The workshop will start with a theory lesson on the number of factors that go into achieving photorealism including camera effects, lighting techniques and textures etc. Then Andrew gives a hands on demonstration for creating a photorealistic architectural interior scene. To finish, he'll show a photorealistic animation from an upcoming architecture training course that he has been working on.
Andrew has been using Blender for 8 years and runs the website BlenderGuru.com. He has also presented at the 2009 and 2010 blender conferences. Since then he's been using blender fulltime and continued to learn more about blender and the community in the progress.
View the presentation: http://www.blenderguru.com/achieving-photorealism-in-blender/
As a Production House producing mostly TV commercials with in-house post-production facility, Lemon Film has recently created bunch of stereo 3D animations. One animated commercial for TV and 3D cinema and a series of 20 animations presenting products of one of our clients to be presented on various fairs and points of sales in stereo 3D.
Bartek will show the pipeline that was used, focusing on technical issues that need to be taken into account when creating stereoscopic images. He'll show what mistakes were made at the beginning and what was done to avoid them later.
Bartek Skorupa is co-owner and vice-president of Lemon Film Studio - production and post-production house located in Warsaw Poland. Chief of Post-Production Dept, self-taught editor, After Effects artist, 3d generalist, and author of "Blender to After Effects exporter" Add-On for Blender.
www.lemonfilm.pl
www.BartekSkorupa.com
In December of last year, Gecko Animation provided some VFX for a project for the NSPCC, a children's charity in the UK. The aim was to create a disturbing visual metaphor for the effects of verbal abuse, by making words appear as scars on the skin of actors as they were subjected to verbal bullying.
To do this they used Blender's (at the time very new) tracker to track markers on the actors skin in the live action footage, then modeled and rigged skin to match the skin appearing in the footage, deforming and re-texturing it to create scars. In the presentation Ben will cover some breakdowns of the various shots they worked on, including how the tracked markers were used to deform the skin rig and how they cleaned up and combined the live action footage with the CGI scars.
Ben Simonds and Jonathan Lax have been working together as Gecko Animation Ltd. for just over a year now. They do animation and VFX/post production for web, tv, advertising and film. They've worked on projects for companies including NSPCC, UKTV (for the TV channel Dave) and 2K games. Last year they won the Best Designed Short Film award at the Blender Conference with the short film Assembly: Life in Macrospace.
http://geckoanimation.com/project/emotional-abuse-charity
Crucial to the making of any short film and especially to one as international as Tube is the having a strong feedback process that allows animators early and continuous response throughout the progress of each shot.
We use the web-based Helga software as a sort of screening room, alternating between direct video chat feedback between animator, anim supervisor and director, and written feedback on Helga. We've also been doing weeklies where the entire team can watch and comment on each others' work. In this live weekly, animation supervisor, Chris Bishop (whose recent film Caldera is the winner of this year's Prix Ars Electronica) will critique Tube shots in progress. Participants are encouraged to offer their own feedback in a discussion of technique and style, as well as seek crits on reels or works-in-progress.
Anim Soop/Concept Artist/Professor/Primitive Star: Bishop is a Nerdodrome co-denizen who specializes out conceptual motion films and art.
In this project we present a new spatial representation called light-depth maps, which is basically an HDR panorama with the depth of the captured environment. This method is perfect also to render panoramas, a hot topic in today's entertainment industry. We will talk about the advantages of this method, how to construct these light-depth panoramas, and how they are used in a one-pass rendering solution developed in a branch of Luxrender.
This project is a part of an ongoing research from the Vision and Graphics Laboratory in the Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics (IMPA) in Brazil. The present goal is to streamline a framework to render synthetic elements in a captured environment.
Dalai Felinto, who is currently living in Vancouver, Canada, is natural from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He has been using Blender since the beginning of his graduate study in Architecture and Urban Studies back in 2003. His participation in the Blender Community includes a few papers, workshops and talks presented at many Blender events. He contributes with patches and code to Blender since its version 2.47
Aldo Zang is a Computer Graphics Ph.D. student at the Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics (IMPA) and a member of the Vision and Graphics Laboratory. His research interests include Photorealistic Rendering, Lighting capture and rendering, Image Processing, Geometric Processing, BRDFs capture and modeling.
http://w3.impa.br/~zang/blenderconf/
Dolf will have a look at the development of 3D printing and his use of it. How well Blender does as a tool for 3D print related work, including some tricks for getting nice printable models. Where it excels and where it lacks.He hopes to show the many possibilities, how much fun it is to design something in Blender, and then hold it in your hands away from the computer. Mostly by showing my own work using the technology over the last couple of years.
Dolf has been involved in 3D printing since pretty much the very start. He helped companies develop their tools and models, and shared his own printable work around the web. His work includes the computer/Blender grown Entoforms, ShapeWright model creation system, and many models (which I will bring for show and tell)
In a new three-year project we will develop virtual representations of environmental objects, processes and systems (EVOs = Environmental Visualization Objects) using Blender. Within the Department of Environmental Systems Science at ETH Zurich these EVOs are used in blended learning contexts in various courses for Bachelor and Master students.
As part of the project we present new "Modeling EVOs" that use custom user interfaces and the Cycles render engine for „real-time“ manipulation of model environmental system visualizations within Blender. Working with these EVOs should help students form useful mental models of how environmental systems function.
Hansjoerg Dietz is a German citizen and lives in central Switzerland. After studying Biology, he received his PhD in 1996. Afterwards he worked as a scientific assistant in plant ecology in Wuerzburg, Germany and since 2000 as senior scientific assistant at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. He has a long-standing interest in using 3D visualization in the field of ecology and environmental sciences. For that he first used Maya, later switching to Cinema 4D and, more recently, Blender. Hansjoerg Dietz is now the main developer for establishing the EVO approach at the department using Blender as the software platform.
Many team members of the Mango Open movie project will be attending this conference. Each of them - and together - they'll be presenting behind-the-scenes material,tutorials on motion tracking, roto and cleaning, modeling, shader nodes, compositing and grading.
In this open session - held in the small theater - the main developers of Blender's new Tile based - and OpenCL - compositor will be available for feedback or any questions from developers who want to get into compositor node coding.
In this talk a number of the new features that have been implemented over the past year will be demonstrated. The principle worflow of setting up objects for particle simulation roles, using effect libraries and customizing base effects will be explained.
Roadmap targets for Particle Nodes over the following months will be presented. Some long-term ideas for physics simulations and geometry nodes will be discussed too.
If time constraints permit, there will an overview of the code structure as well. The purpose and scope of the main components will be briefly explained and compared to similar features in renderer/compositor nodes.
Lukas studied physics and computer science before joining the Blender community as a coder. Programming has been a long-standing passion, mostly self-taught. Apart from some minor contributions to other OSS projects my main areas of activity in Blender are the node engine and of course particle simulation.
http://phonybone.planetblender.org/
This talk will present the free volunteer computing based rendering service Renderfarm.fi, dissecting new functionality available on the site for Blender rendering jobs including, but not limited to, support for Cycles, Cycles subsampling on a grid and BURP improvements such as the Jam Handler, Stage queue and Cleanup Handler. The talk will also briefly cover Janus Kristensen's work on using BURP for his 3D, 4K, HDR and 60FPS version of Big Buck Bunny.
Renderfarm.fi is currently being developed by Nathan "jesterKing" Letwory and Jesse "Gekko" Kaukonen, who are working on improving site within the EU FP7 funded SCI-BUS (SCIentific gateway Based User Support) project.
This paper focuses on ideas how Blender could be improved for architects. Several new tools would make Blender more useful for architectural workflow apart from just being a powerful render engine. Examples will be given for:
- Every operator should be useful for scripting.
- Turn Blender into a procedural modeler
- Projection Mapping
- UV-Vertices with ShapeKey support i
- Nurbs Trim-Modifier and/or a Loft-Modifier
- 2D Drawing
Lukas Treyer is a swiss architect. He did his masters in 2011 and his bachelor in 2009 at ETH Zurich and is working now at the Chair of Information Architecutre, ETH Zurich. He started to use Blender two years ago when he did his first architectural projection at the ETH campus Hoenggerberg.
http://www.ia.arch.ethz.ch/fotos/badenprojections/
This case study highlights the whole production workflow from script to final movie for the movie Ara's Tale. While going into all the technical and artistical aspects of creating a whole movie (story, storyboarding, character development, modelling, rigging, animation, texturing, lighting, rendering etc), this case study has a strong focus on what to expect when trying to do a movie single-handedly. What decisions had to be made and what workflow had to be adopted to cope with the sheer complexity of creating a short. This case study tries to give a realistic (and personal) view of a real world project done by a non-professional blender user.
Martin Lubich is a 49 years old software developer having a very strong affection to CG and photography/film. In 2007 he started to seriously learn and use Blender on a non-professional basis. The last 3 years he developed the short movie Ara's Tale which, in tradition with the Open Movies, is also released under a CC-BY license along with all its production assets.
The aim of this paper is to synthesize character motions from motion graphs such that the character moves along an arbitrary path drawn by the user. This extends our previous work where we demonstrated how to create motion graphs in Blender from a database of motion capture data.
We implement the idea as an add-on to Blender that can generate motion graphs as described in the Motion Graphs paper by Kovar, Gleicher, and Pighin from SIGGRAPH 2002.
Mihir Gokani is a third year graduate student at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. He likes to write programs and explore new software. This project is a part of his work on exploring and extending Blender for interactive character animation. The work is being done as a part of a masters thesis project with Prof. Parag Chaudhuri.
http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~mihirgokani/pages/dedicated/mograph-path-synthesis/
The mechanics of a steam train provides a nice set of problems since there are several connections where one bone is affected at both ends by others which result in circular dependencies. Especially if you need the steam controls to be working. Peter will show you two proper ways to do it but also how to cheat around problems the fast way.
Peter Haehnlein is media designer for digital and print media. He started his working relationship with computers in 1988 with a C64. He eventually upgraded to PC and uses/loves Blender since 2001 (version 2.12). Since 2005 he's giving several courses per year at the Vhs in Kassel teaching adults and teenagers to use Blender for animation or game creation as well as image editing with Gimp
Raimon will talk about projection mapping, generally speaking, about how to achieve this in Blender, and about each phase of a building projection mapping project, starting from the cleaning of a point cloud mesh using Meshlab, to the
common place effects of this kind of production using particles, nodes,
cycles et al.
Raimon entered a study in Fine Art at 18. Since then he became much more interested in digital ways of creation -video, 3D and web, mainly- and he left aside his work in more traditional medias. He now is working full time using Blender in teaching and architecture visualization, and now I want to explain my experience on the most recent area, motion graphics related to building projection mapping.
The bullet physics library was a part of blender for a long time but only available inside the game engine. Several attempts were made to integrate it natively and now after two GSoC projects it's finally ready to be used.
The presentation consists of:
- a brief history of rigid body dynamics in blender
- a rough technical design overview
- a demonstration of the currently implemented functionality
- plans for future development
Sergej is a German computer science student. He ha been a Blender user for 6 years but turned more and more into a developer over time.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Sergof/GSoC2012
Currently, there is an emphasis from educators on teaching programming in a visual context that provides instant feedback to the student. And while widely
used “drag-and-drop” applications such as Scratch or “microlanguages” such as ALICE do fill both these needs, they lack application in the real world of programming and/or the common textual syntax of their grown-up counterparts. Enter the Blender Game Engine. BGE utilizes python as a scripting language whereby the user can easily control all aspects of the engine without a great amount of code overhead and yet not compromise the language in any way.
This presentation, geared towards educators, demonstrates a framework for
teaching python programming with the Blender Game Engine. It also presents a case study where Blender + Python was utilized as part of a three day "Computing Symposium", funded by a Google grant, in which instructors interested in teaching programming were presented with various methods for introducing programming into their classrooms.
Trevor Tomesh is a graduate student at the University of Worcester studying towards his PhD in computing. He holds a B.Sc. in Physics and Mathematics from the University of Wisonsin - River Falls. His PhD research pertains to the creation of video games for physics education, for which he uses the Blender Game Engine. Some of his other research interests include complex systems, artificial intelligence, evolutionary algorithms, robotics, and general scientific computing.
The presentation will be around "Naughty 5" a feature film of 100 minutes which is currently under production. The whole film has been made using Blender.
The discussion would be around the challenges in running a Blender studio in an industry where proprietary softwares are a norm. Challenges in setting up an open source studio set-up, developing a production pipeline and setting up training (an animation course using blender).
After working as a trainer in an institute teaching 3d softwares like 3ds MAX and Maya, Ajit quit in 2008 to start working on his own film as director. He decided to use Blender, because of the need of an open source solution. Its been 4 years since then, the film is nearing completion. He is now leading a team of 25 people who are currently working on the film. Also by January 2013 he plans to launch a training institute where animation would be taught with the use of Blender as the only 3d software.
Bart has been active with Blender since it became available on the web in 1998, well known for starting the news blog BlenderNation.com, and now is working as Community Manager at Shapeways. In his talk he will highlight examples of Blender being used for 3D printing, and tips for how to get the best prints in general.
The Tube Open Movie project features several crowd shots, both with creatures and various human models. A first example was shown on the Blender Conference 2011. With Blender 2.5+ removing all walk cycle features, we needed a new approach to this.
We addressed this problem by building a new Autowalker, by using a reference walkcycle, parameterizing rigs on the fly via tags, and footstep driven action. Our system is implemented as a Blender Python addon.
We will present example shots, go into a discussion of the algorithms
and math (minimal linear algebra required) and do a live demo of setting up the system and simulating some characters.
Bassam the director and main technical Director of the Tube Open Movie project. He is a 3D animator/filmmaker whose 2006 short, Elephants Dream, was the first Blender Foundation's open movie. It established the viability of libre
tools in a production environment and set precedent by offering its
source data under a permissive license for learning, remixing and
re-use. Under the sign of the urchin, Bassam is continuing to pursue a model of production that invests in commonwealth. He teaches, writes and lectures around the world on open production and free software technique.
Presenting a flexible character rig designed to help aspiring animators learn their craft in Blender. With this tool you can easily set up ready to animate custom human characters with full body and facial rigs quickly and easily.
The rig was created Nathan Vegdahl, Beorn Leonard and Jonathan Williamson based on a design by David Revoy and will be released creative commons.
Beorn is a character animator best known for his work on Sintel, on which he did a large amount of character and creature animation. He also worked as part of the animation team on the Warner Brothers feature film "Happy Feet 2" and more recently did the rigging and animation for CG Cookie's game project "Eat Sheep".
Auto-rigging deals with the automatic positionning of a skeleton inside a mesh in order to animate it. Our method is for human-like meshes only. It's in two parts. The fist part is a body mapping wich enables us to find the different body parts and limbs in the mesh. The second part places the bones inside each body part, using ray-casting to center the bones inside the limb.
During our researches we used Blender to develop the algorithms and test them on characters. Therefore, we made an add-on for Blender and, as ESGI students, we'd be proud to present both the method and the tool. We presented this method at Laval Virtual 2012 in France as guest in VR Mix, Session 4 : Virtual Arts, Interactive Technologies for Artistic Creation.
Romain Lopez has worked as a trainee for two years at Hardis in Grenoble (France) on computer engineering on ERP.
Christophe POIREL, after a first master degree on computer science, has worked for five years, mostly as a developper on .NET GUI for financial software in Paris (France).
Both are in second year of Master of Computer Graphics and Video Games Engineering at ESGI.
One of the disciplines that is benefiting from developments in computer graphics techniques is called Virtual Archaeology - techniques by which we can digitally reconstruct all types of archaeological sites and objects. Within virtual archaeology, the game engines plays an essential role. Through them we can convert 3D reconstructions into interactive scenarios, allowing users to explore anything we have previously created: a Roman villa, ancient pottery found during the archaeological excavation process or any other (related) example.
In this presentation we describe the workflow of creating a virtual tour of an ancient cave with the Blender Game Engine, from the obtention of a 3D model of the whole cave using digital photogrammetry and focusing in the using of the blender game engine to design an interactive environment including physics, music, movement inside the cave,and the menu, help and information screens.
Daniel Tejerina is an archaeologist who specializes in virtual archeology, focusing its work on 3D documentation techniques and archaeological sites, such as digital photogrammetry or laser scanner. He is currently co-organizer of a university course in cultural heritage virtualization at the University of Alicante (Spain).
Javier Esclapes is an industrial engineer, assistant professor in the Department of Graphic Expression and Cartography at the University of Alicante. His research focuses on the development of virtual and augmented reality environments for the reconstruction of cultural heritage.
We accepted the challenge of producing 12 shorts for children, 3 minutes long each, using adaptations of Venezuelan indigenous stories from 3 etnias: Yukpa,
Yanomami and Warao, and took the project as an Educational Project, to
consolidate our knowlege of Blender and figure out a production pipeline.
After a lot of hard work, we are finishing the production of the shorts now, have gained the knowlege of how to use Blender for video production and have teached
Blender to aproximately 200 people with workshops around our country.
Ernesto is a user of open source software for over 10 years, passionate and of
strong affinity with the principles and ideology on which it is based.
With studies in Computer Engineering taken in the National Experimental
University of Tachira (UNET), I have been the director of post-production on the independent national production company, "Macuare Producciones" for over 9 years. I have about 5 years of experience as a Blender user of which, the last two years, have been dedicated to direct the Native Stories animated series.
http://historiasnativas.macuare.org/es/
http://blenderven.macuare.org
Live demonstration of the bird rig used for the Iceland Express ad campaign, the workflow behind a complete scene and animating a short shot while answering questions.
Hjalti Hjalmarsson studied Computer Science, Programming and Multimedia Design before discovering his passion for animation. Since 2007 he's worked on the biggest animated ad campaigns in Iceland, many of which have been nominated and awarded at the Icelandic Advertising Awards. A proud winner of the 11 Second Club, Suzanne Awards and numerous graphic design awards, he also enjoys long walks on the beach, back massages, parrots and kittens.
https://vimeo.com/35309317
https://vimeo.com/36847798
This presentation will be outlining many of the Trolls (difficulties) faced in producing 3d art and animation, and some (perhaps unique) ways to manage and minimise them. The presentation is centred around identifying people/methods/clients
derail successful 3d production, with use of real world examples of 3d production completed by RedCartel over the last 6 years, including "Jellibots", "Kajimba" and "Lighthouse" all produced inhouse using Blender.
The presentation will include including helpful advice on how to defeat and overcome Trolls, aimed at freelance, fulltime and remote artists, production managers, agency and studio owners and/or any buyer of digital artwork.
James Neale is a founding partner and Executive Producer of RedCartel Pty Ltd which is based in Sydney Australia. He has had over 12 years of 3d production experience, starting his career as a character animator then illustrator/artist and then producer. He has used Blender since 2007.
Currently he manages clients and their 3d projects, with teams of between 1-12 artists, utilising fulltime, remote and freelance 2d and 3d artists across a wide variety of projects, including character and logo design, illustration, libraries, animation, visualisation and gaming art works.
http://www.redcartel.com.au
http://www.kajimba.com
Jonathan will give an artist demo/workshop to showcase modeling, sculpting and retopology for organic modeling. This can encompass live demonstrations of requests and creating content from prepared material.
Some of the topics covered will include:
- How to approach complicated subjects effectively
- Handling complex topology
- Separating the artistic and technical aspects of the workflow
Jonathan Williamson is Instructor and personal trainer at BlenderCookie.com.
Millimeter waves are the part of the electromagnetic spectrum between infrared and microwaves. They have the ability to see through smoke, fog, and dust that visible or IR light cannot penetrate; additionally many common materials are transparent to millimeter waves.
We have modified the Blender rendering engine in order to simulate millimeter wave imagery in a physically correct way. We present the millimeter wave simulation, several simulated applications of millimeter wave imagery, and the advantages of using Blender as a basis for the simulation rather than writing our own.
Maciej is a doctoral candidate in Dr. Prather's research group at the University of Delaware.
The use of 3D software in architectural field is too often limited to the vizualisation of already designed projects. While Blender is very good at it, evermore with Cycles, I will mainly present my use of Blender as an architect during the design phase of a project:
- How to explore form and spaces directly in 3D with the modeling tools of Blender.
- How to design details of a building directly in 3D with the precision tools.
- How the interactive photorealistic rendering of Cycles can really change the way one choose lightning and materials of a project.
Those fields will be illustrated by exemples of my professional projects, references of other architects works with demonstration of how Blender can be used to
achieve those designs, and some works done by the student that attend my 5 days courses in the Grenoble Superior National School of Architecture (ENSAG).
Matthieu is an architect specialized in ecological buildings. He uses free software for almost all his needs, using Blender daily. He wrote some tutorials, video tutorials and a book about the use of Blender for architects.
We present an ongoing software development project based at Harvard Medical School that uses Blender to create an open-source molecular animation software that has been specifically designed for biology researchers. Our software, implemented in the Game Engine, is an intuitive tool that seeks to allow researchers to readily make 3D animations of molecular mechanisms without the steep learning usually associated with traditional 3D software. We will talk about the overall structure of our program, as well as the specific challenges we faced while developing the software.
Mike Pan is the lead programmer of this project. He has worked in the field of scientific visualization over the past 5 years with University of British Columbia's Fisheries Centre on various underwater visualizations, as well as with the Italian National Research Council's Scientific Visualization Unit on a biomolecular visualization software.
Rise Riyo is a junior programmer of the Molecular Flipbook team, is interested in research and development in computer graphics, and is new to the Blender community.
Ronald Mourant is a professor from Northeastern University on sabbatical leave. He is acting as an advisor and programmer to the Project due to his interest in user interface as well as Blender. His BGE website is: http://bgeinfo.blogspot.com
molecularflipbook.org | molecularviewbook.org
3dami ran in London in August 2012, offering 11 students aged 16-18 the chance to work together as a small animation studio. Over the course of 7 working days the students created a ~2 minute animation from scratch, going through a complete development process. This included script development, storyboarding, the development of all assets and then creating the final animation using Blender. They had almost complete autonomy, such that they ‘owned’ the project. We also
arranged a visit to Double negative and expert advice on getting into the industry from Escape Studios.
This talk will describe the course and outline the lessons learnt from this trial.
Peter is an award winning Computing teacher from England. He is focused on making education accessible for all, through the delivery of free software and curriculum resources. Peter spends his spare time writing a popular Computing textbook through the wikibooks project, reading philosophy, programming classroom tools and seeking out medieval wall paintings. He is a very poor 3D artist, but knows a lot of young people much better than him that are desperate to learn more. His students have won a national animation award for their work
in Blender and he runs a 3D animation group every Wednesday after
college.
Sergey Sharybin will present an overview of the technical achievements of Project Mango - especially about tracking, masking, color pipeline and Cycles.
Sergey is an active Blender developer since 2009. His first major contribution was Blender's motion tracker - in cooperation with the libmv team. Since 2011 he is working part time for the Blender Foundation in developer support. For Project Mango he worked 4 months in Amsterdam as studio TD.
Apertus is a distributed community which is building on top of the open hardware Elphel camera since 2006 to use it as a digital cinema camera. They have won the Digital Community award Prix Ars Electronica, Ginebra 2012 and have recently presented a new project, the Axiom camera (35mm sensor).
KinoRAW's contribution to the Apertus community is the development of a Elphel - Blender workflow which is scalable and aprofitable in further developments such as Axiom . We find in this tools our particular "dynamic duo" in order to achieve the whole cinema production process with open and free tools. KinoRAW's aim is oriented to spread the use of this tools among students and professionals.
Simon is a PhD candidate in communication focused on open production and distribution models. Experienced film and video producer and passionate media educator.
Carlos Padial: is a visual craftsman currently working mainly with open source tools. He studied Visual Arts and Design and specialized in Photography in the Oviedo Art School, where he spent three years working as a color photomechanical technician and learning a lot of handcraft beyond the press industry.
We've recently launched sketchfab.com, a free service to display 3D models online without plugin, thanks to WebGL and HTML5, with a special support for Blender. We made an exporter to publish in one click from Blender to Sketchfab. We would like to present the platform, the exporter and its options.
Cedric Pinson is Co-founder & CTO. He has 12 years experience in real time 3D and programming. Graduated in computer science in 1997.
Alban Denoyel is Co-founder & CEO. He does business development & communication.
He graduated from Essec Business School in 2008.
The company is located in Paris, France.
The Blender Network is the Blender Foundation's partnership program, an online directory and social network for Blender professionals. In this presentation the results sofar will be presented, and future plans will be discussed with the audience - mostly consisting of Network members probably.
The Tube Open Movie is an experiment in Open Movie production outside the mothership of the Blender Institute, an ongoing project of URCHN.ORG being made by a dedicated team of volunteer artists and student interns collaborating in a distributed pipeline.
In this talk we will discuss some of our discoveries and focus on our current workflow. We will show examples of completed and in-progress animation shots, preliminary lighting and compositing pipeline, and show some of the rigs and simulation setups and workarounds in this production. We will also show our current methods for collaboration and project organization, and talk briefly about the challenges that remain, mainly in the rendering side of the project.
For Bassam's bio - see previous.
Fateh Slavitskaya is a Film geek and evil genius, she founded URCHN to explore new modes of producing open media arts. She oversees and develops its programs as a creative partner responsible for screenwriting, producing and design. She and Bassam maintain an industrial animation consultancy, and their independent animation has been supported by the public, grants from private donors,
the Robeson Fund for Independent Media and the Massachussetts Arts Council.
"Them Surreal Kids" is a virtual band, a music band with an 'undefined' style, meaning they're open to any style, but mostly urban pop-rock with an electronic touch and tiny chill-out drops.
In this presentation Carlos will talk about why he choose to use Blender for this project, and how it all worked out in practice. He will show the .blend files and final results.
Carlos was born in Gijon, northern Spain. Since child he always was interested in movies and comic-books, and had fun copying the drawings of professional illustrators. After he finished a degree in Management in college he started working as a 3D artist around 1997. From 1998-2008 he started his career via 3D architecture visualizations. During the same period he played and sang in music bands. In 2011 learned to use Blender and Freestyle.
http://www.youtube.com/user/themsurrealkids
The presentation will be a case study that goes through the process of making our graduating short, "Warning Haunted". We will cover the reasoning behind our choice of Blender as our main tool, the pipeline we set up, the problems which never occurred thanks to Blender but also the problems we had to overcome. We will also explain how we dealt with Blender’s rapid development and how it helped us work better, but also how we dealt with unexpected changes.
We will also talk about some of the problems we had convincing our teachers to let us use Blender, and the hostility some people have towards the software, suggesting ways Blender could improve its image with educators and the 3D community in general. We will also describe ways Blender could be more interesting for animation schools.
Quentin is 22 years old and just graduating in 3D and visual effects at the Haute Ecole Albert Jacquard (Namur, Belgium). He fell in love with the idea of "creating things that don't really exist", and that is what he does.
Christopher is a British 3D artist. He moved to Belgium at a very young age, and ended up studying 3D at the Haute Ecole Albert Jacquard. After starting out with 3DsMax and Maya, he fell in love with Zbrush and then with Blender, despite it being one of the last packages he ever thought he would like. The community, development and advances made with this package continuously amazes him.
http://www.warning-haunted.com
This paper presents the BlenderCAVE3D-s project, which extends the Blender Game Engine (BGE) to virtual reality platform usage. Based on the previous BlenderCAVE project [Gascon et al., 2010] which put forth a python based master/slave protocol for multiscreen reconfigurable video-wall usage, the current project integrates the necessary functionality for true immersive and interactive virtual reality usage of the BGE.
We present here the overall BlenderCAVE3D-s project work flow, including the necessary steps needed to include in order to meet the requirements for a state of the art immersive VR scene development software toolkit. Performance comparisons are presented between the two test beds and a traditional BGE instance. A BlenderCAVE3D-s patch has recently been submitted for approval by the Bf-committers community.
David Poirier-Quinot: After an engineering school in electronics, network and development, he started a PhD in signal processing and psycho-acoustics. He deals with CAVEs environments since the thesis implies a heavy load of in-the-field simulation.
http://www.limsi.fr
http://eurovr-eve-2010.limsi.fr/spip.php?rubrique4
In this workshop, after some materials physic theory, and how respecting physics could enhance the photorealism of a rendering, we will explore how to translate that with nodes in Blender/Cycles. In the end, we will have an 'all in one' shader group similar to advanced material found in Vray or Maxwell. This material could be used for any object. The accent will be on how to adapt such material to production needs.
Francois is currently working at Octopod Studio / FormaCD. He is also CG teacher in schools, from beginners up to Master degree in Stereoscopy, lighting and shading. At Octopod studio, he is working on an animated TV series project entirely made with Blender.
Actually no, they are vain and dream about themselves. How do we know? Because we have one and watched it closely!
In the summer of 2012, the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre started to operate SuperMUC, currently the 4th fastest computer in the world. SuperMUC consists of more than 150,000 Intel Xeon E5 processor cores has more than 300TByte RAM and 10 PByte of parallel file storage directly attached.
For computers of this magnitude, people are always asking "what do you actually do with this machine?". We decided to answer this with a short film.
In the course of about one year, we created a 7min long film. The movie was first and foremost produced for our powerwall: a 6m x 3m large screen with two Sony 4K projectors for stereoscopic 3D. In this talk, we give an extensive "making of", discussing all the aspects, problems, triumphs and pitfalls of such an ambitious project.
Helmut Satzger works as senior scientific officer at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Munich. Helmut studied physics in Munich, where he also did his PhD in the field of ultrafast spectroscopy of biomolecules. He currently works in the field of high performance computing with a focus on life science. Since 2009, he regularly
holds two day workshops together with the Blender developer Andrea Weikert: "High quality scientific visualisations with Blender".
Jonathan Williamson is best known from his website cgcookie.com.
Film production rendering started with REYES architectures (low memory usage, shader language(s), motion-blur, depth-of-field, displacements, SIMD), integrated over the years more and more raytracing techniques (environment lookups vs. proper reflection/refraction calculations, accelleration structures, ambient occlusion), moved to HDR lighting, and - more recently - started using GI algorithms (Radiosity, Path
Tracing, Metropolis Light Transport, Photon Mapping, Final Gather, Irradiance Maps, Light Caches), with more and more hardware support (GPUs, CUDA, OpenCL).
This talk will compare several renderers (Radiance, Arnold, V-Ray, Maxwell, Indigo, iray, Luxrender, Cycles) from a user point of view and will explain rendering artifacts, daylight simulations, portals, tonemapping, and related concepts. Why do we need them? How are different renderers approaching the same problems.
Jan Walter works for The Mill in London as one of their principal R&D Engineers. He joined the film department in 2001 for Harry Potter, The Chamber of Secrets, and Black Hawk Down. He left in 2005 to work on Flags of Our Fathers at Digital Domain in Venice, CA. After working 5 years for Mental Images, both in
LA and Berlin, he returned to The Mill in London and is currently maintaining the MtoA (Maya to Arnold) pipeline to add Mill specific features and make Arnold usable for Maya based productions/projects.
http://janwalter.blogspot.co.uk/
Rarely has a piece of hardware created as much hype around itself as has the Microsoft Kinect. Since it's launch to the public in October 2010, thousands of "hack" videos have flooded the Internet. This talk presents Delicode NI mate, a software designed to make it as easy as possible for any Blender user to use their Kinect for both motion capture and game development within Blender. In order to demonstrate the full power of NI mate combined with the Blender Game Engine, a fully functional prototype of a the children's game and story book concept 'Kinected Stories' will be presented.
Julius "prodigal" Tuomisto is an MBA student at Laurea University of Applied Sciences in Espoo, Finland. Since starting work at the University in 2005 he has functioned as a researcher, project manager and assistant lecturer. In 2008 Julius founded Delicode Ltd, which now develops NI mate. Julius is also acting Chairman of the Board for 3D animation co-op Studio Lumikuu (http://www.lumikuu.com) and continues to manage the volunteer computing based rendering platform Renderfarm.fi.
Janne "jahka" Karhu received his Master of Science in Physics from the University of Turku, Finland, with additional studies in mathematics and computer sciences in 2010. His main computing related interests are 3D graphics programming and algorithm development. Since 2005 Janne has contributed substantial amounts of code to Blender. Janne joined Delicode as partner and principal developer in 2011.
http://www.delicode.fi
http://www.ni-mate.com
While working on a new cartoon series production, Mickael's company (Octopod studio) decided to try making the pilot episode with Blender only. A big part of the work was about physical effects, so he would like to present how they've managed the problems and give some new tips and tricks.
Mickael will also speak about this production (named Lorbak) that will be presented online and for the next Suzanne award.
Mickael is the 3d businness since 1993. he is director of Octopod Studio since 2009 and for FormaCD since 2002. He switched to Blender 10 months ago.
Blender is widely open to any kinds of CG and games production and it's very useful in the field of terrain development. The power of Blender's features has been successfully merged with the production pipeline of large, open and geo-specific/typical environments for PC games. This case study will highlight the features such as sculpt/paint mode, GLSL shading/materials, node editor, modifiers and the way they are handy during the development of realistic environments for Bohemia Interactive's titles such as the Arma series or TakeOn Helicopters.
Miroslav started his professional career in 2007 as a World Designer at Bohemia Interactive. He had previous experience in using Blender as well as other open-source/free CG, GIS tools and libraries during his study of GeoInformatics. In 2010, he became Lead World Designer for 'TakeOn Helicopters' and right after the project was completed(2011) he transferred to the studio's sister company, Bohemia Interactive Simulations, who specialize in Military Simulations.
http://takeonthegame.com/about-the-game/environment/seattle/
We will present some tricks, tips, and advices for people to have a better organized
workflow for small or medium productions. This will include for example :
- use scene spreadsheets for tracking of progress.
- file naming conventions.
- using groups to share and reuse assets.
- organizing folders by scenes, characters and props
Olivier has been doing 3D for a decade. He is a CG generalist, interested in production aspect and workflows. Right now working for a studio in Switzerland: RGBprod.
Francesco has been creating 3D images and animations for around 5 years. His experience ranges from 3D scan data visualization to character animation. He has worked as a freelance 3D generalist in Italy, Germany and Switzerland. He is a member of the Mango Open Movie team.
https://speakerdeck.com/fsiddi/production-workflows
For the design of parallel mechanisms, such as motion systems for flight or driving simulators a Python based tool has been developed to rapidly evaluate different mechanism designs.
Blender was chosen to provide an intuitive front-end to the underlying software, because of its 3D capabilities and its easy to use Python API. Although Blender is not written for this purpose, it turned out to be a near perfect match, saving a lot of time on the development of a 3D user interface and allowing more time to be spent on the development of the underlying code.
There were some difficulties however with using the GUI callbacks and performing the calculations in the background. This is not Blender's fault, since it is not actually made for this purpose. However it was possible to work around almost all of the issues and end up with a very stable piece of software.
Philippe Piatkiewitz began his career in flight simulation in 1995, when he participated in the SIMONA flight simulation project at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. After his graduation in 1997 he accepted the position of System Engineer at Bosch-Rexroth, in the Netherlands. There he has been working on the design of various types of Hydraulic and Electric Motion Systems for flight simulators, driving simulators and cabin crew training simulators.
In 2010 Philippe left Bosch to start his own Engineering firm, Vectioneer, in Maastricht, Philippe has been a Blender fan since the early 2000s, and uses Blender on a daily basis to visualize his ideas and designs.
http://www.vectioneer.com/archives/805
Blenders User Interface is very customizable. Since Blender 2.5x the layouts are defined by Python scripts. In this workshop you will learn how to expand the interface and get some tips on how to build a good looking interface for scripts and custom tools.
Thomas Dinges was born in 1991. He started using Blender and got into 3D
at the age of 16, after seeing the world's first OpenMovie 'Elephants Dream'. In 2009 he started working on Blender as a developer, helping create the new interface for the Blender 2.5x project. He also organizes the German Blender Conference 'BlenderDay' since 2009.