 Welcome. My name is Chuck Gordon and I'm telling you something about the Three Futures Holodeck Musical. I want to cover three topics. The first is, it's some kind of personal story, how to wake the superhero inside you. The second is how to help mankind qualify for the 27th century. And the third thing is how to do this with the planet and have fun with it. First, it was 2006 when I looked back to my career which went back to 1990 and I said okay, it was a good time. I had a good career in IT consulting, leading 25 consultants, but is this all I want from my life? Is this all what I'm here for on this planet and what do I do with the next 20 years? And just recently I found a quote from Robert Zubrin, president of the mass society. He said, I am not going to accept myself, doing less than what I have dreamed of doing when I was a boy. And this is pretty much how I felt. So I decided, yes, it was scary, but I decided, okay, I will go for this quest. And it was lots of work, four years. And then I took a professional coach and with her on one day, with lots of preparation, I found my destiny which was its technology and mythology. And I said, yes, this is it, that's great. But what am I going to do with that? Who wants that? Except me. And over the next few years, I developed a way to achieve that. And maybe some of you remember this film. It seems that I've been living two lives. One life. I'm an IT consultant for a respectable software company. I have a social security number, pay my taxes and I am sent by my wife to carry out the garbage. The other life is lived in my Gordon cave, where I go by the name Chuck E. Gordon, trying to save the world with Blender. I hope this life has a future. And I invite you to join the League of Superheroes. Usually superheroes have it on top, but I have it here. If you want to know where to get this shirt, it's a company in Großgerau, Germany, near where I was living. They seem to be the only one on the Internet selling this funny thing. Okay. So, every superhero has a mission and it took me some years to find out, but I want to get to the Blender part, so I'm rushing over it. My mission is to help mankind qualify for the 22nd century and have fun with it, which means fun for mankind and fun for me. So the question was, what is fun for me? And I am thankful to my mother because she kept those pictures. My father took me into the original Star Wars movie when I was 7 or 8. And I'm very thankful and this changed my life. Okay, young guys, you can't have that, original Star Wars. And you see, late 70s, I think, I drew Star Trek, Star Wars and all that stuff. And so I knew science fiction is one of my things that are fun for me. I wanted to produce my own science fiction content. Next, 3D computer graphics is fun for me. I saw a TV documentary, I think it was around about 1985, about Able Studios, the first steps of Pixar and it was so fascinating and I said, that's great. And on the top left you see the first rendering I did in real 3D graphics on my Atari ST. Then I moved on from the 90s to VRML. I did some quite fancy stuff connecting VRML to databases, dynamically producing content, what was later done by Second Life. And then the third image I started using Poffrey. I made a nice walk cycle for this night and some other stuff. And you can do amazing things with Poffrey. For example, I built a telescope in Poffrey and you see through the lens of the telescope pointing to other telescopes. So it was great. And I do this up until now for some business presentation down there, technology monster. So I said, OK, that's so much fun. I want to shift my professional career and I want to create my own specialized animation studio, specialized because when you do things everybody else does, you can't compete with cheap countries. So it has to be something special. Now, and this also took me some years. I developed a thesis how to help mankind qualify for the second century, which is we need to cultivate wisdom and chivalry, so it means nightly behavior, to enter a 22nd century, which is worth living. I think mankind was a wife, but the question is do I want to live in 22nd century if we don't do this. Now, my approach to science fiction and to 3D computer graphics. First, I founded a publishing business. I wrote my first novel, Game Worlds, which is available. You can buy it. And it, yeah, I organized the printing. I planned the sequel, which is called Three Futures. And I had an English translation with professional translator. You can't do this all your own. And I started with Three Futures this year. Then, 2012 computer graphics, I visited Amsterdam, the UNITE, the Unity 3D conference. It was great. And I saw the movie, the butterfly effect. Who has seen that? It is great. It is some Hollywood class animation, short animation movie, but it was rented in real time. And when I saw that and say, okay, for $10,000 you can do this, I said it's possible to do the thing I try to do. And then last year I had the great luck to visit an animation master class with Michael Markowitz from Pixar. And I was such a noob, but it helped me get into that. And I started doing this holodeck musical. When I, the term, when I explained my wife what I was doing, she said, oh, so you are doing a musical for the holodeck. And I said, yeah, that's it. That is what everybody understands. So I had a technical demo at the World Science Fiction Convention in London, which I have here. I invite you later to see it. And now I'm at the Blender Conference. I've made some more stuff. I will show you later. And 2015 I will begin to produce this refutious trailer, which will be one song with great music, great dance, and all you will see later in the musical. And after that, I will start the complete thing. And we shall see what support can get on the way. Probably I will do it song by song. Now, about refutious, what is it? The story, it's an attempt to save mankind with chivalry and wisdom. Surprise. It is a story about utopia versus dystopia over the next thousand years. And I was inspired by some things. Who knows Legion of Extraordinary Dancers? It's a web, street dance series. You can find it on YouTube. It's really great. And it really amazed me. And I said, okay, I would like to include this in my work. I'm inspired by musicals from Tim Burton. I love the 1970s, Animes of Captain Future. This style I like. And who has seen Kick-Ass, the comic scene of the first Kick-Ass? This is where you have a comic and it's in 3D and it's rotated. And I said, yeah, this is what I want to look my stuff. So I decided I will create a enterable comic and enterable cartoon with dance like you go to a theater and you have an experience like the whole deck you're all in there. It's a bit of work because I have to create two alien races. Those are the planets. I have, of course, to create their architecture. I have to create two human architectures which is one is some kind of neo-article and one is some kind of dark tech Gothic. And, okay. Of course, I did not do this alone. I have a little help. I have very great artwork from Verity Glass from the UK. She draws comics also for Doctor Who. And I had to help with the unit report because I didn't have time to do this all myself. Cover art and all that stuff. Those mentioned there I can really recommend if you have work for them, choreography, et cetera. You can go there. So I pressed the button. Okay. Yeah, now how to do this with Blender and FUN? It's demo time. I will show you a movie now. And I invite one of you to come here and to have a look and then we will reflect this afterwards. Who would like? So, okay. I think it's set up. Just a moment. Okay. And you can adjust the lenses forward, backwards, in and out. But don't turn them please. Meanwhile, I am looking for the movie. What is what? It's a durovis dive, the pure man's Oculus, which just takes your ordinary phone. And I have a unity port of the stuff I made with Blender. And it just puts the camera in the stereo camera and you can freely look around. But you can't walk. People started walking around with this without seeing anything running into other people. This wasn't good. So where is it? Yeah. Okay. I hope this works now. Do we see? Okay. This is about what you see. What you see is a bit better because in there you just have the static scene and the lady dancing. But I did some, when I said I make a hold, I wanted to have this effect. And this observatory is a real place in Chile. I think Yuri Beletsky made this great image. And you can look up. There are stars. Okay. So this is what I had for the demo in London. You may stay there if you want. Thank you. And by the way, this beautiful lady allowed me to photograph her. And it's also done with a, actually later, it's also a 3D stereo scan. Now, my first thoughts were, hey, all this stuff is getting so cheap so you can just 3D scan, mocap, press the render button and you are a Hollywood producer. No, of course not. I was aware that this was quite naive but you have to start naively to get to your goal someday. So I conducted a lot of mocap experiments and 3D scan experiments and try to evolve a production pipeline. This is also my golden cave, which is in my basement. I had to move there. And I have, this is my 3D scan studio. I have there a Microsoft Kinect. I don't know how to pronounce. This little thing, there's a 3D stereo camera which takes stereo photos. And important, the chair and the plate, you can put it on and then you can turn a person around and use phabletech 3D scanner to make a 3D scan which is quite good because you don't need to post process. It quite produces very good results. Interesting, you just can use a smartphone when it has an app with a depth field photography which is the Google nexus which has it. And then you can go to this web page, depth.me, upload your picture and it will extract a depth field which you can use in blender to create a 3D model. So you got the picture and you got this depth field and you can use a, what is it meshed for? No, it's displacement modifier I think and you can produce funny results with it. So, but my favorite right now, yeah, I saw this 3D scan iPad camera from Sketchfab Guy which were really good. My favorite right now is to use the Fujire 3D which just makes a strfp of photos and then I use Argusoft, it's a Russian company, a commercial version photoscan but they have a free version, I think it's called stereo scan and you can produce those same results with the free version. It's quite accurate I think but you have the problem, you have those edges that are not clean so you have to post process it but as we heard earlier at the conference, the shrink wrap modifier is not very popular, I love it because you could model a face which should be animatable, just use project with a shrink wrap modifier and you should have something to be able to work with. Has somebody done something like this? Okay, how did it work? Okay, I repeat for the camera, if you take more than one shrink wrap modifier and combine them then you should get good results. Was it right? Great, thank you. No. And then I had a learning dive into Blender. I started Blender 2 with 2.49 which was pain in the ass and fortunately there was a book, the Blender book from a German author which helped me through so I got okay with that but some day I stopped it and now it's much better since Blender 2.5 and what I found was so great softwares, unbelievably great, thank you, Tom and thank you community. Many really good books I found, I found thousands of videos, video tutorials, some of them are excellent, some of them not that excellent and helpful community but those are all very tiny mosaic pieces and when you try to get a fast setup and get fast up and running because you have a commercial interest in, for example, earning your life with this, it was not fast enough. What I had hoped to find was all this because this is really, really great but some kind of top-down graphical overview of a best practice production pipeline blueprint that lets me drill down where I need it not in weeks or months but in minutes to say okay, this is what I want to do and this is a best practice approach how to do it because otherwise I have browsed through ten tutorials and did maybe find a part of that what I was looking for. Now, I wondered what it would look like and I prepared something, I'm not sure if my drive already synced it, we'll try to find it but I would like to ask you, would you think such a thing would be helpful to have an overview where you can drill down, you can say, okay, this is a pipeline for something and for example, I have 3D scanning, how can I do this with stereo scan photogrammetry with some, what is it, infrared sensors like Kinect with some other stuff, depth fields and that, would this be interesting? Yeah. Have an idea how it should look like, you can of course make a diagram, for example, there's a great tool called YAD where you can model graphs and stack them and rearrange themselves and it's really great, so it can be abstract, what do you think it would be more interesting to have it like a village or a factory way of departments and doing things, what do you think? Okay, if you have an idea, I would be glad to discuss this with you later. Let me do a leap of faith and have a look if my Google drive already synced it, which possibly could, okay, we'll try this and maybe it's there some minutes later, meanwhile I will continue. So because of that I joined the Blender Foundation education mailing list and you can find me there, I would be happy to discuss things like that with you there. Now, what have I done so far? I have this whole tech demo, a rough storyboard, the artwork from Verity I mentioned and we did some 3D modeling and I put it together in a small video, which looks like, yeah, this is original artwork from me, I did it with my Android tablet, I bought it for that and I'm quite happy and it gives a rough idea, there's some city with floating skyscrapers and she gets a call, she takes a space bike, travels to the moon and there she has a romantic dance and then some more things happen, which I will not mention here, but from this stage I said I need to take it further to make something impressive out of it and I gave it to my artist and so I gave her, for example, the 3D model of the bike and she did this for me and this is the 3D model and she made the texturing, so this is 2D, which I yesterday ported to Blender and this is what she made from my, you see the contrast of my drawing and what she did and so I said, before I thought, I'm not that bad, but when it comes to that you need a real artist who is able of doing things like this and I said, wow, okay, that's really amazing and yeah, then I did not have personally the time to do this before Blender conference, so I asked the guy who ported this to UniWolts.de to make a camera mapping of that and I just fixed some parts of it and included it into an animation and I had lots of fun building this floating tower, I just put in a background and started working on that and putting all the textures and all the details in there and then now we can have a look at the rendered cloud flight produced out of it until this morning. There are some flaws in it, but this is what was possible right now. When you have a look at the textures right now, you see they start moving and I don't know why yet and this is the 3D mapped scene with the motorbike. This is a Blender render, I had some trouble with the terminator problem so I increased the subdivision surfaces. That's what I have so far. Okay, for the finish I have some great resources I would like to share with you because I did read a lot and a very good book is Blender Production because it contains very important animation pipeline details what to do to avoid pitfalls that will cost you a lot when they appear late in the project. You can buy I think from CG Masters the character creation DVDs Volume 1 to 3 in the lobby and I had three books which I had fun and good contents in it which was Build Your Own Rocket Bike, the Blender 2.5 character animation cookbook and a very important old-born book is the Art of Game Design from Jesse Schell, it's from 2008 but it covers really the basics and gives you a good idea because if you design for a whole deck environment or VR environment it's some kind like a game, I see it rather like a movie where you can freely watch and maybe roam around but you have some similar points and problems so this is a great resource. Summary, I would like to, because I have to build it anyway for my production pipeline to do some kind of top-down best practice blueprint for character animation if you're interested in me feel free to join a discussion at the Blender Foundation Education mailing list with this I plan to help mankind qualify for the 22nd century and have some fun with the three-features holedack musical and think about waking superhero in year two because he's in there and I can tell you this was the most satisfying thing I did in my life thank you very much. When I had a look at the starting time I think we have three minutes left I have one question for you and I'm working on that point with Elling how to create real-time 3D content directly with Blender which I would love to do but actually I haven't seen any possibility so I went to Unity right now. Tom mentioned some possible WebGL viewer in the future maybe this was something. Any questions from you? I think we are out of service. I was just wondering who's writing the music or do you have any samples of the music that will be in the musical? I have some guys in the games industry which produce premium game music and they said okay for the trailer we go with you and write the music but they asked not to be mentioned in the name right now this presentation will be freely available the others for example the choreography you can see the address there so I take professions. I do a bit myself but it's just playing around and if this shall be a success it has to be done professionally. Thank you. Anybody else? One more. Was the VR animation that was all motion capture? That was a free capture which is available from the Carnegie Mellon University they have a large database of I think five or six thousand motion captures which somebody was so kind to port to BVH and I was importing this into Glenda and just trying with that but I also did some mocap experiments and was not amazed by the fact that you have different output formats and you have to think about how do I convert those different formats to my rig and all that stuff you probably know. Last question? Then we are finished on time. Thank you very much. If anybody wants to see this I'll be around here and you can have a look.