 Samir and today I will be talking about a 3D animation software called Blender in a nutshell actually. I was told that there are a lot of people who are interested in understanding about this software. So we thought of putting up a small little presentation about how we have to do it. But let me tell you frankly that this particular presentation is only a overview of whatever Blender can do and we are not able to show you all the things what are possible there. So as they say it is like tip of the iceberg but only difference is that we have realized that there is iceberg there. So we are trying to dig more there and then we are also going ahead with our plans to use it fully in the domain of eLearning. Blender has been there since long now almost 3 to 4 years now when Blender released its first stable release and since then it has been used heavily by different people. You can log on to Blender.org to see their website and why I am telling this is that I am now just now told that you all have now network connections right. So the point is that I would like to request you all that you can log on to Blender.org. You can also download the latest Blender release from there depending on the operating system what you are using and it is in the range of 16 to 20 MB only. So you can take it back with you whenever you go back and use it in your own place. So with that I thought by the time I continue you can keep that on the download and then we can proceed with the presentation. So what I am going to do is the major difference why I am talking about Blender here and also at many other places is merely because Blender when it was introduced it is a complete open source 3D animation software and the word 3D animation itself triggers a lot of different imaginative things for people because it is becoming a very big business right now. So animation is fairly used in all domains and what we have realized is that Blender has not shown any progress in terms of its applications in e-learning specifically which we feel is not correct. If it is an open source software and if it is available and the community is also fairly alive where people respond to your queries and other things then why not use it for e-learning that is where we started our journey and we had a project actually so which I maybe it is already covered but I will discuss it some more. So I feel that it is very important in India that we use Blender for e-learning purposes because not only 3D animation awareness is quite large here apart from that we have good expertise in animation and if we have a tool which is open source and can be used by the entire society and I think that is something we should look forward to. So with that in mind we started on a project we were given a project by a ministry and which we actually extended from our earlier project called project Oscar. So you can all also log on to project Oscar which is oscar.iitb.ac.in maybe I can repeat that Oscar is oscar.iitb.ac.in so Oscar has nothing to do with the Hollywood Oscars but it is acronym of open source course where animations repository. So what we started off around 3-4 years that there are certain subjects which require more visuals to explain than merely words and we just listed out couple of them and then we were thinking of creating animations for those subjects. From that particular concept Oscar was born and we right now have over 100 animations there which are free for download. You can take down the code you can modify it you can re-realize it if you want to. So with this motivation we just thought yeah so this is the Oscar and a sample animation on Oscar looks something like this. I would like to just spend a minute on this particular slide to explain you what is so very different about animation. The problem is that when we talk about animation people immediately related to character animation and cartoon and other things and unfortunately e-learning animation is like I say in funny way that it is characterless animation because you do not have any characters to animate here but what we have here is a very interesting mix because apart from just giving out a particular story or particular concept in a narrative format we also have to see to it that it is understood by the user and it can be only done if it has interactivity built in. So for example this is a six bar mechanism in mechanical engineering and what you can see is that there is a enough reading material on the left you have animation in the center on the right hand side you have textual input boxes options available. So you can actually edit any one of these attributes and see the change happening real time in that animation. Now this was developed using Java and we had a fairly good amount of response for this and if you log on to Oscar website you can see the number of downloads happening for every animation and people were using it, people are still using it. There were certain points at where we faced that we thought that just merely 2D animation is not going to help us. So now how can we create 3D and that is where we found out about Blender. So which the concepts which require the third dimension also to be shown was actually our starting point. We now plan to expand our offerings in 3D using the same Oscar project and we have some challenges like Blender does not have a training system in place. It is a open source software not very much famous in India right now. So there are challenges that you do not have training modules. I have couple of students here from other engineering colleges in Bombay who are pursuing their project using Blender and so for that reason they are also learning. So we have formed a small group here which is Blender enthusiastic people and we plan to conduct various workshops on Blender. So we have been already conducting that we have conducted so far 3 workshops to train people on Blender. It is a 5 day concise workshop for people who are interested in that we can share that workshop contents with you and you can take it along with you. We have a large number of tutorials are available for Blender, how to use Blender and all aspects of Blender. They are all available on Blender website also plus there are some other websites called underground Blender and other people who also keep on working and contributing towards Blender. So all of this is available. People who are interested we can give them specific pointers. Why I am not extending on that topic is that I would I do not want others to feel left out. So let us keep on going ahead. So I am going to study present your case study on one particular aspect. So this was from the chemical engineering department and this is called the vapor liquid equilibrium. So people who are familiar with chemical laboratories will relate to it and people who have seen it will also relate to it and so let me show you this. So this one actually is the this one is the textbook diagram of that VLE experiment and this is the actual photograph of that experiment. This is a mini miniature version of that lab which is around 6 feet high but the real one which is also present in IIT Bombay is around 14 feet high. This is all made of glass. The most critical portion is here which has 4 concentric glass flask in each other interlocked in different ways. There are some tubes coming out from this and that. So it is a fairly complex structure as I said. We started off with these two things and we wanted to create the professor was very keen that if we have 3D animation of this I am sure people will understand it better. He also wanted to use it because the lab instructors is a critical resource. You do not get good lab instructors forever. So it depends on a lot about the enthusiasm of the lab instructor how he or she uses the lab description and then teaches this particular experiment. So we first started with 3 deliverables in mind. First one was just to explain the assembly because that was the most critical portion. People used to take hours together to assemble that thing. So if we can show them assembly in a simplified format step by step that would be very nice. That is what the plan was. We also wanted to actually animate the entire procedure which we again debated and then found out that if we animate there is nothing much we are going to achieve except for a video. So instead of that we can just directly shoot the video of that particular thing but now what we do is that we have a combination of video and animation wherever required. So whatever portions video cannot show we can go into animation at that particular point that is the changes we can do. And then the third which is proposed right now is adding interactivity where in 3D space the user should be able to pick up and drag and turn twist and everything the elements of that particular lab. So if you have some flask and tubes and all that you should be able to move it around. So that was planned. So like I was saying the concentric flask so here you can see that this particular angle is not possible for the cameraman to go inside the flask and show what is how is it getting connected there. But it is very easily possible for a 3D animator to show that. That is where we started scoring the brownie points and then we deliberately went ahead and got a detailed description of the entire experiment from that person and rendered it accordingly. We had a problem about our textures and all that because it has to look real. You cannot show possibly a metallic flask because we have to show it transparent we have to have the innards also being shown. So we worked around with some of the available resources. Luckily because we are in open source community we can easily get hand hold of some textures and other things which are already developed. And then we finally found out this particular option. The proposed interactivity model is currently under progress. This is what the project these people are going to carry out as their final year BE project. And they are going to focus mainly on the interactivity part. Blender also has a game engine. What happened was we wanted to do the interactivity and we were searching whether blender can be exported to some other medium like Java where we can add on the interactivity portion. But it was far more difficult. So blender itself has a game engine which supports interactivity and we can have a lot of interaction there itself. But it is limited and it has major limitations as far as we are concerned because it cannot interact with liquids. It cannot interact with transparent objects. In chemical engineering department they said we cannot go away without transparent like glass objects and liquids. This is our bread and butter and we cannot go away with that. Maybe you can try in physics or something but still you cannot go away if you are not saying that we are not supporting liquids in animation. So we had a kind of a blocked end in front of us and that is the point where we discovered that apart from blender game engine which is inbuilt. There are other game engines which are open source game engines and which support this activity. So ogre is one of them which I have listed here ogre and that is a very robust game engine which can take on these challenges. And currently what we are planning to do is we want to develop things based on blender and ogre combination that is the plan right now. We also explored something called panda 3D. Panda 3D is a CMU offering. It is again open source game engine. It is fairly used in industry also. We have some commercial games also made using panda 3D. So it is fairly robust enough. But especially for our kind of problems we realize that we can go ahead with ogre. One thing I forgot to mention was about the overall architecture of blender. So blender is actually packed using python. So prime of ICU encounter python as the language which you have to use extensively for doing any programming using blender. And ogre also supports python. So we decided that was the reason that we thought we will go ahead with ogre. We are now trying to do this in this format that we are using blender ogre exporter. And then we are trying to integrate the meshes and the applications to create an installer package. See finally like professor Fatak says that the user should not be having any dependencies for using the product. So you cannot say that here is a open source offering and you need to have this list of things if you want to use it. So it cannot be like that. Whatever minimum basic requirements are there. If a person has a PC and fair amount of things already installed it should run on that without any other dependency. And that is our target right now. So currently whatever we are doing we need blender to run it and we need ogre installed. We need some SDKs to be installed. We are trying to take out all the dependency and try to make it a self running file which is an exe file or a dmg file in case of a macintosh. And we will see that if it can pack off all these things and then install it automatically when you run that file it will be the best thing possible for the dissemination portion at least. So what has happened unfortunately is that the macintosh which I was using which has blender installed and other things does not have a connector which can connect to this system. And I wanted to show you the actual blender thing also when we can do that. But because I did not have that installed here we could not do it. So I think what we will do is you can take questions if you have and we will be available around here. We have just now I have told you the place where you can download blender from. We have the website or a complete package of some five days of blender training also available with us. So people who are more interested in blender can take it from us. I just wanted to give you overview what all is possible in blender first of all rather than actual talking about how to animate in blender because I think that is not the forum right now. But certainly yes people who are wanting to dig out more in this area we all are available. They are the students and they are also fairly well versed with the proceedings. So I think you can contact anyone of us. Question is does this blender provide any interfacing with other applications like any operating systems application so that we can. Is it provide any interfacing with other applications? Yeah it is not providing see it is a open source community finally community driven thing. So if you have if you want to pack it up into some other application you have to write the SDK or if you have to search whether it is available already. But blender as a community is trying to do all that. So just recently I saw that blender we were using till yesterday we were using blender 2.49A and yesterday we saw that it has 2.49B also now available and then they have listed a lot of things that what all are new in this. So for example the water thing which I was discussing for simple game engine problem. So we had created some small interactivity game where you can just drag drop certain things. The problem was that it was not able to change the textures after we start the game engine. And now in the recent release they have changed it. Around October they are releasing 2.5 which is supposed to be the best so far and we all are looking forward towards it that 2.5 should solve a lot of problems. I think another problem because as I told in the beginning blender community has not used blender for e-learning in a bigger sense. So if they are using it for commercial movie making or advertising or some other areas these problems do not arise whether it is compatible with other applications or something. They can just yeah it can export to all 3D softwares whatever like colada or dot max or so all that formats are available from blender. It can take on all the formats that is possible. But in terms of web based applications or they have not yet developed because they have never used it actually they have never thought of it that is the problem. But recently we are so our group in IIT Bombay is concentrating on that. We have another student from IIT Bombay who is doing his BTEC project and he is trying to incorporate blender files into flash. So that will be one more important step for us. So this was done by the student. Now this is interesting because you cannot see anything here and this is the dependency. You need blender installed in the system to see this. So he has tried to incorporate blender into flash using blender and flash converters which are not available but he is trying to build up some of them. And he has given the mouse over and the keyboard interactivity to that. So you can change the direction of the object by using QWE and other stuff which is possible only if you have blender installed on the system because it is still taking those APIs from blender and then it is showing up in the browser. But this is what dependency we are trying to take it out and I thought if it runs without that it will be ideal case because normally whenever we move around all of our machines already have blender. So we have never encountered this issue as such. You have lots of stuff on YouTube and other blender. So this is one of the experiments which we just are trying to crack right now. So what you see here is a cross section of the glass apparatus and the water is getting animated inside. Now we actually had the entire bowl filled with water earlier and then we cut the glass ware into half to take a cross section and then we thought if we can see this particular thing along with some added guidance like for example you want arrows to be animated inside this to tell you that what is this and labeling and other things. So it is possible. And this is what we are currently attempting to do where we can have interactivity also built in at the same time we do not have to compromise with the particular academic aspects of this thing. So I just thought we had this video so we will show this. Thank you very much.