 Welcome and thank you all for joining Yeah, let's talk and let's get to through this the quest to round caps This is very dear to my heart and I'm also let me check just like I think some faces are working also on this really good. So First let's say hello. I'm Alexander Mitzkos some people might know me as a tzuga master in the blender community and I'm a lead-free artist at Denkvac where I yeah, I usually do 3d stuff, but also sometimes More of a general tinkerer and helping them do stuff. I've been at the blender conference before I've had a talk on a meta balls and it was Really well received. I said meet a ball instead of meta ball for a long time, which is alright afterwards I tried to bring a bit more of animation to the illustrator's mind Which was really fun to do then I went back to meta balls because there's a lot of stuff to talk about and also hard surface modeling with meta balls, which was really well received like This person was not really happy that I talked about hard surface modeling in blender with meta balls and This next talk will be in line with all of this because it has the tag story time and community on it So you're not going to learn anything except you knew here But I want to guide you through this little experience of mine for the last two years And also maybe explain how to interact with developers how to not interact with developers and Just how how things work from an outside and inside perspective Let's start with the case study So, you know what I'm talking about and what is this round cap curve thing if you haven't followed the last two years of my journey So imagine you have a really great colleague and designer in your company and he sends you this thing And he's also intrigued to do this in blender, right? So he has like this sketch and he imagines here this this lines can be tubes and then there's like a more 3d Look and he's really great at lightning lighting everything and setting the thing up so that it looks good But he's not a geometry notes professional. He's not a modeler. He's not like into procedure generation He just wants to export his fantastic outlines To blender so this is my case study and let's just go through this really quick So you'll notice what will happen and what will not so first thing is if your design software can export SVGs You're good like SVGs are Weird you can put I think executable stuff inside there You can write them by hand you can export them out of professional software or blender itself, but first export them Next step is you import your SVG file to blender and that's really easy the import comes pre-installed with blender It doesn't even says no properties. So Send it in there and now I Did this for this presentation. I import my file Fantastic nothing happens This is my imported design. So turns out I need to scale this up I've been using blender for 10 years now so or even longer So I figured out like scaling is a good idea if I don't see anything, but a beginner might not Next thing is perfect. My file is there. Just now. I need my outlines back and extrude everything. So That happened And it even happens even worse you sometimes get like this flicker. That's like Rounding precision errors Not really fun. So your next step is research How to get things right you may be put in like in your favorite search engine blender curve size to big flicker help Next thing, you know You can even scale things in edit mode. So we do just that and Get our curves back wonderful Can even go back now and Make them thick Darn it. That's not what somebody expects if you want to get his curve extruded. So Let's do this again research blender curve extrude all curves Get more information. We can hold down the alt button and scale everything up Fantastic and now the first people will notice that this does not have what I expect It does not have the round caps. We can look inside this tube And we did not import the design as it was intended But what we can do is we cannot go in and clean up this file and just make sure that it looks perfect So again Research Let's now the the next time we went into a favorite search engine put in blender 3.1 bevel multiple curves selection sphere caps round help Like now we're getting anxious because we're trying to do this basic task, but we're still not done. Good thing There's nice people on the internet there's on gumrod an add-on spherical caps for blender curves by look and It's really nice. You can get it for free. You can pay The person some money problem is if you get it for free once you cannot pay afterwards I figured out and I'm sorry I need to still pay your money because it's really awesome, but I need to do a new account for this and So two minutes later. This is not a one-click solution I need to go to a website find this person get an account on the website to download this Stuff happens in between But after we did this everything works as intended we can append the geometry notes tree and Have all my curves selected here can paste it I can even copy the Geometry notes to all the other outlines and it basically well, let's stop too early and it works as intended so We got there in the end, but this is not really an experience that any of us want to go through like this is Even if I did this now once the second time I will have some of the problems again Even if I have everything set up. I still need to re-import this setup So success we have done our job, but I talked to an industry professional Julian Glander illustrator and We were came to the point like I could make his or you all could make his life 2% easier If this would not a solution that needs like multiple steps and just to be really quick because for what do we need these? Round caps on our curves the example It's really easy for beginners to model basic shapes that look a bit more friendly are a bit more Round it's really easy to get your own neon signs and typography typographic experiments It's highly used in things like motion graphics where you have animated strokes And I put this also here from the side and it's really important for all the solutions that we create But we can't do things like that that we can build up the curve around our spline that we set up and also to make sure That that things don't flicker that we don't have step interpolation because if we have again steps or interpolation arrows We can do things by models, but we want to have the splines and like the parametric Information and then again also just a quick test. It's really great for small characters and for even articulated characters So because I don't want to show you only the big issues. I also want to show you some solutions There's add-ons. There's geometry notes now and there's workarounds So animation notes is an add-on that's really dear to my heart It opened the world of procedural animation and procedural generation to me And I even made a video on that in the past and shared a setup that does exactly the job So you can have multiple splines inside of one curved object. It will copy over the round caps to the system Manu Yavinan, you may know him from old Blender projects was so nice and Took my file and made it publicly available on his website as CC zero and I was really happy that Somebody was archiving this experiment for others to use so in preparation of this talk I downloaded this exact same file and I did not have animation those installed so No problem. I'm just going to go back and install animation notes, but Somehow I was not able to install animation notes in the most recent version, which is an error on my side This is not that the animation notes add-on is not really well Done, but I had to install the add-on. I had to install the right version. It might break between Blender versions and it's also as all add-ons Really good for highly specific tasks and it's also good for heavy lifting So if you have something that really needs to happen outside of Blender or as a really specific job that just only One person or like one group of people needs to do then an add-on as a really valid option But there's a little helper now in Blender and it's called geometry notes geometry notes Make procedural generation of geometry and also again animation with a few tricks possible It comes built in with the Blender versions and it's really nice But then again, it also broke in between so geometry notes as you might notice or even know Did like a few versions so there was backwards competitive compatibility issues Which is okay if you know about it But a colleague of mine got an old file from me and wanted to re-render it and just got stuck with this screen Which is okay because again, you just need to re-import and a valid notary and everything will like line up again automatically, but Geometry notes is close to be perfect. It's high stability really good performance It's like the most valid option you can exchange files You can link files, but it has been overhauled a few times in the past So it's still breaking in a few spots and like your setups need to be Imported from outside like they do not come ship with Blender Which is okay because that's how Blender works, but it's no one-click workflow like there's no like do this now so next up There's more work arounds. So this one is like I Really don't like this, but I'm going to show you there's some few tricks And I will not show you which tricks exactly but you can make something like this out of a regular curve without an add-on Without animation notes without geometry notes, but it's also not really perfect. So one of the tricks is to have the better resolution to zero so it's just a triangle then you can extrude it and have the ends welded together with the caps and It's round, but that's not what I wanted. So there's intention and precision in this thing There's a lot of ways to get rounded or smooth and caps So by just shading things move and it may look round, but it's like the geometry is not round They are often tied to a specific level of subdivisions or meshing. So this Example I showed you before Works really well in like some cases, but these cases are so small and you need to be so precise to get them It's maybe not for everyone and also I should have always asked for spherical caps instead so It's actually the quest to spherical caps because just round caps is not really enough I was expecting and also the designers. I showed you before to have a actual sphere Showing up on that curve end So then that happened During my presentation preparation Dalai for linto just wrote me a small whatsapp message. It's like hey sugar You're working on this round caps presentation, right? I'm not sure if you'll notice or no, but I'm using a geometry knows round caps set up for the hair tools I can just like oh hatches like this is inside of blender There's somebody using a workaround to get this feature done. I think but this will be nothing, right? It's not Mind-changing or anything. It's like, okay. Yeah, this is the icon. Just like try it out. No problem We are importing the No tree again. I missed the click here and then we're connecting it to the curve and then some something clicked Because in the very first screen that we did I imported an SVG file that had actually outlines and was like a Graphic but as soon as I import it into blender will not render like you get the the file from an SVG or from a design inside The software and you will not have this so I completely miss that there's also 2d outlines for splines That are not happening inside of blender right now, which is okay. There's 500 workarounds There's things to do with it but also again here the caps are usually not mashed and evaluated so this has been done by Dalai and Imported into the file by hand So how did and this is like I've been working on this for two years and just one day before my talk that I came around And told me about this. So Anyway, where did we stop? It's actually the quest to spherical caps. So for two years. I've been doing small videos I've been tweeting I've been on other platforms And so I want to try to tell you how it is nice and good to interact with developers But maybe I haven't done always correct. So please don't do this It's you can write as many question marks and exclamation marks as you want But they're not getting a feature into blender. Also just saying hey software X does it differently or better? It's not helping anyone But also don't do this like even if you're nice and you get a lot of retreats You cannot expect the blender developers or generally Blender to scan everything that's going on on social media on Twitter or wherever like you need to somehow find a way to interact with developers in a way that they can read stuff they can interact with stuff and also give you feedback and Also, it's not really working the screenshot where Tom answered me me that the feature should be there soon is also one year old so Twitter is nice, but it's not getting you a feature instead of blender So I talked about a place where you can get feedback where you can interact with developers and some might think It's developer the blender org But that's not correct. So the thing that I would show to the developer would just get the answer This works as intended because the file is not breaking the file is imported valid The spline is imported correctly from the SVG file and there's no error message. There's no crash but there's help so Go to blender developer org and submits a bug if it's a bug, but if you have a feature There's right click select. So The blender org a developer the blender org is a bug tracker rights click select is for features. So right click select as part of the Blender community and Is like a separate part but a really really nice part of it the blender community consists of Blender news Right click select graphic or where the builds also for animation nodes are stored Then there's a Spanish speaking community and also it stores or is the place for communications with the Blender chat Regarding Blender chat. It also does not help to bug people on the Blender chat and ask for the feature Even though Tom will give you lots of love and other people Will give you lots of love so You have a bug inside Blender, so it crashes you get an error message something explodes Get an example file ready and head over to developer the blender org and make sure you fill out the necessary details. That's like a Explanation how to do that in video form by Pablo, but there's also written manuals how to do this correctly if You have a feature request then you can go to right click select and Basically have a big playground to describe your feature you can describe it at example images You can example link to videos and we even paste like your iMockups and not only Do these things but you can also vote on them discuss with others and get the stone rolling and the good thing is it's Monitor it by some of the Blender developers and it's a spot where you can actually get traction for something and have like a Yeah a useful interaction and not something that goes down into a Twitter stream and it's lost forever Just for you as an example how this works on the right hand side is one of the Initial posts I wrote For the feature you can get embed gifts. I also made like a cringy video that put in there and also it says it's pretty cut off close status in development Which it is in which it maybe isn't But the important part is writing this blog Writing this blog post basically. I thought I had everything done. It was two years ago I thought like this is all the information I need to know about this feature But then just one day ago. Dalai wrote me like maybe there's like a 2d problem And also when preparation of the talk there were so many questions still open And so I understood more and more why this feature is not like a one click I would put this line of code inside Blender and we have a new feature because What's with this so right now all the solutions I found are adding the curve and so You import a spline from your design and depending on how your initial software behaves your spline will be Extended so maybe we need to inset the Round caps to the curve for some users Then there's the thing I was talking yesterday with somebody there's continuity arrows So in Blender the curve cannot be one thickness, but it can be a very unthickness So you can have a really tiny end and the really thick middle part So there could be continuation arrows between the line and the around cap and there's also I always expect it is super clean loops and it's just like a UV sphere as an end But you cannot be really sure if this is what the user wants so maybe some people want like a more tapered and with Loops that go around and interact with each other so The result of this presentation and I'm really happy to tell you I Stand in you in front of you with empty hands and that's completely fine There's been so many good things happening in Blender development and also in Yeah, general Blender projects be it from the Institute or From other people around we now have geometry nodes So they have been overhauled a few times, but now it's a really solid system This really solid system allows for creatives and other people to build tools inside of Blender and help other people We have generally progress on the curfew eye and also on the behavior of the curves So there has been like the profile settings and like it's getting much better now to render these curves in the meantime cool PowerPoint just crashed. I'm just trying to go back now Okay, and we have a full new modifier and even other modifiers and it's super important to have stuff like this because this modifier only allowed for Crazy works arounds like this and I cannot make this Line of new things in Blender complete. So there's just a slide of stuff. That's happening your I stuff performance cycles the flamenco Render management. There's bug fixes. There's focus animation and rigging. So Thank You Blender deaths Maybe let's talk and figure out how to make this happen and how to make this part of Blender more approachable and In general, that's all. Thank you for coming and I hope you enjoyed the talk