 at the Creative Freedom Summit, day three. And it's my honor to introduce Jason to us. It's time to show us some stuff in Blender. So if you have questions for him, don't feel free to leave them in the chat or the ether pad and someone will jump on the screen and give those to Jason to answer. So take it away. Perfect. Hi, I guess let me, for those of you who don't know who I am, also I talk with my hands a lot. I'm Jason Van Gumpster. I guess the easiest thing to do is to screen share just a little second here. Let's see if I can click those buttons fast enough. Share. All right, so I'm Jason Van Gumpster. I, most of my time these days is spent working with Orange Turbine. Orange Turbine is a consulting company specifically set up for helping studios and tool makers integrate Blender into larger production pipelines. That is not necessarily unlimited to media and entertainment but we're also doing stuff for manufacturing. I mean, Blender gets used in all sorts of different wild and crazy places. And so finding ways to get that to work and getting those things trained, getting people trained up on how to use them is kind of what this is all about and what we do. Orange Turbine is part of CG Cookie which is mostly related to tutorials and education of Blender. So this is more hands-on consultation sort of things. So that is me currently, let's stop sharing so I can have my goofy face here, stop sharing. And so yeah, that's me currently. I also, I wrote Blender for Dummies and also for the last 10 years I have been doing work in currency design which is the weirdest application of animation that I have ever been involved with. And so when thinking about what to talk about for this particular talk, a design sort of came in mind but one of the things I really wanna think about is how design, like depending on your community, design can be anything. And we tend to get a little bit myopic about what design is, right? You talk to a user interface person and user interface design and that's gonna be usually application based or web based or something along those lines. You talk to an industrial designer and you're talking about products and things and things that move around. You start talking to currency designers, which by the way is technically also a user interface and you're talking about designing for usability but also making sure that things are secure. And so you have these accessibility, usability, all these things are interacting and there's a lot of different things that are involved here with what sort of comprises design. And the really cool thing is that you can use Blender for nearly every facet of it which is one of the really cool things about it because Blender, as you guys have seen in some of the other talks already is a Swiss Army chainsaw of computer graphics and you can do 3D, you can do compositing, you can do drawing with three-spincil, you can do video editing, you can do audio editing if you really, really want to, you might want to try something a little different but you can and you can do a lot of procedures like you can do Python coding. There's a lot of different things you can do and all of those things relate or comprise or are adjacent to design. And so Blender becomes a really solid tool for that sort of thing. I was trying to think of something to really show about that. I actually, I'm going to lean away from stuff that shows up on screen and stuff that shows up design-wise in that respect. I'm thinking about designs that you do more manually, more with your hands. And what I mean by that is that making things, right? And so Blender can facilitate that as well. Blender and Open Source in general can facilitate that. And so one of the other fun things that I do and I will be bouncing back and forth between my face and screen sharing. So hopefully it is more or less seamless. One of the other things that I tend to do is I make rings out of wood. This is a, I'm showing my hand here when it's only on the side now instead of the actual screen. But these are rings that I've made when I basically bend the wood and sometimes I carve on them. Sometimes I do complex inlays and these sort of things. It's sort of a thing I do on the, something I do on the side for hobby. And the challenge that I had was I do like carving. I do like working on these things and making more intricate and complex designs. The challenge is that you're working very, very small. And so if you're trying to carve on something, small knives are helpful, but you're trying to hold the, the, you know, if I'm working on it, I'm holding the ring and I'm trying to dig into it and carve on it. It could be very, very difficult. And from my experience in art and currency design, engravers have a really cool tool. It's basically a stand and you have a bunch of little pegs on it and it rotates in multiple axes and you put your, whatever you're engraving in that and you can lock it in the place and then you actually do the engraving and stuff like that. Now those tools that stand engraving stand thing really cool, really awesome. Usually machined out of like high quality metal and really, really awesome stuff. And then, you know, entry price for that's like close to $1,000 US. And I don't really have that, especially for, you know, whatever amounts to a hobby of making rings and carving on them. So I took it upon myself to try to design something like that for myself considering things of being usable, usable for that particular task. And that means I'm designing an actual tool. I'm designing a thing for making things, right? I'm designing a tool, which is, you have to think about all these different aspects, not just spatially, but then you think about how it's moving, how it's changing, how I'm gonna interact with it and these sort of things. And I'm not gonna show the physical thing that I will start showing blindery things with that. And so we'll start with this. So back to sharing screens and launching Yonder Blender. By the way, for doing the break, there is the 10 cube challenge. And this is that 10 cube challenge, making a teacup. Thank you, W, for saying that it was something to try and do. So it did, it did, it's there. Yay. But that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about this thing. This is my carving mount. And what it is, is it's built around a single five-pound weight. So a five-pound disk weight lives in there. And the idea is I needed something that I can put the ring on, variable in size and still work with. And so the cool thing is that because you have tools like Blender that allow you to model and animate, once you create it, you can actually disassemble the whole thing and then make cool animations about it. So this is this thing taken apart and coming back together. But so there are some parts that will have to be manufactured. And then there are some parts that I can actually just get. And then there are some design considerations within that. So this here is my stand-in four or five-pound weight. And I mean, modeling this in Blender is pretty straightforward. I mean, it's a simple geometry for those sort of tasks. And one of the cool things about working in for these sort of things that are gonna be sort of hard-body and actually made physically, they're not deforming, they're not changing in this case. So I don't have to worry so much about really, really ugly topology, like whatever craziness is going on here. But I do need to have something that says, okay, I can look at that and that's a five-pound weight. Now, then I need something for it to live in. And so that's gonna be here. And then, so the other thing is that I decided I was gonna be 3D printing this because the PLA film is relatively inexpensive. So you also have to think about how it's being made, right? If I print this and maybe it's nicer to have this beveled in the other direction so my weight doesn't come out, then I have to worry about supports and struts and trying to clean that up from the print. So always thinking about when you're doing design, especially when you're doing 3D spatial design and you're knowing about the manufacturing process, then you have to think about, okay, what's gonna facilitate making that more effective? So you're not just thinking about design as it pertains to, again, design fits in everywhere, which again, I've said before, it gives us a little bit of hubris, but it's also one of those things where you have to think about that for every stage, right? You're not just designing the tool, you're also designing the process by what you're making it. And then once it's made, as someone who's using it, you're probably going to subvert that design anyway to make it suit whatever your particular needs are. Now, more and more customizing can be done, but we'll get into that in a second. So yeah, this is, again, a fairly simple shape, just extrusions and there are some fun things you can do with Blender here with that edge loop there. Give you some harder edges. So this is a crease, actually doesn't show up nicely in this render size, but so from here, we can switch over. Now, the one thing that I really wanted this to be able to do is rotate on the whole thing I wanted to be able to rotate around the center axis here so that you can actually move it. So I'm actually, I should be able to do that because I'm usually going to be holding the knife that I'm carving with in my right hand, but I need different angles to play with it. So this means that a top of my weight, the thing here that is, next I should show the whole assembly here, this obviously will be printed the other way around that gives us an axis and gives us the, and this actually I believe goes inside that. Now, this is another fun thing to think about when you're doing 3D printing in particular, I did a lot of time, spent a lot of time measuring around this weight and spending time with the rulers and calipers trying to make sure you have things right. And one of the really nice tools in Blender for that is this measure tool. So you can actually measure distances pretty well and you can snap it as well to different components to really get a better sense of, that is not even across the center there, that's better. So yeah, but the thing is when you do 3D printing your tolerances are always, unless you're dealing with really, really nice 3D printers, your tolerances are always not nearly as precise as you would like them to be. So there is some iterative movement here in trying to like this is probably still a bit tight, but after moving around enough that this actually wore itself down, but I did have to print this a few times before to even fit properly because my 3D printer has tolerances that need to be addressed and are not necessarily well documented. You can try and map it out a little bit, but they're basically, it's a lot of trial and error to try and get that right. From here, this little fun thing is a little lazy Susan. Now there's a fun thing about this. Again, I just needed it to be the right dimensions and space I needed to be able to have the holes for drilling it into things. And there is a savvy person would notice that quickly you'll notice that there's a problem with what I'm about to show you here. And that is, so this is the most complex part. I'll show you these. This is the most complex part of the whole thing. And this little lazy Susan bearing lives right there and nestles itself right there. And the idea was that I would screw this into there and screw this into here. Problem, and this was one of those things that I realized way too late is that in order to screw this into there and this into there, you can only really do one of those because the whole thing closes up. So if I screw this one into the base, I have no means of screwing it into the top. Likewise, if I screw it into the top, I have no means of screwing it into the base because yeah, that would thinking spatially, thinking about manufacturing. Fortunately, I was somewhat clever and that I designed this shape in the bottom. So on the physical one that I finished, this is actually screwed in to the bottom component and this just rests on there and because tolerances are pretty tight, it doesn't move around and everything is happy and golden. Though I wouldn't recommend necessarily picking up the whole device by the outside casing because some might slip off because it's a five pound weight in there. And so this is a design improvement that I would like to address at some point. Probably the easiest way to do it is just put some kind of adhesive here and then don't worry about screwing it into it. Just use adhesive, use super glue or an epoxy or something and that'll solve it. But that's one of those things where you can do all sorts of cool and crazy and fantastic things in 3D space, but when it comes to actually physically assembling the thing, yeah, there's complications that could associate with that. So thinking ahead with those kinds of things. Hey, Jay. Yes. We have a question in the chat. Goodie. What 3D printer do you have and what do you like or not like about that model? So I have a Inder 3 Pro by Creality and one of the things I really like about it is that it is very doofus tolerant, I'll say. It's very resilient. If you've never done a lot of 3D printing before, you can do, it'll be very forgiving for doing any sort of mistakes or those kinds of things. And it's pretty easy to assemble and feed and get working. And the nice thing about the Pro is it has this sort of Teflon coated magnetic mat. So you don't have to worry about scraping things off the glass. You can just pull the mat off and bend the mat and your print comes off of it. And it is one of my favorite things about that particular model is having that mat. I've worked with the ones before, right? You have to do the hairspray on glass and scrape and it's never clean and it never quite works the way that I want it to. And this mat really is one of the things that's really nice about it. As far as things that I don't necessarily like about it, I think there's a lot of people who do mods to it to give it other capabilities. I've seen people do laser cutting additions and print other things to go and associate with that or... But the build volume is not particularly large. I use it mostly for making these kinds of things and if something breaks, it's plastic or plastic enough, then I will recreate something to print it or if I'm working on, I've built little light fixtures and those sort of things with it. And for that size, it works fantastically. I think the largest thing that I made was actually a headphone stand. That's the shape of a hand that's holding it that way. I should mention that I'm doing all of this traveling full-time in the back of a 37-foot motorhome. So that's what I've been doing for the last year and a half. So I have my 3D printer with me because things do break. But yeah, I would say that it is not the fastest print speed and it doesn't have the tightest tolerances in terms of the default nozzle and those sort of things. But for getting started, it's hard to recommend anything more than that. So that's the end of 3 Pro. That's my little ad for them. Yay. There's actually a follow-up question. Someone says, it looks like you're streaming from your motorhome. I'm guessing from the decor behind you. That's true. That is, this is technically, just to digress here, I'll stop sharing my screen because this is funny. So technically, I'm in a motorhome that they call it a toy whore where the back half of it is actually a garage. We modified that to be the office and bedroom. So that's a Murphy bed there that flips down and flips up for doing work. And so yes, that's exactly what's happening is I am in a motorhome in the Florida Keys currently and for the next few weeks at least. So yeah, that's that part. Let's go back to sharing my screen. And I have a feeling that for some reason, yeah, Jitsie has a tendency to, whoop, that's not right, has a tendency to make Blender non-responsive after I, when I start sharing screens. So we'll do it that way. Yes, you can start Blender with an icon after doing a few add-ons and whatnot. I've gotten in the habit of just starting it from the terminal, but let's see where we were back to the assembly part of it. So yeah, this particular element right here, this lazy Susan, thinking ahead would have been smart, but fortunately this most complex shape we have here compensated for that. Now, this is where a lot of the thought and work and design sort of goes into this thing. And this is where if you're doing these things, you end up doing a number of things to try to revise and make edits to it. So what we have here is the base I've already covered. Now this, we were talking before about how do you print something like this and deal with cleanup of structure of the parts and pieces. And this one is actually a fairly challenging one because there's not really a side that I can lay it on that won't require some sort of support. And so really it's about what's gonna be the least annoying to try to do cleanup with afterwards. This is a lot and then how much material you wanna clean up as well. This is a lot of dead space under here that has to have support built for it. So that's not ideal, that's not great and we'll take a fair amount of time to print a bunch of stuff that ultimately is gonna get thrown away. I believe what I ended up doing is printing it this way. So if I do it like that and rotate my view, oh, it's set to turntable, all right. But I printed it, I believe with one of this side down. And so that gave me the fastest print. I did still have support structures in here for covering that top of the curve and there was some cleanup that had to get done as well, specifically so that this channel remained clean and also from what I could tell had the least amount of waste when I was printing it. Again, thinking about the manufacturing process, the reason why I also didn't wanna have a lot of cleanup on these parts is because this is one of the main moving parts, aside from the rotation of the overall thing, these slides are the main moving parts within this design. And so what you end up with is you have this component that pairs with it, ooh, so we can see it. And so just to give you a sense of it, this part right here will slide on those rails because you wanna be able to work on rings of different sizes and so you need to have a means of having tension to keep that ring in place. I mean, actually, there's still some more improvements that could be done to this design so I'm always welcome to suggestions and recommendations. You'll also notice that there is this channel here. This channel, because once this thing slides in, I don't have, one of the improvements that I should have put in that I never did was a sort of like a set screw to keep things in place. Instead, what I did is I modeled this whole channel and if I put an edit mode here, oh geez, not horrible, but I modeled this channel and what I do with that is I will use a string or a rubber band and tie it to keep that tension on there to keep the ring in its place. Now the ring is gonna be living here, but so now I have two axes of movement covered, right? I have the rotational axis and I have, I actually only need two, because I don't have to go in the other axis because the ring is, I'm not gonna carve on the inside of the ring, not with this device at least. So I have my rotational axis, but I need to have an axis where it rotates this way so that I can actually move the ring around and carve on it in the round. So I have a support for it, but I need to be able to rotate it and do those things and that's where these two little buggers come in. So if I go to the exploded view here, what I've done is I have, these are basically roller blade bearings that you can get for just about any kind of pair of roller blades and they set themselves nicely in there and with a little super glue, they don't move. And then this weird straw looking thing is, we'll assemble these here. What we have is, comes together and Mary's like, so they're held in place because there is a taper to it, they're held in place on the bearings. That whole assembly actually gets locked in place by the string that's held there. And then these two fun things will rotate, which it's hard to see them rotating because I didn't put any visual indicator that they're rotating, but these two things can rotate and that's where the ring gets mounted. And I can, with one more small non-printed device, I can actually keep the ring in place and prevent it from moving. And so, there's a lot of different parts to this, right? There's a bunch of different components and because the build volume for the Mi3D printer can't do all of these parts all at once. Also, by the way, printing these two, similar challenge because one, this one, has yet printing something that's really tall that has to stand up. There's a couple of challenges with that. One, if you print tall, I have to worry about the supports, one side or the other that I have to clean up after. Then I also worry, depending on your material that you're printing, and I'm doing this with PLA, you're printing in layers. If I print in layers this direction, that's also the easiest direction for things to break. So it would, because if I put tension too hard this way, because it's kind of tree-ringed around, each of those layers becomes a potential breaking point. So maybe it would be stronger to print it lengthwise, but then the sacrifice is that, then I don't have a smooth surface where I'm gonna be mounting my ring, which especially back here could impact how easily it spins and rotates. And then likewise for this one, because one fits into the other as a nesting piece, this one, I mean, cleaning up down the pipe is pretty easy because it's just gonna marry with that, but you still have to worry about that strength component. And I think ultimately what I ended up doing is I did actually end up printing this one standing up, and I believe I printed it with this flat facing up. Nope, I'm wrong. I have printed up the flat facing downward because this is the surface that I was most important. And basically I was rolling the dice to make sure that my, and if I do the layers tight enough, if I do small layers, then while there are more, from one mindset, there are more potential points of breakage because you're doing it such a much finer print depth, it becomes more sort of solid in terms of the way that works. And again, thinking in terms of designing for manufacturing as well as designing for usage, there are obvious trade-offs in what's gonna work best and what's not. And- Oh, we have a question from the chat here. What's the most ambitious thing you've 3D printed using a Blender design and did the print turn out well? I will say the easiest, the easy question to that is the first print never turns out well, at least for me. It's always, especially with some, this is probably one of the most intricate things that I've done because it does, it is tooling for tooling, right? It is a tool for making other things. And I'm using tools to make it, which is, I kind of like the overlap of that. This is probably the most functional and complex and complex because it's a functional device. I have taken a number of like 3D sculpts that I've made and 3D printed them and made them to do things. And while those are intricate and detailed and fun, they're not necessarily complex in terms of usability. They're complex to look at and they may be complicated to figure out how you're gonna, like I 3D printed a, like I said, a hand and the hand itself is a sculpt of a hand and looking at it, there's a lot of detail, there's a lot of cool things in it. But really, if I put the hand like this, as long as it fits the build volume, it's not challenging necessarily to manufacture. Now that one did have a challenge because I was using it to hold it. I'm talking with my hands and I'm in the tiny screen. So let me do this real quick. So the actual hand would be like that and I would mount it to the wall. And while that is, the functional part of that is really, how do I mount it to the wall without the hand falling off and thinking about static weights and how much weight you can actually carry and those sort of things, those are considerations, but it's not moving and it's not necessarily a functional prototype of anything. It's just something really cool to look at. So I would say that this thing is probably, it took me a while to actually want to conceive of it and then sketch it and then model it and then remodel it a few times each time iteratively to make it work a little bit better. But since I've already switched over to here, I can show the thing in real space and then try and loosen things up my desk to make it easier to redirect handles and stuff. So first, here it is and yes, I printed it in black because that's the PLA that I had, but so there's my binding string, it goes in the seam. I'm gonna try and see if this, ooh, is that actually visible possibly? I can't see me seeing it. So the idea is that this thing rotates and I can spin these elements here to do the carving. Now this whole element comes off and there's the bearing. And yeah, this one was printed like that. Nope, yep, yes it was, sorry. I'm looking at it and making sure that I'm not telling you I was, again, because I need these channels to be clear because if I had to like do a lot of cleanup in these channels, then that doesn't slide as well on these parts right here. This assembles and yeah, so if you look closely and it stays in focus, you can actually see that the layers are this way, but it's held up to use for a number of different rings that I've worked on. Now you'll notice that if I try to put, for instance, my thumb ring on this rig, it's not really holding it in place. This may look like a flaw in my design, but here's the solution that I ultimately ended up doing. This tubing, this is great tubing and I've actually, what I'll do is I'll cut off a chunk of that, cut a slit down it, make it sized so that the ring itself will nestle onto it and be pretty taut. And then that squeezes between these two cones and that keeps the ring in place, it doesn't move. And then once it's fully assembled and held in place and I put my handy-dandy little piece of string, I tried it originally with a rubber band, but rubber bands have a tendency to lose their elasticity and that bouncing was not great. So little handy two half hitches that I can slide tighten. Now this is held in place. This still rotates freely because it's on a bearing and this whole thing rotates. And you hear that rattling? That's partially because of my mistake of not getting it screwed and levered in from the bottom. But that there is this whole thing. And yes, if I try to lift it, the weight is sitting on the bottom and inside of the casing here. So this is one whole piece, but if I try to lift this from here, that's thing. Now I will say one of the things that I did for usability and I'm not entirely sure I did it right was I made this purposely round so that I could set my hand here as I work and then I can carve on this side with my blades and do that and I can rotate. And since I'm, if I go this way, I still have this sort of support hand, basically because I don't have rubber footing and anything on here, I can rotate the ring if I need to do my carving. And it's, if I really wanted to try, this could also maybe work as a lathe. If I were like, I have a good feeling that that would just tear this whole thing apart because I don't think it's made for that kind of high speed spinning. Though maybe one day when I get tired of using it, it will be one of those things that I do just to make it self-destruction glorious fashion. But the other cool thing is that this is in PLA. This is all in plastic and this functions in service for me, but there's nothing saying that this couldn't be, at this point, manufactured. And if for instance, if these little axles here ended up not having the tensile strength that I need, this is a design that I could easily get done as a piece of metal and have that fabricated that way. And basically, you could see and see it, but probably easier to just have it like drop forged or something in one of those lines. And so that, let me put that there and pull me up here and hello again. And so that's designing for manufacturing, that's designing for use as a tool. And I will say one of the really fun things is that, let my keyboard, can't switch screens without it. One of the really nice things that doing things in Blender and doing things with 3D printing in general, one of the things that facilitates you is the ability to share and have other people improve. And so, but of course, this is on Thingiverse. And I'm reasonably sure I included the blend file and build instructions and how to print it out and at least the way that I put it together and those sort of things. You can see this is kind of, in this video, you kind of see where I realize, oh, I can't screw that part into that part. That's, but for, I would say for the cost of a 3D printer and free software and the computer to do the 3D modeling and the PLA to do it, and the bearings and whatnot. I was able to do this and while that is not free as in beer, there's no, there's absolutely financial cost associated with that, it is substantially less expensive than the professional engravers mount that they use. That serves my purposes. And I would say also that it's custom built to fit my particular workflow. There are things about those really nice fancy mounts that they do a lot of really great things, but they're also built primarily for jewelry makers and engravers that work particularly different way. They're not necessarily working in wood for their jewelry. So that provides some additional constraints and challenges and fun parts to do with that. Yeah, so that is sort of the brief sort of, I'll just say walkthrough of a single example done with basically entirely in blender. I think I did a little bit of pencil and paper scribbling, but this entire designing concept was done in blender. I think I used Cura for converting it to G code for printing and that's also a good source. So that's why I like to work about it. I just want to jump in here because there's a relevant question. What's the process to 3D print from Blender? Is it just filed a print or is it more complex than that? It is slightly more complex than that. So I think there may be a Blender add-on that goes directly to G code, but Blender itself has made for the creative process of that and trying to visualize your layers and visualize tool-specific requirements. It's sort of not built within Blender and trying to build that as an add-on to Blender while very cool would also probably be an enormous task because you have to account for all the different makes models and whatnot that are coming in. Community can do that, but community has already done that and some level with tools like Cura. And so what I end up doing is I will export my, you can, there are 3D printing tools within Blender to make sure that your geometry is sane. Basically, you don't have any non-manifold meshes, which means meshes that are like a single face that has no depth, that the whole thing is watertight. Sort of basic sort of solid modeling concepts. You can do a quick sort of 3D printing pre-check from within Blender there to make sure that that will actually work. And then you export that basically as an STL file. And you can do that, the exporter will adjust the orientation to, cause a lot of 3D printers will use, won't necessarily use the vertical as the z-axis. So sometimes you have to rotate that as well as adjusting for scale. I do model and Blender at scale, my units set properly, but I've noticed that even though it accounts for it and makes it look pretty on import, it will say, by the way, I scaled this by 1,000% or 10,000% even though the units should have been stored in the file. But in any case, the exporter still works, the importer on Cura still works. So you export the STL and then you pull it in, in my case, I pull it in in Cura and lay it out on the bed in the way that sort of makes as most sense as I can make it, and then preview it. And then if the print time is tolerable and the amount of material used is tolerable, go ahead and do it. Usually again, first of, first, second, 13th run, I would do those at lower precision, faster prints, just to make sure that the overall idea and concept actually works. And then I'll spend, you know, I'll do a sort of a high quality print because it does have a need to stand up to me banging around on it and those sort of things. So brief, brief answer is export to STL and use, sorry, use the 3D printing tools to make sure it's watertight and 3D printer safe, export to STL, pull it into your G code creating tool of choice and go from there. We do have a thought from the chat, which is, Ooh, I like thoughts. You may want to break up your tough to print items and then use a PLA glue to put it back together. Then you could invert for printing and not need support structures. That, especially for the, this tough piece is a really solid suggestion, a really good idea. I never, I don't have a whole lot of experience with PLA glue. Most of my experiences with CA glue, super glue, and because a lot of the rings, they're at least especially like the shiny ones, that's actually what I'm using to finish and put shine on it is that that's actually, the finish is done with super glue basically, so I don't have to relate. And so most of my experiences with that, which tends to be brittle and doesn't necessarily have a lot of structural strength when dealing with 3D print. So if PLA glue can do that, that'd be fantastic. The question is for me, I'd have to figure out which parts are glueable and still maintaining structural integrity. So likely I would probably print out this, on this complex piece. I would print maybe the base up and then the ring would be a separate print. The challenge of course with, and this is something I've run into, especially with the, the Ender 3 Pro, I don't know if other ones have this issue, but if you're just printing like a thin wall, if it's just a single thing standing up, sometimes if it doesn't have enough support going around it, it tends to, even with bracing supports, if you have something over top of it, it can fall over pretty easily. And so I would have to make sure that my walls are thick enough that it, when I print it, it doesn't fall over. But that's the, that's a great recommendation. And I think if I, if the top of this thing ever broke in the future, I would probably take that approach. Nice. All right, we have another question. Yes. Any advice for Blender, newbies, favorite channels or tutorials, website? Yes, I am, I will say I am, I am a little biased simply because of my association with CG Cookie, but I think that they have a really good starting point. And then for getting farther along it, their citizen training subscription is actually pretty solid. The Blender, Blender Foundation and Blender Cloud, they've got a lot of really good getting started videos. There's always the, the, the donut tutorial by Blender Guru. Everyone sort of refers to that one. And that's somewhat, that one's still pretty relevant for getting your hands dirty and, and first getting, sorry, your hands dirty and your feet wet, mixing metaphors here, but getting, getting started and getting rolling with Blender, those, those tutorials tend to be a really starting point. I will throw in a pitch like, I did happen to write a book of Blender for Dummies. It is not necessarily a tutorial based book, it's more of a beginner's reference. So it's a good idea. It's a handy book for understanding why things are doing the things they are, what sort of things you would do for an overall workflow or what does this button do and why does it do it kind of things? That's, that's really the, the, the best use case for Blender for Dummies. Those would be sort of the best, best, sort of self-driven sides of things. I would say also that the Blender Artists forums, Blender Artists, BlenderArtistsplural.org is, is probably one of the largest English speaking Blender communities on the web and has been around forever. I happened to be a moderator there as well. And in terms of getting help from other people who are working on stuff or showing off your artwork or those sort of things, that's the place to go really to get a lot of goods community support, at least asynchronously. If you want it real time, the Blender Foundation does host a rocket chat instance called Blender.Chat, which is Blender.Chat. Put your browser there and you're off to the races and there's, there's a user channels but it's also where the developers will, will hang out and do real time collaboration stuff as well. Let's see, but I just wanted to make sure that was CGCookie, Blender Cloud, Donut. Okay, go ahead. So yeah, CGCookie, the Blender Cloud, which is run by the Blender Foundation. And I would say that the Blender Guru Donut tutorial and literally if you search for that, you'll, you'll find it. Those, those tend to be the three sort of video based starting points that a lot of people will go through. Of course, you just type Blender in, in, in YouTube or any, any video streaming thing and chances are good, you're gonna, you know, you can't, you can't go on a video streaming service right now and throw a stick and not hit something that that's related to Blender, it seems like. Right, okay, here's the next question. My thinking process usually ends in a mind map, but I was looking for something better looking than any mind map tool that I know. Is it possible to do mind maps in Blender? That is a use case. I have never used Blender for it. So if your mind maps are, cause I use, I use mind maps an awful lot. And I actually, my, the one that I've been going to and has things that I, I don't like about it, but they work is a VYM is called, it's an acronym for view your mind. And it's, it's written in an old cute tools kit, but it does a job for me trying to do that in Blender. Your challenge is gonna be on connecting threads and you can, I can imagine there's a few ways you can do that. I would probably like doing it manually. You could have bits of geometry and or bits of text actually. That's fine that I just use bits of text that put out an idea. I wouldn't necessarily write a paragraph, but you would have a bit of text and parent it to another bit of text that is the core of the idea. And you could sort of get yourself a tree structure based on parental hierarchy within, within the 3D environment, which could actually be pretty cool. The difficulty is when I do mind maps, I have a tendency to, I'll have like a bubble that encapsulates an idea. And then within that I'll have images or a bunch of texts or a few other things. And trying to have that sort of encapsulated structure just based on the 3D geometry alone, to get in the 3D viewport or even in the node compositor are, because node compositor also already gives you the ability to draw like connecting points between two nodes. The difficulty there is that there's not a lot of meta information that you can associate with that unless you start building an add-on for it, which is what I would do next is I would, okay, if I wanna use this, this parental hierarchy mechanism, then I would be able to add little bits of, because every object can have custom data associated with it. So I might use an add-on to build an interface where I can click on say a cube and that cube represents whatever idea or a bit of text, probably smarter, a bit of text that says idea. And then within that, I can encapsulate maybe an image or those sort of things bundled with that. The other way to do that would be with a, again, develop an add-on for Blender that uses the node editor as your mind mapping tool. I've seen actually people do that for, if you're doing branch storyboarding, kind of like how, oh, what's the twine? Twine is a really cool tool for doing sort of branching stories, like for a game or choose your own adventure stuff. That is a pretty cool interface and a pretty cool way of doing that. You could do that with Blender's node editor if you wrote custom nodes for it to pull that off. So long story short, you could use Blender for it, but you would probably end up developing Blender into a tool to do it, which could be pretty sweet. One of the cool things that are coming up with Blender, it's sort of a bit of a digression, one of the things they announced at the last Blender conference was this concept of Blender apps where Blender is a platform for creating tools. So again, this kind of goes back to the conversation of designing tools that are building, making things for making things, right? So in this case, Blender is a thing for making things, but then you're using Blender to make things to make other things. So in this case, the Blender app would be, maybe you strip away the parts of the interface that you don't need and only have the node editor with a specific Python add-on code to make it into a mind map. It's all built within Blender as a Blender app, but really it's whatever your application is, Blender is just the platform that you're doing it. And that's one of the things that they're working to to make with the next few releases is really facilitating that kind of development. And I'm actually pretty stoked to do that sort of thing because a lot of the work that I've been doing with Orange Turbine has actually been more industrial and more with manufacturing folks. And so if you wanna have a process that is being refined and you don't need this, so I need to have a full 3D suite, you just need to be able to modify different parts of geometry within some constraints, then stripping away all the stuff you don't need that would confuse somebody who's not used to using Blender is a really, really fun way of approaching that. So there's a whole bunch of cool things that I'm excited to see what comes out of there. So yeah. If you wanna take a few minutes to just wrap up and add anything else you wanna add, you can go ahead and if a last minute question comes in, I'll jump back on. Absolutely. Yeah, so I'm just gonna do this thing. The easiest way to track me down, we'll go with that, is by way of my website. That's monsterjavaguns.com, also any social media stuff. Monster Java Guns is me. That is an anagram for Jason Van Gumpster because that tends to be easier to spell than my name. But this is also, I'm a little bit behind on updating my little website here, but it points to all the other different projects that I have myself involved with, be they writing projects, 3D projects, orange turbine, carving a lion to the top of a table with an angle grinder, little bits of code, or the books in the right fiction and non-fiction. This is basically the home for all of that and how to get in touch with me. So yeah, that's the basic wrap up of that. I would just say that from a design standpoint, the biggest thing is Blender can be used for all sorts of things. And again, the Blender apps component that they're trying to roll out in future versions, I'm really stoked about that because then yeah, you're designing a tool that's very specific to a thing that you're doing. And so because Blender can do so many crazy things, you can apply that with a design mentality and all sorts of different and interesting ways because obviously Blender is 3D, right? It's gonna give you the ability to think spatially in a way that maybe your traditional vector drawing or 2D application doesn't natively have, right? I think Paul yesterday was showing some really cool stuff with grease pencil and being able to light your vector drawing or those sort of things, that's a whole dynamic that I think is ripe for exploration in terms of design and just creation in general. But it also gives you the ability to think kinetically, right? Blender is not just a 3D modeling tool, it's an animation tool. And most of what we do, especially when it comes to things that are design related, they involve an interaction. They involve change over time, change in state, change in appearance, change in whatever. And so being able to have a tool that you can animate things and control when those animations happen is very nice. The very least just for conceptualizing a design, but you can also execute those designs as well. Awesome, thank you so much, Jason. This was a great talk. I like how it merged making things with software. I'm a crafter myself, so I really appreciated that. And also recently, my household has adopted a 3D printer, so I was excited to see you talking about that. So thanks a bunch for your time and joining us from the Florida Keys when you mentioned you had to turn the AC off, I was like, where is he? So now the dots have connected for me and thanks a lot again. Take care.