 Hello everybody, oh it works. It works So welcome My name is Hank I've been making drone shows for one and a half years. I adopted it. It was a part started by Dutch drone shows, which are my current partners and Bo Gerbrandt from the Institute worked on it and C++ worked on it and I picked it up and I ran with it So excited to have you here We can we can go two roads We can focus a little bit about the real-world aspect of it flying in the air and that kind of thing Or we can go to the other side and we can focus a little bit on the technical side on developing Stuff for drone shows and the kind of deal I would kind of like to know your preference so I can like go a certain direction So for the people who are here for the real-world aspect of it. Can you just raise your hand? Okay, got a few of that. Cool. Thank you and for the people who are more in the development side and making stuff Can you raise your hand? Okay, a little more about equal. Cool. I think I got you covered So let's let's go to the next slide I currently work as a drone specialist for Dutch drone shows But Blender goes everywhere so I somehow ended up in the offshore industry working on digital twins working on Blender tools and it's been a really really fun exercise and an advisor for a medical company that makes explainer videos for medicines and I'm not making the stuff they are making it. I'm trying to help them This is necessarily about me It's more that for some reason after adopting blender my workflow I've been going anywhere and Blender seems to as you all know go and go and go so it's everywhere and I'm happy for that. I like it. It's it's a good thing. I think But it's not just Blender If you combine Blender with Python Which is a bit of an investment because now you got to learn programming if you don't know that already and maybe you were in that for the Arts at least I was Still am and then that takes some time But the two combined are really something special because Blender is so open that you can go anywhere And you can grab stuff that you like so It's it's insightful territory because you as a creator. I want to make stuff. I like making stuff But I don't like clicking At least not redundant clicking I want I want I have my workflow and I just want to get the thing done the thing in my mind So there's nothing bad with clicking there's no click shaming if you want to click all day. I'm fine with that But if we can eliminate some of it and you have better tools and you can like just go further at the end of the day Just want to make your thing and nobody cares if it was one click or 10 or 15 or a hundred so To I had this big idea in my mind. So bear with me. I just In that one and a half years I did a lot of clicking because drone shows is a lot of clicking It's a lot of redundancy and every time when I was doing a lot of clicking I was like I should be able to do less clicking and so I wrote write an idea and it would work and sometimes it wouldn't so this is a Blender timeline seems familiar. I picked some keyframes on it to give you an idea. It's 250 frames long It's just a standard Blender timeline just to give you a sense of scale and this is one and I'm gonna press the green button and we have 30. That's a lot of work, right? That's a lot of clicking and then we can go for a hundred now we now we're really talking volumes and then So far I've basically made the feature film length Timeline wise because feature films more complicated in Blender So that's a hundred twenty cent hundred and twenty six minutes of it. That's a lot and By thong and Blender have been really good friends. I could not have done it. Otherwise, I wouldn't have done it But this isn't about numbers this is not necessarily a numbers game. It's about creativity. It's more fun to make your idea than it is to just Try it. It's more fun to do things I'm gonna check for time. Okay. I think we're good. Maybe it runs or maybe I need to press play Our story starts like all stories small fragile and full of wonder Watching the world with innocent eyes Soon to be swept off our feet because we are not meant to play small Let us take you on a journey Look up at the sky and remember I was kind of afraid that I was gonna run out of time So I just took one really cool piece Thank you That means a lot to me that's cool So we're gonna go to the next part I wanted to to show you something but I'm too nervous to do technical things right now So I pre-recorded this and I was supposed to speak on it. So this is Blender and I just wanted to show you what the viewport looks like when I'm working So I've been able to tune it just how I like it's the running real time In the left you can see what the audience is seeing In the middle you can see some objects that I'm using as vectors to control the the coloring Which is really really fun to do And on the right you have a bit of Python code that's currently doing nothing I don't need it at this point. I've already done the work. I've spent so much time doing this So many hours You can kind of get a sense for what a drone show looks like and Part of the trick is to get the drones from A to B in an efficient way because they don't go so fast This is the real world So what about Python and Blender? Well drones you have like 30 50 80 100 200 and You need to get them from A to B to get the trajectories right and making that is Partially fun to make the shapes But the the sorting them so they don't crash into each other is not so fun. So I have all kinds of little scripts That helped me sort things Help me check things if they're the drones are not within three meters of each other And we're gonna see what comes next So I think this is another video with my voice on it. Let's find out this is pre-recorded Hank and This is a look at what it takes to create more and do less clicking so I've got a really short simple script hopefully the least scary script you've ever seen at least that I wrote and It's a function that I called animator and it's gonna make stuff appear And it's gonna do it very regularly and that's not something that's fun to do as a creative to have something Be from nothing to something and then offset it and make sure that it's very regular Currently it's gonna have an offset of four. I'm gonna scale it from zero to one And then that's gonna happen in Let's say 12 frames So I selected This is my input. This is the script that I wrote And we're just gonna run it and let's see what we've created. All right. That wasn't so bad, right? So it basically goes over every object and It gives them a keyframe and it goes on and on and on with the right offset So if you look here, you can see great We can change the timing as as how we like But let's not do sentences again Let's just have a bunch of cubes and let's have it be pretty quick So this is the creative part. It's not that difficult We're gonna do an increment of two frames. We're gonna scale it up by 1.5 or 1.2 and Then let's go for How long are they gonna take? Six frames. Six frames is fine Maybe go from one even. I'm already thinking like what this is gonna look like and we can just give it a try. So I'm gonna select the entire collection And I had keyframes on it already. So I'm gonna delete those And voilà, we've created But a script has created like a lot of keyframes and I can test it out and enjoy it. There it goes If we don't like it, we can change the timing and it's like it's essentially free to change it, right? So this allows us to or allows me or whoever writes this To create more and to click less So let's let's keep on moving and we just wanted to show a super simple example And even this simple is already pretty powerful Okay, so this particular example is not directly related to drone shows But I wanted to show like if you just have a script that sets two keyframes. What can you do with it? Does it save you any time? Can you be more creative with it? So now we're gonna get a little bit more technical. How does this work in drone shows? Because I mean it's fun to do Python and development, but how does this really apply? So we're gonna jump back to pre-recorded Hank who is nice and relaxed and on a Sunday doing this in the afternoon Hello, everyone. This is pre-recorded Hank once again and I wanted to give you a chance to To watch a bit of the show or a show and Not spend the full 10 minutes watching it but still give you a chance to To get a feel for what's going on live in the blender scene And then we'll talk about a little bit of youth of by home to help us out make stuff and Click less be more creative So as you're looking at it looks really simple, it's all working together. There's no chaos It's just doing exactly what it needs to when it needs to Got the right color. It's fun. It's nice animated. I'm gonna go to these cool triangles And did some animation on it And then transition to the logo With more cool animation on it We organize things This is also done with a Python script This is a lot of work otherwise And then we can safely lend the drones and we're done so Let's say I'd say we want to check the safety of the Situation and we got to think in terms of the real world with this one We cannot just animate these drones and then call it a day. They are Not allowed for example outside of this box in the real world This box is given and this these are all real world scales So this box is 120 by 100 by 90 meters And it's placed on the map And we have an idea where the audience source is going to be what they're going to look like is that what we're going to see here Now Each drone Has to adhere to certain requirements They're not allowed to go faster than in this case two and a half meters per second sideways they can go up 2.8 meters per second and Or in this case was two and a half and then go down a little slower. Otherwise they get unstable They can go down by 1.8 meters per second So that's one thing So during the transition a Lot of care taken so that none of these drones move faster than a certain rate um And we like I do that with a python script And also this is like a drone cloud and in this cloud None of the drones are allowed to go fad like to just be within three meters of each other but i'm looking at a 2d screen here and It's not easy to see I mean you can get a sense for it and I guess you could do it with geometry now It's to uh To make it but in this setup i've made a python script and what it does is for example, let's pick this drone And it checks all of its neighbors So it checks the distance to that drone and that drone and that drone and that drone and if any of those is Uh lower than the collision tolerance of 3.0 or 5 meters I get a little bit of a warning And then it moves on to the next drone and it checks all the neighbors once again And if that's okay, it moves on to the next one and it checks all the neighbors And I've optimized this as far as I can Um, I used to do it live in the blender scene and go over the timeline Um, but I've upgraded the script because I use it So much so now it it loads in all the keyframes and uh commits it to memory And then it does all this math from memory So it doesn't need to update the blend side the blend file when I move To another frame for example, which saves a lot of time So let's run it And see what we get so it's now working on a few frames It's checking it and of course this drone show is already finished. So it's uh It's nothing going on. That's all done. It's good Now let's uh, let's make a collision somewhere For example, what if we had this one move all the way across the field? That's definitely going to cause some trouble And see if we can If we can find it I might need to set a keyframe on it. No, we're good So it already detected it at 3,500 and it says hey Drone 47 one another 47 is crashing with 148 And that's a problem Because they're less than three meters apart 2.614 etc to be precise And then it's done the additional courtesy of hey if you want to fix this it might be handy to have these selected already It's going to save a lot of time So with this you can just go and see what's going on and then solve it so This script is uh, it's not that long, but it's pretty complicated and it's got a lot of iterations I'm remade it and remade it and remade it Just one just to make sure that it's as fast as I can make it and that's worth it Because it's it's used so often And these tools help to move forward and there's a lot of tools So there's tools to sort drones And there are some tools to place drones and there's tools to clean keyframes And there's tools to transition paths and there's tools to To save shapes and all kinds of little things that have if they use if I use them I keep using them So, um, thank you so much for watching and let's get back to to the live show I'm not sure how we're for time. So unless I'm gotten off the stage, I'll finish the presentation, um I wanted to give something to you from my hard-earned experiences if you're going to go for python So I would recommend if you want to have a go at it learn the basics of python itself Just just because you don't have to do and blender and python and all that at the same time It's it'll be much easier and you'll just need three things variables and lists loops and functions Um, learn python the hard way was a really good one a programmer friend of mine recommended it You don't need to do the whole thing. Just do part of it and just get in there and have fun with it If I can do it you can do it because I'm dyslexic and programming is not easy Boldly I wanted to point to the blender cloud this particular tutorial scripting for artist by dr. Siebel and Updating f curves is a I found a really good introduction into like getting into the details of blender So you so you're like beyond the ui beyond the ux and just get in like the parts that you want to change Can I just write let ai write my code raise of hands? Yes or no? I see two three hands Really? Of course you can that's great But ask it to debug your code because that's gonna help you learn and Ask it to explain how does how does this work when you get a solution if you don't understand it? So you're gonna learn and then ask why things work that way because it knows that so that's helpful We're gonna are we gonna skip this I'm still on the stage so we can choose we can go for one more one minute video Um, but you can already see what we're gonna do We're gonna run the script and then you can do this yourself or we can go for pretty pictures So raise of hands for pretty pictures Okay, got it So we're gonna skip this part and we're just gonna finish up This is uh from a few drone shows or parts of it And if you have any questions just raise your hand or come after after the show to me I'll I'd be happy to talk drone shows And anything else So these are actually shapes. It's geometry. It's vertices that you're looking at. I just happened to replace the geometry It's really low resolution It's two chains getting pulled apart and then There's lightning strikes in there and then it changes color And then the the favorite one Audiences really like it and the the glasses come together and they go ching But then these are like a hundred meters high. So that's kind of cool And I think that's the end of it. So thank you so much. It's been uh, it's been an honor