Getting Weird with The Mantissa

thank you all right cool so unfortunately there's good there's a problem with one video but hey that's life we're just gonna move on and get to it so that shouldn't be the next slide it's gone okay that's a different slide but fair enough I'll go back to it in just a second so first I'm gonna quickly say Who I am so my name is midge I'm a motion designer and 3d animator I love education as also I do a lot of teaching too and I'm mostly interested in free and open source software IT stuff pipeline stuff I'm a huge hardware nerd as well I love to build everything myself and I love watching movies and TV so a lot of my inspiration comes from movies and TV generally and got me into sort of being a motion designer so what do I do I make a bunch of weird art basically I love that motion design has become this thing where it's like if it doesn't really fit in any category you just call yourself a motion designer and it's like looks weird as it looks abstract it looks kinda techy awesome so yeah I make all kinds of stuff this is a I like to abuse all the tools in blenders as well for example this is all just one scene with different camera angles and a bit of lighting changed and it's just one object with a bunch of shading on it and that's it and one micro displacement and it's one of the images I did when it first sort of put into blender and my way of working is I really like sort of stream-of-consciousness working I hate having to switch between multiple applications or having to render out multiple sequences of something and bringing them back in and doing things and a lot of that is where my work comes from and this is a really good example this is done with the hair system it looks really big and huge but really it's just a hair system and you can abuse all these tools to make really interesting looking things fun fact this was rendered before the hair patch and I took a really really long time and then it got patched and all of a sudden it rendered super fast so I yeah let's see I gotta go back first for some reason the slides are in the wrong and everything I blame Apple all right so the thing I'm gonna talked about talk about today is days now my birthday's in about two weeks and my brother's birthday is about a week before me and about six months ago we were talking to each other and we're like hey we've never really done a birthday party together wouldn't that be cool and we're like okay we can definitely do something and he does a lot of work in a local venue and we managed to book the venue and then we started thinking well what if we actually turn it into a party and then you know started thinking even more I was like well you know I'd love to I've been moving more into the the VJ scene and doing more a lot of work with musicians like maybe it's a good way to showcase some of my work so days turned into how I ended up talking myself into creating 60 VJ Loops yeah because I started talking to people and now we're gonna have to go through all those slides again to get at the right one come on you can do it it really doesn't like it all right so I went from zero to 60 in four months and I'm really glad there's gonna be some render calculations and stuff in there as well and I'm really glad I did all of this for the presentation after the work was done because if I would have seen a lot of these numbers I would have gone who who are not getting anywhere near that cuz this is just like a giant pain in the butt because it's all personal work it's not paid so I have to do all their all their work in between as well to get it all done and my reasoning here is like I wanted 60 and I wanted them to be out twenty seconds each so if you loop them three times you get a minute and that way they're all a 2k resolution so I can move around a little bit and obviously I went for the cinematic 24 frames a second mainly because I have to render less frames and even if you calculate it out it's twenty thousand eight hundred frames and yeah like I said if I would have known this in advance wouldn't even started but I'm really happy to announce that I've managed to finish it in order not even before the party but actually like now they're already done so I'm gonna give you a sneak preview of all all the so that's the first video I don't know we need to do some some juggling and the sound is all no sound oh just pause it this all worked at home on a Linux machine alright look at all the professional gear failing by the annoying guy with the videos no sound aw come on there we are [Music] [Applause] thank you very much yeah so that was basically the last four months of my life music was done by my brother so I just wanted to give him a shout-out as well so yeah so how does a project like this get started right I talked myself into it so it's all you know it starts with one guy and the last time I did this presentation I was sort of halfway and that still said one idiot because I was in the middle of it that's why how I felt and well you know getting back to those 28,800 frames you need to get it rendered so I've got two workstations Zeus and Rinzler you can guess what my favorite movie is most likely and between them I've got the power of five GPUs and for some reason that doesn't feel like showing up but there you go so there's one workstation with three GPUs and one workstation with two GPUs and everything all those twenty-eight thousand frames were all rendered by me on my machines over the last six months and again this is another one of those slides it's really interesting when you do it afterwards because one loop is four and eighty frames if I render them at one minute a frame takes about eight hours to render one loop now the average was not one minute I can tell you that right now is more like three and I think towards the end it might have even started peaking towards four minutes so the total render time and this is just on one workstation the main work session three GPUs would be 60 full days of actual rendering like 24 hour days now I use the second machine is all a little bit so it probably cut got cut down to about 45 to 50 days even and I don't know how I managed to juggle this like when I look at that number I'm like how I was doing all this stuff has been client work I did you know get a whole other lot of other things done and somehow two full months twenty four-hour-a-day months got taken out of those four months just to render a lot of people I'd say well why don't you use a render farm well I tried but the way I work I don't know there's something about it that render farms really don't like and I tried render Street one for example I was really excited about it and then when you're used to rendering on a whole bunch of GPUs and then you have to fit your frame into half an hour on a CPU it becomes near impossible it's absolutely crazy and even with the high power Bowl over the last few months it still came out cheaper to just render it myself so it's been a very hot summer not just outside but it's been a lot harder even my even in my office so very interesting but I'm really happy that I got it done so how do you keep and how do you stay inspired through something like this right because doing other stuff the whole time I'm trying to like push myself trying to get better at it and at the same time not trying to get completely depressed and like want to walk myself up and go completely nuts so after I made a few of them I started thinking about my methodology and I should really put some time into it to figure out a way to keep myself going and the first thing I thought about was like what's my target audience well it's drunk people right it's gonna be all projected behind the DJs and all over the place and I'm still figuring that out a little bit but most people are gonna be doing this and they might stare at it and other people are be going to be doing this and staring at it so you know it's it really releases you it gives you some kind of freedom because you're like as long as it's weird people probably be into it which is really nice and another thing that I found after just doing a few of them is I had to let my ideas go I couldn't go in with a preconceived notion of what I wanted to make because I would just get disappointed if I didn't get there in time because you do feel the pressure and you know I can act really cool about it now but I felt the pressure the last couple of months so I found that letting my ideas just letting go of them and not trying to go in with I'm gonna make this or I'm gonna make this it was really really important to me and are really important just in general to stay motivated and the way I started working around that is just by picking out tools and planner that I hadn't used much and just going alright now I'm gonna make a loop with this tool I mean trying to figure out how to loop it and just hope it works and yeah I did a lot of really fun stuff so this is where the second video comes in so this image is actually from a contest that was done recently on Remington graphics it's a YouTube channel grant Wilk their host said he's a really cool guy and the the challenge was to create something from sphere without modeling or sculpting when I read that I was like yes I hate modeling and sculpting and not because it's not useful it's super useful but I have never been like a really good modeler so modeling for me is too slow to get my idea out and I don't like the fact that you can't iterate very quickly unless you're like a super pro modeler and you've got all your hotkeys set up and it's just not me I'm afraid so I do everything through modifiers so or the contrarian that I am I was like all right it's fear challenge I'm gonna make a cube that was like the first thing that came to me and this gives you an idea of the modifier stack that I use and you've seen me sort of run through it and this is my favorite way of working because I can generate ideas like that I can change one parameter and all of a sudden I get a completely different result you know especially if you can combine it with stuff like particles and change seeds and start messing with things and really just iterate really really quickly and then you see the end result there to get to that kind of workflow I now know which modifiers are very prone to crashing and which ones aren't so there's some of them that are really slow some of them are really fast and it's been interesting to see some of the development happening lately on them so what's the other part of that is you have to dare to fail this is just a handful of stuff that didn't make it in the video and won't ever see the light of day because I didn't like them or they were rendering too slow or there was something about them that I just wasn't into and this is just a very small selection so I didn't create 60 loops I've probably created almost 120 at this point but that comes back to what I was saying earlier about sort of stream of consciousness I want to be able to work as quickly and as focused as possible so if I'm working on something and I do this all the time that's something that's like it takes an hour maybe or in half an hour I'm working in blender I'm not liking what I'm seeing file/new crash just throw it out slash and burn and keep going keep going I don't have a very creative background so - like creativity through brute force most of the time and it does work and you know some of them maybe I'll revisit them at some point but I think it's a really important part of being an artist is just daring to mess it up you know there's nothing wrong with it you don't have to show this to anybody it's it's really important that you keep going for yourself and you become more critical of your own work so there was gonna be another interesting video I don't know if this one alright so first another thing that obviously pops up is you have to loop everything and you have to get pretty creative at some point because after you've done use the same technique like a few times in a few loops you want to start doing new stuff you want to start looping new tools and you have to really start thinking about how stuff works and how to loop stuff and yeah it's like kind of a brain melter sometimes but some of the stuff that I've been able to loop is geometry very simple it's a displaced plane and the way I approach that is I displace it I then mirror it and then I can array it because it's got a perfect seamless seamless shape which is really nice another thing is a displacement modifier if anyone here has ever seen my youtube videos I don't know what I would do without a displacement modifier it's like the base of all my work and you can set a modifier to use a custom object as a coordinate so you just make a curve have that follow the curve and then when it loops around back to the beginning you get perfect movement which is really interesting next one is dynamic paint which is fun too because it's like this place with a little extra edge with some fade in it you can do all kinds of things so there's a plane under it that's being displaced and then it's being all pushed into a vertex group and then that vertex group is driving another displace modifier but it gives you really interesting looking organic feeling things and the trick to that is just having a lead-in so it's basically the same trick as this place but you move your you're rendered portion over a little bit and have it lead in perfectly and then I discovered this last one fairly late but I have a feeling it's not gonna load they're not coming up are they ah so there's three more that unfortunately don't load one of them is oceans the ocean modifier is very loopable as well and the waves which is a lot of fun and then I've already forgotten what the middle one was Wow oh yeah cloth stimulations you can actually loop cloth simulations by exporting to separate point caches with a different seed and then mixing them together which is really interesting and the last one is particles when I figured that one out I was super happy and basically it's a complete and utter hack I'll use the particle instance modifier to get geometry and then I'll export that geometry as an Alembic and then bringing the Alembic twice and offset one to the other and have it sort of work together if you're interested in this kind of stuff I recently did a YouTube video on all these techniques so you can hear me babble about them for like 45 minutes or something but I go through all of them and set them up from start to finish and then there was gonna be like a really interesting video where I actually had a time lapse of me making a loop so just imagine me like a blender screen and things going really fast but basically what I was going to explain for this is that I never leave blender I do everything from start to finish so I start with all the modifiers and stuff and then I jumped between shading lighting compositing and modeling because of those modifiers all the time I'm going back and forth back and forth back and forth and because I start compositing really early I keep my sort of end and frame in mind as I'm doing stuff and especially when I started using the blender cloud add-on to bring in HDR eyes so I don't even have to leave blender yeah it's awesome I really love it I don't have to leave blender anymore so I've got this whole little toolbox that allows me to just create create create create create and to me that was like a really really awesome thing now I've got a bunch of images overlaid here that hopefully oh there we go hopefully will illustrate this and this is a very simple example but being able to go back and forth you can figure out where you're gonna fix just in shading and rendering and what you can fix by doing compositing so I just have a couple of compositing layers they're not gonna show are they oh there we go so I abuse the mist pass all the time yeah what is it this one the sunbeams I think that should really be able to go inward so any developers listening please [Laughter] there we go more glow more crazy stuff and then I glitch it out and use the the filter filter I love the name of that one you can really highlight your edges and do weird stuff with it I know it's probably meant for other things but I really don't care coming from a background of using a lot of proprietary software is really refreshing to see that blender approaches the problem in a different way it gives you all the tools but it doesn't tell you what they do which at the beginning is kind of weird but it's something that the person I was speaking before me also said not 80 but the other guy Brent I think it was his name is I noticed when I'm teaching as well students approach it very differently than like these streamlined tools that you're not supposed to use for anything else so I really like that and I just keep building on and then I put a scanline effect there and the the reason I'm able to do this is because I can just go back from fourth in the entire pipeline without ever leaving it and that to me is just absolutely crazy I also come from kind of a VFX background so I don't even render EXR is anymore I just render my final composited frames to PNG sequences yeah I know but it works for me so I don't mind and doing everything on GPU allows you to make it go fast so this is the final frame so what I really wanted to say to everybody is just messing around and have fun like just break everything and then see what happens when you try to put it back together again and that's how a lot of my stuff kind of sort of ends up being I let the tool guide me a little bit and then I take over when I feel like I actually have a concept that I can take out of it also you know use whatever works I've complete almost completely converted to open-source tools which is really crazy it's also very interesting when you talk to like an accountant and they're like so you must have a lot of software you can you know put in money-wise and then get money back from them like no I actually don't have any software costs right now and they're like oh that sucks you're gonna have to give everything to the taxman and I'm like all right that's what I get for going open-source I guess so yeah it's unfortunate we couldn't see the the time-lapse video but yeah I want to thank everybody I've got website I've got Instagram Twitter all that stuff there's a bunch of YouTube tutorials as well that I do so if you're interested in this kind of work give him a look or just say hi it's all good I've been trying to stream as well which has been a very interesting experience but uh yeah that's it for me

Channel: Blender

Views: 23,874

Rating: 4.9760718 out of 5

Keywords: blender 3d, bcon17, open source, academic, blender, de balie, vfx, 2017, presentation, science, education, bcon, 3d, talk, amsterdam, conference

Id: LohlNxHTSJA

Length: 19min 56sec (1196 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 15 2017