 All right, good morning. I'm used to speaking in front of groups as I'm a professor in the State University of New York at Buffalo State. But this has me really nervous. And so bear with me. And it's an honor to be here. The Blender Conference is my first Blender conference. And super excited, super nervous, and super honored. So thank you. I've been using Blender for about 12 years. I discovered it at the first college I was teaching at. The college couldn't afford the software. I did 3D Max and so forth in the 90s. And I needed an alternative. And so I naturally found Blender and fell in love with it and haven't looked back, been using it ever since and been evangelizing students for over a decade. And so you're going to be seeing a lot more students, a lot more artists using Blender in North America. So this is just some of the stuff I do. A lot of people here have been talking about daily practice. And that's something I really advocate for and do myself and teach my students. Just make work every day, iterate, experiment. And it piles up. And eventually you'll have enough tools in a toolbox of sorts that you can use when projects come along. And so last winter, I was approached by a company called Projects in Buffalo. And they were going to be doing a projection mapping project. This is the former Buffalo State Lunatic Asylum. And it's a very auspicious, ominous looking building that hovers over the landscape or the cityscape of Buffalo. It was abandoned for about 50 years and just sat empty. And full of graffiti, full of decay, this is what it looked like 100 years ago. And in North America 100 years ago is a long time ago. And so this is what it looked like for a long time. So anyway, the project was, this has been turned into a four star hotel now. This is what it looks like now. It's a really nice hotel, a convention center. And this is part of Buffalo's Renaissance. Buffalo has been going through a major renaissance over the past decade. And young people are moving into it. Property values are still low. But the quality of life and everything is still improving. We have fairly harsh winters, but the summers are fantastic. But anyway, so there was some money to do a projection mapping project. And so what was going to happen was there was going to be a whole bunch of animations that were wrapping around this project or this building live. And there was going to be a live, the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra was going to be playing live. And so I was approached to contribute animations to this project. So advertising and everything started around March or April and the event was going to happen at the end of July. But we didn't get all the project parameters until just a few weeks before the project started. And so we were going to have to come up with 60 minutes of animation. Five to 10 minutes of animation I was going to be responsible for. There was a team of about five or six other motion graphics artists that were in charge and making different parts of this project. It needed to be rendered at 5K. We were using the D3 technology to do the actual projection of the animations around the building. So we were going to use about five Christie projectors, super flame throwing Christie projectors that wrapped around the building and they were going to be organized and synced with the D3 system which was a very proprietary system. And so every time we had to do tests the dongle would stop working and there would all be those problems with the license and so forth. But I was working with Blinder, everything were fine. So, but it also had to be synced to live music and because we didn't have the live music we only had recordings, hopefully everything would time outright and sometimes it did, sometimes it didn't. And we only had when we got all these parameters six weeks to complete the project. And because I already signed up for a three week residency artist residency then I only had three weeks to get the project done. And so my project was not so much about my section was not so much about the building itself but about the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. And so they said they wanted lots of notes, lots and lots of notes to be flying around the scene. And I don't know anything about music. I know everything or not everything but I know a lot about motion graphics and art and design. But so I just threw a lot of notes everywhere and I was trying to figure out how can I actually get this done? So I was gonna use cycles but to get it rendered quickly at 5K my piece was gonna be over 5,000 frames. I'm just gonna use emission objects and that allows me to push the samples really low. And then to make a sophisticated looking animation I would just throw in a whole bunch of particle systems and see what I could do with that and just start playing with particle systems but actually what was I going to do and how was I gonna make this work and how can I make the notes react and look like it's not just notes being projected randomly on a building. So the company we were working for there was another company that scanned the building in 3D and they gave us this OBJ of the building itself. And it was fairly detailed but I ran into some issues. This was the UV map for that OBJ. And they told us it was spot on and perfect. It wasn't. So it wasn't quite perfect. We only found that later but it still worked out really well and sometimes with these kind of projects if the audience doesn't notice then it's okay and that's how I tried to approach it. So my first approach with this project and using Blender of course was well I'll take that UV map and I'll just set a particle system at the bottom of it and set up an orthographic camera and then I'll just use a force field and move that force field around and have these particles fly around the building. And then I created cubes wherever the windows were and made those collision objects so that way the notes would just fly around those cubes and I wanted to see how that would work and that worked out pretty well. It was kind of decent. I called this the sort of two dimensional after effects approach. A lot of the other artists that I was working with they were just mainly using after effects and doing the same exact thing. And the effect was okay. I was somewhat pleased with the effect. I had the cubes change colors and so forth so that way we had lights flashing on the windows and then as the music sort of built you would see these notes move around in a rough approximation to the way the music was sort of reaching a crescendo and it was pretty and it was rendering quickly. I added some glare effects and so forth. The building itself is a brown stone building and so we were very wary about how reflective it was actually going to be. So I knew I needed to make animation and some work that was very high contrast. So this fit all those needs and parameters. To test it out I wrapped the texture around the building using the UV map and then just did open GL renders to see how that was gonna look as it went. And so this allowed me to iterate and move quickly. The other artist that I was working with was with After Effects. It took a lot longer to render but with Blender I was able to move the ideas much more quickly using these type parameters that I was using. But I didn't necessarily like the way the building in the way I was animating wasn't three dimensional. I wanted to try to come up with an idea or a way that things could fly around the building and take the actual contours of the architecture into a greater account. So I started thinking about baking textures. And so I would set up a light and I took the previous animation and I would just set that light to have that texture as the emission object. So in other words I would project the light onto the building and then try to bake the textures onto the UV map to see what kind of effect I could get. And I think that this was in the kind of the right direction. And so I started setting up other situations where I'd have emission objects and play with the glossiness of the building and capture the texture onto the UV map. And I liked the way this was going. But the problem I was running into was it was 5,000 textures in a sequence and I didn't have a decent way of rendering a sequence from those textures. And so Google, I just Googled and Googled and Googled until on Stack Exchange, Blender Stack Exchange, this anonymous user, Ptor, had posted this script. And thank you, Ptor, or P-2-O-R. I don't know who you are. But this script allowed me to take a sequence or bake a sequence, a texture sequence from this. And so just posted the, or pasted the script, tweak the script a little bit into the script window and then you hear Run Script. You have to do a few things before that. You have to actually bake one texture for the first time. And Blender completely freezes while it's processing the texture, the bake. And so you're not quite sure if it's working. So you open up the folder and you see the files piling up and that way you can know if it's working the way you want or not. And so I started doing some experiments. Parts of the animation, beyond mine, I was building assets for the rest of the show as well. We wanted to talk about how the building had fallen into disrepair, how it had been abandoned for a long time. So I thought I would take the Vine add-on and have vines grow around the building. And that worked out really well. And this is what that looked like after it was baked and then animated onto it. Let's see here. Does it play? There it goes. And so this is a rough approximation of what it looked like when it was projected. The video from the event is crude. There were some copyright issues and so I'm gonna show some video later. I took it from YouTube, from people who were posting it to YouTube and they've already had some takedown notices, so hopefully it'll be all right. And then I started doing some other experiments like pouring water, because we're really close to Niagara Falls. They wanted to reference the local culture and the local things. This wasn't used, but I thought it was really kind of interesting. So the water and everything falling on that could bake those textures. And I experimented with what types of shaders and materials to actually use on the building. And what worked best was just having a pure smooth glossy material and then I could capture whatever was happening around the building. And so I did this sort of Lord of the Rings thing here for the finale where I have these notes spinning around and I'm just using various force fields to move that vortex around. And then because there's a glossy shader on the building, I can bake that texture after it happens. So it allowed me to create a sophisticated, complicated looking animation and actually I'll have it rendered quickly. And so this is sort of, it was fun to do and I could go through this in a lot of different directions. So I got to play the notes in a way because if you just turn on auto key framing and then I just grab the hit grab and grab the force field and then just play, I can just record and play that. So the frame rate doesn't tell you what it was actually like. It was a much smoother process. And so animating this way, it was fast and fun and I could go through lots of different tries. I remember the last one I did here, the one that I was happiest with, my son was talking to me at the same time as I was working. He's telling me something, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. And that was the one I decided to use and I thought that was fun. This is a photo from the event and this is what the notes look like on the building. It turned out way better than we actually thought. I don't know why the brownstone was so reflective but it worked out well. Here's some video. This is a little bit out of focus. There it is. So the camera doesn't really give it a true honesty to what it looked like but it looked good and the audience was very pleased. The band was playing in front of it. We expected, I think it was 12,000 people to be around this event and 18,000 showed up. It was standing room only and it was a lot of fun. Here's a more of a close-up of what that looked like. Let's see if that'll play. There it goes. And so I think there's a lot of potential in this process to basically just take that UV map and capture those textures and do all sorts of things to it. So if I had more time, right at the end of the process, we actually got a very high resolution image map of the building. And so I could have taken that image map and used it to warp the building, make the building look like it was falling apart. I could have used all sorts of add-ons to destroy the building and rebuild it again but there wasn't enough time. So it had a lot of potential. This is what the ending animation looked. So I was able to light up the windows. I had all sorts of other texturing effects. And if you look up there around the edges of the triangles there, you see these little light flashes. That's where the UV was not quite perfect. But the audience just thought, oh, it's glittering, so. And so those kind of happy accidents are so all right. Having a good quality UV map is important. And so that part where the particles shoot up the towers, there was a very high notes. That's where the music, it was Gustav Moeller and it hit a crescendo. And it was the most dramatic part of the show. This is a photograph from that moment. So you get a better idea of what that experience was like. But it was fun. And giving yourself type parameters like that, I've done enough projects over time to know that if you try to do too much, you're gonna fall on your face. So keep it simple. And try to work as best as you can within those tighter parameters that you give yourself. So like I said, I think there is a lot of creative potential in this process. But I know a lot of you here could probably write a script that would build an interface for baking this sequence and it would work just fine. I don't know much about Python. I know enough to be dangerous. And that's something I hope to fill in down the road. But if you are going to do anything like this, have an accurate UV map, and then the possibilities are really quite endless for doing this type of animation or artwork for projection mapping around a space or in a space, I think it has a lot of creative potential. And then give yourself enough time to thoroughly test the ideas to iterate over and over again. I think that is really important. So if you set up type parameters that allow you to generate your ideas and refine and evolve your ideas, then that's absolutely critical. But that specifically I think is why I like Blender so much and why my students like it so much because it's like every time we open it up, it's like I feel like a little kid looking at a new toy and not a new toy, but a toy that you're very familiar and comfortable with and it encourages my students to go home and tinker and to play with it. And it's such a good tool for that purpose. And I think because it is free and open source, it just holds so much potential for so many people all across the world to be authors of culture and democratize this content in such meaningful ways. And so that's why it's such an honor for me to speak at this and just share this little thing that I learned how to do for a project. So thank you for your time and enjoy the rest of the conference. So thank you. Thank you.