 Okay, just a little warning ahead. Because yesterday in the Susanne Awards we saw such a cool 90s techno video, so I thought to get back into the 90s spirit I'm presenting in 1024 by 768, sorry for that. We didn't find it that up there. We were all researching last night, but anyway, I think it will work out. So, hi Blender Conference. It's really nice to be here with all of you. My name is Simon Repp. Today I have the great pleasure to talk to you about what for you hopefully as well are some new paradigms in industrial design visualization. And more specifically, I'm going to talk about, I'm going to present to you an early preview of a research and development project I'm working on, which is called Project Elmira. To start things off, I wanted to give you some background. So as I stand here, I'm only a very tiny fragment of a large international community and project called the Exim project. Who have you has already heard about the Exim project? Okay, not too many, which is all the better because the slides make sense. In the picture you can see a few of my colleagues, a few of our project partners, the founder and the chairman, but it's by far not all of them that are involved in the project. And the Exim project concerns itself with the development of a professional modular open source and open hardware cinema camera. And as prior milestones to this, we have first the Exim Alpha, which is already existing. This was the prototype and the proof of concept that such a thing can be done. Right now transitioning from development into production is the Exim Beta. You might have heard about that. It was financed through an Indiegogo campaign one year ago. They acquired over 200,000 euros to build it. These are finances for the development, actually, not for the actual production. And yeah, right now the first ones are being going into production, actually. And this camera directs itself towards early adopters, towards developers, towards tinkerers, but also very importantly towards filmmakers who also want to get involved in the development. Because like with Blender, you bring together the users and the developers, then the magic happens. And it's the same here. And what I'm more specifically involved with is the future. That's the Exim Gamma, a camera that is set to ship at the earliest at the end of 2016. It's a big research project that's funded by the European Union through a Horizon 2020 grant over 1 million euro. We have five project partners involved. They are spread over Poland, over Germany and Austria. And I myself am part of the team at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. There are about eight people. And we concern ourselves with the coordination, with the planning, with research, with scientific publications, with graphics, communication. And last but not least, why I'm here, with visualization. So getting to the topic. I joined the team in May 2015, so not too long ago. And I'm working there for nine hours a week. And I will continue to do so until June 2016. And my rough job description there is to work on documentation and visualization. So when I started off, I sat together with Sebastian and with Nils and my colleagues. And then first weeks we kind of got feeling like what would be the challenges. The first start was a bit working on 2D graphics, talking about workflows and stuff. And eventually we got to the 3D part. And yeah, we were sort of getting an overview like what would be the work I would actually do in the visualization niche. So the thing at hand would be camera components. So this is what I would visualize. Lens mounts, circuit boards, enclosures, view finders, whatever. Also possibly some external modules, because there's, for instance, a remote plant for the X and Beta. And very importantly, I would be working on ever-changing designs. So I'd like to really stress this. I would never, ever or probably work on finished products in this whole project. This is important, so keep that in mind. We thought about what kind of visualizations do we want. And it's product shots, orthographic views, front, side, back, et cetera. Cross-section views and exploded views. So these are the main things, like classical industrial design visualization stuff, actually. All of this possibly in a realistic and a blueprint aesthetic. And animated, of course, and possibly, if we can achieve it, also interactive. And these are sort of the places where we would use all this footage that I would produce. So we have weekly articles, sometimes even more than weekly. We have, of course, our website, we have print materials, we will have packaging. And very importantly, the last point, a manual for the camera. And this led us to another topic, which is sort of not so ordinary. Because as I was saying, I'm working on ever-changing designs, so versioning was really important. So of course, the last version always bears significance to a large majority of the people. But as I said, the Beta is a camera that is directed towards early adopters. So we don't want to leave those behind and have visualizations in the manual that don't even fit the version of the camera that people own. So this is something that we needed to keep in mind and that adds quite some complexity to as to where are the files, where are the visualization files, and which version are they and where are they linked to and all that stuff. So and at this point, I got a bit concerned because nine other weeks really not much. It's almost nothing because you also have to factor in like meetings and all documentation and all the overhead. So I thought, how will I spend my work day-to-day? I had this fear that I would come into the office and there would be a new version of a component and like, hey Simon, we are having an article next week. Can you do a visualization on that part? We need to communicate this and that. And then there's of course this problem, like how much work do I put into this? Because if it's like a weekly cycle and you know it's just a draft version next week, like the component could look completely different. How much work do I put in to actually set this up as a beautiful visualization rig? And so I sat down with Sebastian again. We did some thinking. I made some chaotic scribbles and the first idea basically was just automate the shit out of everything. So the idea was just to have a very automated system that has almost no user interaction, maybe where it just put in the raw designs, the CAD files, and outcomes, cross-section views and exploded views and whoops, what happened there? Yeah, outcomes, all the visualization formats that I talked about earlier. And in the first weeks of this, I mean, we kind of went for that, but it shows in a process or I realized that it's not really beneficial to automate things so much. So I think it's very important to also have that human factor, to have a designer actually go in and change some things, even just small things can make a whole difference. Because computers are smart, but they're not yet that smart that they can communicate great visualization for you. So the plan evolved a bit, quite a bit actually, it's escalated, I would even say. And in the last months, I was basically working on this now, a system that kind of has automates as much as of this tedious versioning stuff and deployment and all that, but still retains the possibility for the designer to step in and to actually these human changes that I really need. And the product of this is currently codenamed Project Almyra and this is what I'm going to present now as a live demo and along the way, I will talk about all the design decisions and stuff. How many minutes do I have left? I forget to set the counter. 15. 15, perfectly. So now we'll get interested with the resolution, but I think we'll manage. Okay, so as you see, Project Almyra is a web-based service. This is like one of the key components in this deployment. So one of these very important paradigms, I wrote it down so I can really talk about it. Oh, no point. It's actually, like I talked earlier about this versioning thing, you know, we have a manual with descriptions on the cameras in different versions and we have different visualizations and so this is a whole mess, you know, every week you have to deploy different files to different places and different versions and all that stuff. And so the idea is basically that this system deploys all the images over a web server and for each visualization, you get a permalink that you can insert in Wikis or send somewhere, send an email. Just you take out all this, put it on Dropbox or to upload it via FTP and all that stuff. Okay, maybe I'll just jump in and show you the workflow. So what I can do in Almyra is basically create a visualization. Which one are we going to take? I think I'm going to visualize some stuff from the Blender Cloud. So maybe let's start with the watch with Victor's watch. And that looks correct. Basically the idea is always when you start a visualization in Almyra, the model that you use, which is raw CAD-CAD data, so we agreed for a moment on STL because it's just like the common denominator which we can work with, something you can get out of every program no matter how proprietary it is. And you link the visualization you do to the original source. So later the system can update the visualization. And normally you would probably point to GitHub or something but because I wanted to keep the internet out of my presentation, out of fucking it up, I'm now fetching the stuff locally. Okay, and basically you can then select which kind of visualization you want and let's say we want an animation. Let's say it wants to be four seconds. I'm going to turn down the resolution a lot because I don't want to wait for the rendering. And then you can have different templates for these classical visualization types that I talked about earlier. So this is stuff that you always have, like turntable or Helix or Dolly or user control that I'll talk about that later. And when you choose a turntable, then you can choose a default style which is applied. Let's keep it realistic. And then you have modifiers, one of which is already implemented, automated cross-sectional view. Okay, let's... What did I forget? Great, the title would be good. Five demos, exciting. Okay, so there's our visualization. I'm now showing up in the system. And have I started the renderer? Let's see. Of course I haven't, okay. So in the background, I'm now starting the rendering process. And if everything goes well, yeah. Okay, so it's now a registry string, it's doing something. There's a red dot, you can see it. And it's rendering the missing frames. So this is one principle of the whole system. You start a visualization. And from the beginning on, you have something to work with. This is one of the very important paradigms in this. I need a bigger table. So, and all these versions are continuously deployed. And even after just, I don't know, in this case probably two minutes, you have something that you can show to people. So you have a link that you can email to people. You have something to talk about, to look at, and talk about with the engineers and with management. And this is really to take out this classical dilemma like I'm a designer and of course we always, we aspire to do really cool things. And then we're like, ah, well, I'll show you tomorrow because the visualization is not cool enough. And I'm just going to break with this paradigm here and say whatever I have, I'll just put it out there. Because it's more important, especially in industrial design visualization, this is not about fancy arts or movies. It's important to see stuff, to work on stuff, to communicate, and this is what's happening there. And okay, it's actually, it has only a random haughty animation because the random queue is, I'm only giving one minute of random time to each queue. So if there's more visualization, it always switches to another one. And that's why it's not finished yet, but it will be in a second. And it automatically applies all of this in different formats. So there's no, okay, you sent me an MP4 actually I needed something else and then you have to somehow find out how to convert it. Everything's there already. Also as a sip, all the images themselves, all the frames. Yeah, okay, and as you can see, here you have three buttons. One is like the system stores all visualization as a blend file. So you can at any point take the visualization out of the system and use it in any crazy way that you're used to work with Blender because it's just a blend file and you can just take it out or put it back into the system. This is the other button, updated scene from Blender. So you can just replace it. And the idea is of course that the workflow is you use this templating system to get a visualization going that is already almost what you need or at least fulfills the basics. It's like a turntable animation of the park. That's what you need. And then as a design, you can go in, download the blend and make some changes and upload it. So maybe let's do that. Download it. So there's the blend. I just downloaded and oh my God, it's so tiny. Okay, so there it is. And basically I can now do whatever changes I want. I don't know how about maybe I changed color or something. Maybe I even animate it. Okay, perfect. I'm going to save that and back into the browser. I will choose that file, turntable, and I'm updating the file. Now as you can see, it has two versions of this. And in the background in second, it should be rendering this again. Okay, it's still exporting the other one. Okay, and while it renders, I'm talking about the last button. This is probably the most important here. As I said, every visualization you have is tied to wherever you get the data from first, to the cat files that are online somewhere. So if an engineer in meanwhile takes this part that he asked you to visualize and updates it on the GitHub repo, the system can automatically fetch that and then it tries to reapply everything that he manually did to the visualization on the new version of that design. So and this is another very important factor and maybe it's even the key factor in this whole thing. As I said, in the project, I would always work on ever-changing designs and they give me some lens mount for instance and I visualize it, I put in a lot of work to make it beautiful. And then next week, the engineer comes and says, okay, I added a little screw there. It's a new version, but it's kind of important for the manual. So I would have to really reapply all these, I don't know, sharp corners and the UV mapping and maybe redo the animation and split the model and do the exploded view animation and all that stuff that is the end goal should be automatically done in the system, as much as can be done anyway. Of course there are things that the computer won't be able to resolve, but it does as much as it can and after that you have to do it manually anyway. But only a little part of it and not all the deployment and all that stuff. How many minutes do I have left? Five, perfect. So I'll just consult my cheat sheet so I didn't forget anything. Yeah, another thing that's kind of important about this is as it's a web interface, it's not limited, thank you, it's not limited to the designer. So previously you kind of get all the hardware data and then you work at home or at your desk and it's sort of your territory. But with this, as you saw, there's a wizard for creating classical types of visualizations and with this anyone can start off this process and this is very important for me because then Sebastian, for instance, our team lead could say he needs a turntable visualization of a part and he doesn't have to send me an email like here you can find the files and this is what I want, it's like messy and tedious. He just goes in there and paste the URL and says how it looks and then he has something to work with already. I don't even have to be concerned, like I can be on holiday and he still has a turntable animation that he can work with. It's at least something, it's always better than having nothing at all and at any point then when I have time I can look at it and say, okay, this needs some human intervention and I am the designer and I do some changes and I re-upload it and it's always in the system and all parties involved, so management and PR, press, the engineers, they always can see what's going on, where we are, like what they have there and they can just anytime open it and where's my mouse cursor, get all the different formats, so there's GIF and I don't know, there's MP4, okay, now I don't want to download. I think this works in the browser, does it? Yeah, so yeah, that's another thing that I would guarantee a level of quality, this is also very important because even if I'm a great designer, sometimes work is just so overwhelming that I don't really have time to invest much into something and in that cases I dare to say that even an automated system can probably deliver whatever you can deliver if you don't have any time at all and this is just the idea, like if it's really stressy then just let the computer do it and it's not a waste precious time to deliver something that a computer can do as well. Okay, so I think I have all the most important points. Okay, do you guys have any questions? Otherwise I will, a long side of this just show a few more things. Okay, the question was, is it available already or is it just internal? Yeah, like I said, it's an early preview so it's not online yet. I actually thought about opening the repo just now, opening, creating one, opening but I'm not sure about how we are going to license it. I mean it's going to be some open license but you know the details, is it GPL or is it, I don't know. Yeah, I still have to clear it up with my team then can be, yeah, released any time. Yeah, can you tell us more about the user control part? Can you specify that question? When you select user control you said you're gonna tell us more about it but I think, ah, yeah, sure, sorry, yeah. Very good. Yeah, as you see, I didn't talk about this at all. There's web 3D, so another goal in this would be that the system also automatically generates interactive web 3D view. Using, I think it will very surely be planned for web because it's really cool. And yeah, and then of course the camera can be user controlled as well. So that's why it has user controlled here. And the idea with the interactive web 3D view is to have it integrate just like all the other modes. So also, if there's a new version, the interactive web 3D widget is automatically updated like behind the scenes. You always have the paramiling and the stuff just improves in the background. So the samples increase, so now we're at, I can't read it from here, like something higher. Yeah, that's the answer to the question.