our mosque here so for this image we actually want to separate UV map so we can actually position it without changing the map for the paint texture so extra UV map and we called a decal a UV I'm up here select it's connected now when you should know Drago see it's not fit because it's like although in the center we need to scale this up but what happens is you see now there's repetition and if we want to get rid of that what we can do is change that from repeat to clip and it's not gonna change I don't know what this is back but it's changing in the render so cyclos actually changing it but it doesn't change here so I think that's a bug but it's probably going to be fixed into innate our Lord and Savior um yeah so we're going to use this as a mask so we're going to take the color from here put it in here for the other one we're going to make a duplicate of this and put it in here and make this white here and put this to mix it needs to be the other way around where's the older and if we render it now we have a why is it different here what so I do need to flip it okay wait so we're also going to do a bump map for extra detail so it's not the best way like if you want to make it really realistic you work with PBR textures right now I'm just going to grab this texture and just take the black and white version put it in the hide it's just going to use the little diesel from here and then decrease the strength to 0.1 just this gives it a little extra it with the roughness somewhere around there so it's a little bit shiny and let's do the backside so this part would actually be cloth and then the last part would be wood so right now if you do it this way you actually gets very sharp edges so it's not the best way to do it and you can better make texture paint Maps because then you can blend between the different masks but for time constraints we're doing it this way so make a new one use the prints cold you're going to get our fabric texture UV and wipe this one needs to be bigger because the fabric is actually quite weight to get the right size also for it is normally I actually studied that it's actually the right size but for now and just for the lulz let's make this one red nice color I have minutes if they're questions ask them so over a few are expositions I currently use in real engine with the new VR plug-in I might switch the blender who knows that thing is by the way amazing Thank You Jonas was it I know who made that but I will definitely be making blender in while in being in VR I think that must be an amazing experience so we actually just copied this texture over that's for the metal roams and then we just swap out the texture so for that we take this extending part in this little edge so this is all copper the sign and we of course make this copper-colored and put it on metallic it's going to look very dark in the viewport let's do this in the quick and dirty way so we have some texture there and for the last part the wood going to copy this over once again and switch it out for the wood we can find it there we go take the metalic okay so if we could look at it and rendered phew let's see what we got but Devon how HDRI in my startup scene so we were you have a nice lighting we didn't really do anything about yeah my laptop is also not the best and in rendering but yeah this is shield so I think I'll leave it at here if you guys want to get in contact with me I'm on our station mainly but out here if you want to take pictures is my contact information also for questions about modeling you can contact me any questions yet okay thank you all for coming and see you next time you

Channel: Blender

Views: 6,836

Rating: 4.5728154 out of 5

Keywords: b3d, cycles, suzanne awards, grease pencil, Blender Conference, blender, lightning talk, 2d, animation, de balie, blender 3d, addon, amsterdam, bcon18, conference, eevee, render, presentation

Id: zG-pyaw5z60

Length: 54min 21sec (3261 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 14 2018