 Can I start? Is this on? Ah. Come in. So, hello. My name is Manuel Lulao. I'm from Hamburg in Germany. I'm 20 years old and using Blender for six years. The title of my talk is Making Use of Blender Without Having to Learn It. And that sounds very provocative, I guess, and very mystified also. What does this even mean? And so, at first, I'd like to get some reaction from you of who thinks that this sounds unbelievable, maybe stupid, or maybe thinking to yourself, like, why would you even try skipping the learning steps? So who's the profiting side there? So just a quick raise of hands or something just to see who's unsure about what this means. OK, that is exactly what I expected, and also what I intended. So this title is actually quite matching for what I've been talking about, but it's not specific at all. So I'm trying to go for a more specific direction. So how about another title? Like Enabling Non-3D People to Make Use of Blender. So this sounds way better already, and we can see where this is going. The basic idea being that you can also settle blend files to people not familiar with 3D and also not only not being familiar, but also not trying to become familiar with it, not trying to learn it. So yeah. And I think that this is the perfect use for Blender because Blender is so extraordinary, versatile, especially on the interface part, that you can create files which are self-explanning when you open them. And also when you can save a file to have a layout in the interface that usual people would not recognize as a 3D software at all. And you can just hide the 3D view, and someone coming would be, hey, is that an editor or something like that. And these files that you have to create, they have to fulfill certain requirements. And the three most important ones are figured to be easy usage. So you have users of the file, they have no idea what they're doing. And you want to make it as easy as possible for them to understand what they have to do to get the result and also to not get confused with all the other stuff going around. And also the file has to deliver fast results. That is very important. So us coming from a 3D background, we are actually used waiting for one render, just one image for maybe an hour, maybe 10 hours, maybe rendering a whole month on an animation. We are used to that, and we can tolerate that because we understand it. But if you imagine someone sitting in an office even not being able to use the computer for five minutes straight is really stressing them out. And they get bored and they get frustrated. And so fast results are important for such a file. And of course, it also has to work without constant assistance. So you should not be there to help all the time, but maybe give them an instruction on it, give them one page of lookup material, and then they can make a use of that without you being there. And how can we do, how can we meet these requirements? We can create, oh, very good. I have to get the USB stick, I guess. Sorry for that. I really hope it works here. So that was that. The answer, how can we make that? We can create templates. Ah, nice. In this case, templates is only meaning regular band files, but nearly everything inside of them is already done. So the approach to that is very different from your usual vendor workflow because you're not trying to output an image, but you try to have the file as the output, so you have to modify the interface after you're actually done with your work, which is something that I guess you usually don't do. So you have to think that a graph editor may be great for your workflow and that is fine, but when someone not coming from through your background sees that, it's like weird graph lines and he's confused and you should not have them see that. So our goal here is that some changes can be done to the file safely and without much know how to customize the output of the files. And the way we can achieve that is by preparing a lot. So the file has to be prepared and actually the most important here is hiding stuff that can get the user confused. So with Blender's interface, you are very flexible and you can just reduce the number of windows. You can exclude certain types of windows and also just drop all the windows that don't need actual user interaction. Also Blender allows for some locking. Locking can be great if you have to have a 3D view in place. So lock the camera position rotation scale and for the objects also, just to make it safe. And also with just one week of Python reading and experimenting, you can create custom buttons which are a really, really easy thing to do in Blender. Yeah, so the overall goal being here that we try to decrease the chances of misusing or breaking the file due to misunderstanding or experimenting with the file by the user. I have an example file which I'm going to show you today. I'm working in a publishing company and what was needed were high quality 3D renderings of book covers, for example, for online shops. And you should be able to choose from four different books with various service features and then the user should be able to replace the cover images of the books himself so that no 3D guys needed for that part. And the way I met the speed requirement on this particular file was by pre-rendering and then later accessing those pre-rendered stuff which I did in cycles with the compositor and combining it with a shadeless color pass I rendered with the internal on the fly which is really quick. And behind the scenes of this file, a Python-controlled script is giving you buttons that control a lot of stuff going on in the compositor. Here you can see the custom menu that I made and you can see those five lines of radio buttons which are really easy to understand. You just have to read them and then you know what is happening there. And with five clicks, you can select from 64 different file possibilities being there for you to create. And it's very, very simple and if you are just seeing this, it's basically impossible to misuse or break. Of course, you might accidentally collapse the file, switch the tab and get confused or something like that and if you then save the file as a user, it's really bad because you don't know how to get back. And behind this script, each of those radio button lines is actually controlling switch nodes. So you can see here that on the left and the green column is actually our 32 pre-rendered image input nodes and then we have a pink column of switches which is controlled by, for example, the reflection, no reflection radio button and it all enables or disables when you switch the radio button. So the whole switches here. But enough for only talking, I want to show you the file and how easy it is to use without even understanding what is happening. So demonstration time. Yay. Here's the file. We can make it like down here, we have the script which can be an auto run so we can even drop that and it creates this menu here and we can just try to re-render something here. So how, this is a paperback image for online shop dimensions and if I switch it to hardcover, confirm it and render it, it gets re-rendered and then it's nice and glossy and yeah, so let's try a more thick book and it's working as easy as that. And also for the backside, for example here, we have some nice pages here and it's just really easy and the user would then just have to image, save as image, which also could be skipped by the compositor, we could just auto-save it. But I think that this is quite confusing still. So if a user accidentally clicked here and saved, he wouldn't know what to do when he opens the file, how to get back to what I explained him to use. So to get rid of that risk, a friend of mine who is more into programming helped me and he wrote me a little executable file. And this executable file is actually mounting Blender kind of. So we only have those input informations that the user does because we have so little information that is changed. We could just feed those information with the executable to the Blender file and then it gets rendered and saved. So I want to show you that. So here's the three books Excel file and if I just run it, you see that we have the radio buttons here just in Windows interface. And we have the output image name which could be like anything you want and the output path. Yeah, so we just select that and when the user is only seeing this, there's nothing he can accidentally click wrong because everything is important to the output of the file. And if you now hit render, we have specified a path here and click render and then Blender gets started but just the console and here's the rendering happening and compositing and now he just, ah, that's wrong. So you see the name here that I just typed in, the image got saved here. So, and if I just make a hard cover for example and render it again, it's really fast as you can see and done. You see how it switched to another book and the user, as you remember, should be able to change the cover image of it. So that is like the most important part of the whole thing. So let me just grab another cover image and I instructed them to just override the file so that's usual Windows progress that they're used to like overwriting files has nothing to do with 3D and we can just do it here and then hit render again and once it done, we can go, ah, there it is. Ah, I have to restart this. It's actually no image one. So once it's done, which is now, we can go to the image folder and see that the Art of Blender is now a 3D book ready to go into the online shop and with this method, like all the different books would be exactly the same angle, the same reflection, the same size and they would look very nice. And it's really, really easy to use. Okay, so much for the demonstration. Of course, there are some known issues and the most important one being, of course, it is very prone to break. If you're not mounting the file, actually, it is very, very easy to break the file and by experimenting, by not understanding what they're doing, by maybe not running the script and stuff like that. And the usability of one file is also very limited. You can output very few images with one file. So here we have 64 possible results plus the customization and it really takes a lot of work to make more possibilities and also the files get bigger because of the pre-rendered images which have to be attached and so on, yeah. And also, as users saw, without a custom menu, navigating is really hard. So if I just was in the blunt file and not having the custom menu here, so I'm not running the script, then I would instruct them to like, yeah, go here, go there, blah, blah, blah, and it's very, very confusing and you can easily get lost. So that is not good. Also, the image result is always RGB. That is just something about Blender and something about every three software. They are not outputting similar images and that's just something you have to communicate when producing for print workflow, for example. And as with any other digital product, files can very easily be shared, just something you should know. And I asked a bunch of people who make their living on Blender what they think about the sort of idea and also about the usability and so on. And here are some general questions that I got and the one I got the most times, nearly everyone asked it, can and should it compete with web-based services? And I think that if you just, you're offering a service for people to see their logo on a Mac before they get the Mac printed with their logo. There's so many services for that already, also for T-shirts and pens and stuff like that. And for that, I don't think that this is useful, but for a more individual product, it might be. So if you're having a very individual product and trying to customize that with different images, with different logos, then a plan file can be a solution for that problem. And also a question just, how versatile can one file be? So how many images can it output? And also at what point does the work justify the result or not justify it anymore? So yeah, a good question, I guess. On getting started, you can do a few things to make it easier for the users. And if you're involving software that already know into the pipeline, they're going to feel more familiar, they're gonna understand more what's going on. And yeah, you should try that. Also working with things and external data, like overwriting the image outside of Blender here instead of selecting a new file to render on the material, it's making it easier for the user. And making use of the compositor can skip a lot of button clicking and making the whole file less prone to break. So for example, the file export node at the end of the compositor would just save the image automatically and save the user some more clicks. Some ideas for the use are, of course, recurring images that files should be often used. So images that have to be updated frequently, like online shops, they're constantly getting new books, for example, they can make use of such a file, maybe also online shop with wine bottles with new labels, furniture, interiors, or advertisement. There are a lot of possibilities, maybe even diagram charts or something like that. Yeah. And to summarize, those sound blades can be a sellable product, so you can maybe include that into your variety of services. If you're freelancing, for example, you can explore a rather new market. I don't think there's that many people doing exactly this already. And you can also mount the file in a custom program, as you saw it, to make it fail-safe, which is just also like 100 lines of code, or maybe 200, it's not that hard, and you can also get help on that. And these files, of course, are mostly for companies, individuals, who have the need for recurring images in the same style, but actually at the moment, they are just having flat images in their shops or bad photos, and you can go to those people. And also, of course, Blenderheads can be your customers if you have a good file. So that was my talk. Other questions or ideas on your mind that you can't wait to ask. So he asked if you could also add other passes than the color to being rendered on the fly, like reflection or global illumination. I think this is possible, and you could just use the pass output from the scenes to have only the glossy pass rendered, and combine that with your color and your pre-rendered. So I think you can expand on that. Any more questions? Yes, please. I understand that since doing such a program that you did, so it's definitely worth, I would argue with this question, can it be solved? Because it's such an individual situation, you have the possibility to automate, but you get to the moment where nobody's interested. It's so specific to your job or for our job that really needs to be individually written. Yeah. You don't really find a way to set it to. So he's saying that, trying to summarize it shortly, those files can be hard to market because they are so individual and for so little usability maybe. And I think that you should consider this more to be a service that you do for one company only, one person only, and not for something to be sold in a marketplace for many people to buy it. So I think if you approach it that way, the use can be there and the market may. Yes? Yeah. This program. Yeah. I saw that Exifile and maybe somebody answers that question, wouldn't it be possible to use the game engine to do that to make a template as a little game, use the blender machine in the game and then you have an Exifile as a little game for you are not gaming, you're pressing buttons and get as result, you get your book or rendered like that. So you mean the safe is executable from the game engine? Yes. The safe, the programmer work there. Yes. Yeah, I think it might be possible. The game engine. Yeah, I think it might be possible. So, yeah, thanks a lot for your attention and feel free to come up to me later and ask some questions. I saw it on the stream. Ah, good. Yeah. We'll direct talk. So, feedback. Ah, no, I was finally moved for the first time. I was too scary, wasn't I? I didn't know I was terrible. You must have left it there ago, right? You left it there, you must have left it there. That's you. What the?