 I don't think nine years or so professionally since four years and I often have this thing that I try to use things in a way how they're maybe not thought of by the developers. So just using sometimes shaders to do actual modeling or like weird stuff. And I want to talk with you about MetaBots because they're really, really old phenomenon and they're really handy for motion graphics and even for more things. So what are those things? Let's see what we're going to talk about. It's what our MetaBots, more or less, it's not going to be too in-depth because I'm not actually understanding too much of the technical side. Then some basics, how to use them in Blender, how to bring things together to a more complex project and then from there going even more complex and doing advanced rigging techniques. And we're going to look at base measures for sculpting with MetaBots and then a quick look into how to feel fake fluid simulations with MetaBots and rigid bodies. There's also a small downside but later on to that. So what are MetaBots? So who of you guys have used MetaBots before? Just a quick hands up, oh yes, you know what I'm talking about. Who used it in a recent project? There's also quite a lot of people, amazing. And I said you're also listening to what I say. And is there anyone who doesn't have a clue what I'm talking about right now? Yes, amazing. So just real quick, these are MetaBots in their most natural form, blobby moving things and that's also one of the definitions I thought. So G. Scott Owen wrote a nice SIGGRAPH article about this in 1999. I was eight years old then so that's way back. And from the same year another article about MetaBots and it's saying like MetaBots is known as some blobby objects are a type of implicit modeling. And implicit modeling just says that you just define parameters for your object. So you have the center of the object and the radius and you're not actually saying where the vertex point sits on the model. Onto the basics of the usage in Blender with these MetaBots, it looks like that. You just have the Meta objects into your scene. They can be animated or they can be static and as soon as you add another copy of the object you will see you get this nice wielding action. So every time a MetaBot goes into a close proximity of another object they will intersect and have this nice wielding movement. So you can see this again. So again it jumps together. These are already animated but animated by hand. We will later look at how we can improve that. MetaBots also have different types. So when you add a new MetaBot you can change between a capsule, a ball, plane, an ellipsoid which is not regular and then the cube. And the cube you need to turn the view so you can see it's actually a cube. To get this view of MetaBots with the red and green ring you actually need to go into the edit mode. So yes, MetaBots have an edit mode and these allow you to further change your MetaBots and also give you these nice options to change the stiffness per MetaBot or subtract even MetaBots from each other. The next thing we need when working with MetaBots is grouping. So usually when you start out with this and you add a capsule and a plane and another ball they will all behave in one blob. So they will all go into the one same object and this will look like this. But maybe we want to have two objects in our scene and we want to have two blobby objects that don't interact with each other. It's quite simple, we just use the name of the object and give it a new name. So all the MetaObjects with the name MetaBallSingle will be the parent, the master and then we have children of that or not children in a hierarchy order in a MetaBall order with the .001, .002 these will always act as the slaves and they will blob into the same object. So with the knowledge of that we can already have two characters that are blobby but not wielding together. Texturing and coloring and yes, that's possible. I was first not sure if it's even possible because I tried to put a texture on and then you get an automatically generated UV. You can then in cycles use the generated texture coordinates or the object coordinates but there's also a handy trick to actually color just parts of your object and this is by using at least in cycles gradient textures or other texture types too with which you can already change the texture in the renderer view over here. That's just a small example. But we can also introduce texture coordinate for an empty. So here in the scene there's an empty and as soon as I put the, also this is not working, so to the cycle steps if you use the texture coordinate for a different object it will not show in the material view but we can see in the rendered view that we are now able to change the appearance of the texture and the origin of the texture coordinate by an empty and knowing that we can parent things together in Blender we can also parent this empty to a meter ball and control the color of this meter ball over a whole scene, animation and character again. Bringing things together I'm always talking about this character. I'm going to show you a small character now that's just with the basics of parenting in Blender so set parent and set the color parent and then we try to go further from that. Yeah, parenting. Good parenting helps everyone, not just you but also the people around you and the small character I came up with is this little chicken dove type of thing and for now it's not moving correctly because the colored head did not move with it but if I parent everything together I can move the actual chicken and the head will stay dark and we can also animate it real simple. The animation of that will look something like this not really animated just as a preview purpose of what we're doing here. We have different kind of meter groups so the legs and the facial parts are done in one group. The other group is inside of this body mesh which can deform and animate. But we can also use this in a more advanced case and this would be advanced parenting which is rigging. Where's the pointer of this thing? We just introduced this kind of armature into this object and we're not parenting things onto each other again but we're parenting towards a control object. Having this control object now we are able to do more complex hierarchies and we are able to store the animation of the things into one armature animation which is handable by an artist. And applying this to this complex character I talked about we ran with this kind of chicken which maybe could also play another role in the Dweeb series and you get this really articulate character. You can have then these simple IK rigs which work quite well with this. You can then also scale the meter boards so we have an ice close and I'm just scaling another meter ball inside of the ice to double scale and then the ice will blink. And also I can then just render this out. This is just for a preview purpose so the legs are glitching a bit but in general you can see that it's actually a viable tool to create a kind of character. Of course it's a stylized character but you can take this really firing at lots of detail with this because you always get a tessellation on the fly of the meter objects. To show another quick thing inside of Blender you can also do it further and Jim Moran, hi, you call it the drumstick attack I guess. You can actually pull out the drumstick of the chicken and I modeled this chicken from meter boards and it's like a regular pose and then taking the chicken leg out of the chicken it actually looks like a chicken leg which is quite interesting to me. Another thing we get, we get nice details when the chicken leg moves. It can actually behave quite nice when it's closing and opening which is hard to get from real topology. And then a really huge chicken is this one here which I also found on the SIGGRAPH website which was done by MetaRace and I think if I understand the blog post right this is made from millions of meter objects that are put together with a plugin but I'm not quite sure how they did it they at least did it with meter boards which is amazing to me, like the whole dinosaur. So guys go crazy with this. You can rig some characters that are moving in their shape so you can change the shape while they're animating. You can create a database of characters that can be made from one base mesh and you can switch the proportions. You can do really a lot of this. You need to figure out the way when the arm gets too close to the body but that's up to you if you want to keep it or take it as an artistic glitch. So for something completely different you can also use the meter boards for scout base meshes which is another thing I found out in my workflow so I'm a really bad box modeler when it comes to base meshes because it takes me more time to do this rough base mesh than actually sculpting. So why do I use meter boards for this? I can sketch the volume and really think about the volume on the fly. I have an editorial translation so I can change the resolution of my base mesh how detailed it is from really low to really high. I can wheel parts together really easily but even a library of noses from characters and just drop them onto each other and they will wheel perfectly and they will have one watertight mesh and again like with the characters I can even do variations of one character really easily and then if I have done the base mesh I don't need to go in and actually sculpt or box model something new but I can just add parts and do variations of this one character. I actually try to record lots of these live editing sessions. I did four tries and I hit record in one session and this was this and it's not even the best one but on the concept art of Roman Zemenko you can check him out on art station just to give props to this amazing artist. I try to do some sculpts just to preview or base meshes how this can work and what you can see is that I'm most of the time working in one side view and then the volume gets more or less added automatically and I can play around with that later on. Then also adding the holes of the noses by subtracting a meter ball which is also possible to already add detail while actually doing this models of this special artist I found out it's really interesting to do like already hair texture with the meter ball so you don't do just the volumes and also start to add details and when it's done it can look something like this and these models are quite high-poly to render them out for you as a graphic but you can also have them really low-poly and have enough space for your own interpretation of the creases so now you're stuck with a meter ball right so what to do with that you cannot edit the pixels you cannot edit the sculpting but this is rather easy what I recommend to you is just to save the file as a meter ball state and then as an edit state and you just press Alt and C and create a mesh out of it and you can start editing the next second also symmetry is locked into my Blender version and then, but wait there's more so we now created a character a base mesh for a sculpt but we can also fake fluids with this and actually this is the one where I brought the most practical example and I just show you really quick how it works so I have a rigid body object that is behaving in a scene and I just have this rigid body object it's a fear, it's colliding, it's rigid and it's not really fluid like but I can go there and parent meter ball to this one object and can make lots and lots of copies of this one rigid body object and I start to get something like SPH fluid simulation just in really simple and stupid but it's really easy to edit as an artist because rigid body objects are quite easy to understand for us we can push them around we can make walls where they bump off we can say them to be damper we can say them to be like really bouncy and we can really nicely add direct or fluid and this is exactly what I did with the last year's cycle STEM or REAL for the just intro graphic I actually wanted to do like a real fluid simulation for that but I'm not really proficient with the fluid simulation tool and I didn't know how to actually put things so it was rendering and rendering and rendering and like baking them again and I didn't have the really fast workflow doing these meter balls I was able to really control the look of what I'm doing by simulating the spheres in a quite how you say it interactive way so when I added the meter balls they would actually be more or less in real time on my machine I could change the simulation and there's a mosquito and I had like a second just had a real good feedback of the whole thing that's going in the wrong direction there's a downside and there are multiple downsides of this and I already talked with Jaltie about that coming to the characters you would need to find a really good art style for these characters so they don't suffer from these wielding so if you have characters that are really human and articulate and they have their arms by their sides this will wield together and you have a weird look maybe this is what you want maybe this is not what you want it's not what you want you should look into different kind of grouping or then going back to a mesh object but it's another huge problem you won't get motion blur on the meter balls so this comes just down to the way deformation is handled not in blender but in general you will have constant deformation on all objects and you will not be able to get a real motion vector out of this meter ball object so what you get is a usual camera motion blur if the camera moves around the thing you will still have natural motion blur but the water, the particles will still be hanging without motion blur and that's also a kind of art direction if you do the art direction that it doesn't need this kind of motion blur, it's okay if you actually need it really important you need to go back to pixel motion blur which works without using the 3D data or you up sample your animation render it at double FPS again which is hard on the machines but not hard to do exactly also there's a small wish from me to the developers maybe if we could export a meshed version of meter balls into a lambic that would be amazing because afterwards we could import this meshed version with the whole animation as a lambic file and you would be able to add modifiers on that you would be able to do changes on a frame basis and all the perfect things you get from a lambic files but I have no idea how expensive or in workforce how hard it is to do that actually just I'm running not out of time I'm much too quick so I'm just going back and show another thing no, that's the wrong direction just going to show something again which I maybe skipped a little and this is the... where is it? is the actual rigging of the thing so with this chicken I actually was able to use mirroring of the not the bone structure of course that but also the meter balls so you don't need to worry when mirroring the model about the negative scale or anything when you just hit s-1 so this is a nice thing you can still do mirroring quite nicely and it's also helping defining the volume when doing the sculpting and just a small thing about this thing you're just seeing one meter ball and this comes back again to grouping so the master of your meter ball system needs to be visible to make the mesh show up in your viewport but you can also go into the viewport and disable all meter balls that are slaves and just the master will there and show you the complete mesh but because if you wouldn't do that and if you would show all meter balls at once you would have the problem of your viewport being super cluttered with sphere lines that are not actually needed for your character and design I'm just going to let this run through again and then I'm also done so if you have any questions and you are here at the Blender conference feel free to poke my brain there's maybe more that we can do with it and there's maybe more you can do with it and can really apply it to a real project I'm really happy to be able to be here and to share my experience with Blender and with the tools with you and come over pick my brain ask me questions after the talk because now I just make space for the next guy and he has some preparation time because my talk was a little bit shorter than thought also if you need me on the web at Zugermaster you find me anywhere from the Blender cloud to Twitter to YouTube you name it come by, say hello bye, thank you