 I think it should be fine with this one. Maybe I will be showing some stuff with my hands but it should be fine with this one. So I think we could start right now. So welcome everybody. My name is Vila Navak and I will be presenting Blender Cam. How many of you do know what is it actually? I see some hands. Okay that's great because this is what most people would think when they ask me about what does this thing do. And I post it on the Blender Artist Forum or anywhere so it's not that. It's computer-aided machining in Blender. What is computer-aided machining? It's basically if you are wanting to manufacture something like either it would be a table or a sculpture. This is a computer-guided machine which mills. Some people for most 3D artists, 3D printer is a much closer thing to think about because you don't meet a CNC machine so often and there are not so many open source machines like in the printing area. But basically for example this table was done with a CNC machine. These letters have been done with a CNC machine. And for the first time I got a machine like this because I wanted to do wood sculpture. You cannot print wood. So I realized there is not enough open source software to do it in good resolution. Okay here is a bit of information about the CNC machines. There is a simple CNC machine like a hobby machine. This can be like from a small size up to machines which are as big as a room and cost multi-million euro. And there is like some specifics of these machines. It's really an industry standard for manufacturing a lot of stuff including injection molding stuff which is like anything from plastic that is manufactured massively has this process in the beginning where the mold or the steel part which is injected to has to be manufactured through this process. Okay and they have three two N-axis which means like the one you see here is, oh my God, sorry. Okay sorry. I forgot to connect the computer but I will go on talking and while the computer starts again. Okay so yeah I was talking about the axis in the CNC milling and that is that you can have three axis which means the machine can go just from one side through material or you can have more axis like four where the thing is turning in it and five where like basically the machine can go from any side to it. I'm sorry like this computer takes a lot of time to start again when it goes to fourth sleep because of the battery. So what I think that that was I will just remember those in the presentation. There is one thing that these machines are nowadays replaced with 3D printing process a lot but still you cannot print wood and that's also why I am using it because my main focus is wooden sculpture. I'm sorry. It's still starting. So I will the next part of the presentation was the CNC process. Actually how do you achieve a result? Oh great it's back. Okay these are some videos of this process actually at work with Blender where some simple stuff gets manufactured on a CNC machine. Okay it's not running. Okay now it's running. This is like some simple plywood cutting on this machine. Basically what is the thing why the plug-in is kind of complex thing is that it has to compute offsets. So you have a drill that is drilling something some shape but you have to go to the side in the case of 2D cutting and you have to go to up or like to offset the shape of the cutter in the case of 3D cutting. That's why it is using quite complex collision algorithms and for meshes which have up to several million polygons it is really have a computational task as for example here where is like a simple 3D sculpture but it already has several hundred thousand polygons and that's actually why I started developing this because there are several open source plugins or softwares to do simple 2D dimensional cutting but for 3D cutting like this I couldn't find any software that would actually work that wouldn't compute path for such a simple sculpture longer than one day for example. So that's it I will. So BlenderCam is an addon for Blender but it's not distributed as an addon. I distributed as a complete downloadable package where you get the Blender with the addon and some libraries which are needed to run it. That's basically one of the reasons why to distribute it separately. The second reason is so that people have another interface in the beginning on it. Most people who are into this manufacturing processes don't understand the animation software so well and there's no reason for them to see the timeline. So the other stuff which is written here I've already said. Interesting is that it gets quite it's quite successful although if I post about it at Blender artist like nobody knows usually what it is or so but it gets like about 20 downloads a day statistically and I also get donations for it so it's quite successful and quite moving. Actually right now there is a presentation in the other room running where a very sympathetic architect is presenting his work and he did a lot of work with BlenderCam for architectural models or landscape models. Here are some features which I will show very soon in practice. What is important for me that you have many strategies to choose because it is very important to save time and get the best quality in CNC milling and very often it's really about costs because every tool you use gets ruined in some time and also the machine time is much more expensive than with 3D printers for example because there you get very few electricity and CNC machines eat a lot of electricity and possibly also other material like cooling, liquid or these tools which each tool for CNC milling can cost up to 30 euros and you can use up this tool during doing one work. So there are some more features which people who know what is CNC milling will understand why they are good like for example limiting the operation space that you can define a curve on which you are and you are operating only inside this curve to for example make some precise detail in the work and that again saves you a lot of time. Here is a bit about the workflow. If you want to try it yourself you don't have to have the machine yourself. You can just have somebody and know about some fablab where you can use it but you still should know this and know how because usually it takes a lot of time to prepare the tool parts for the machine so to do it you need to bring the ready tool parts to the machine to have this job done. So you create what you want. You don't need to create it in blender. It can be inkscape or any vector art or anything else. You get it into blender and then you have to think like this is there mainly because for example sometimes if you dig too deep there can be collisions. Again unlike 3D printing there is a spindle spinning and if that collides with the material or like something is not computed well then that's a big problem. We make the tool parts, run the simulations, export the gcode. The gcode is basically a program which the CNC machines understand. Each machine has a different gcode but it can support up to about 10 types of gcode and many more can be easily added. Then it's like watch the machine, do your artwork. It sounds simpler than it actually is. I will now show a bit of the workflow with BlenderCam. This is just a little show of why it's not so easy to compute. You see that there is like a certain path and there is the cutter which is a spinning tool is following it. Now when I switch to a rounded cutter it goes along a different path. So that's basically what's complex about it. That you have to do this many million times per piece to have precise movement. Now I just prepared a very simple example because the computations can take time similar like with rendering and for some of the relays it computes up to half an hour a path. It's a very simple example where this is already preset. This is basically a path that the tool follows. You can see there are, I did two operations here. One is for a so-called rough part and the other for finish. Usually you want to use a big cutter to get away all the material and then a fine cutter to do a very good finish surface. So the big cutter does most of the job. Also, if I compute the other path, the finishing path, you can see that for the rough part I set it so that it's actually above the surface. So there is some material left and so that for the finishing path you don't have any, because the big cutter can make some, it could basically go through the surface, the finish surface you want to achieve. So you make it a bit off the surface. The price of it that you can get it faster means that it's not so precise because the cutter can vibrate, for example, and that's why you do it this way. BenderCam has basically a lot of settings that you can find in professional cam softwares which can cost up to 5000 euro, for example, or just plugins for some CAD softwares. So just quickly, there is about 10 strategies some are marked experimental because they are not finished and my development model is like to get things first working, I give it to the users and mark them as experimental because then I can get feedback. Because there are not so many people giving feedback so it's very useful to have it at least like this enabled also things that are working in progress. So there is lots of parameters which are very good if you would start with it getting serious like what direction you want to get into the material because it really doesn't matter how it's cutting. There are so-called layers, you can see that for example this path goes in layers because of course it cannot go all the way down at once because it's going in layers and you set them according to your cutter and to the power of your machine how much can it handle. This is the same with the speed. So there is so-called feed rate which is the speed with which it's going the machine. Very important is of course the size and shape of the cutter. A blender cam is supporting actually any number of cutters but the basic ones are flat, a ball and a v-carve which is for carving and then it's custom where you model a mesh of the cutter. It has to be a rotational mesh of course and then it computes the offsets according to that. It has some optimizations factors which are very important because some people want to do very precise work which is quite simple, some cat work. For that is the so-called exact mode which uses the bullet collision engine but then if you switch it off that is a mode where you can use meshes of up to anything blender can handle because it's basically using the buffer it converts everything to image and then computes the offsets but it's quite essential for working with high resolution stuff. That is something I want to show you as the next step because this is like I wanted to show some of the work I did. This is a wood bas-relief and that's what I am doing with blender cam mostly. I work with wood and this piece is like for 50 hours in the machine until it makes it ready. So it's pretty detailed stuff and you couldn't do this with the classical collision, polygon collision because it would take days to compute. So this is like a Bosch inspired artwork called Office. It's not hell but it's called Office and this is the big battle with the cars and this is some mass grave. It's quite a dark artwork but it was some feeling I had about what's going to happen maybe in some years. This is the goddess of shopping actually. You can see she has six hands, two counters and two hamsters below her doing the yin and yang of shopping. This is the address of blender cam. That's also a thing I wanted to show you just for sure the website. There is a gallery of artists that people posted I tried to show it off. Also I warned people realistically that the blender cam is more for artistic use. I made an aircraft engineer in Warsaw recently who is using it to mill into steel. I'm not connected, never mind. And also uses it to manufacture scientific equipment with the software. I met architects who are using it and that's it. You can download versions for Linux, Mac and Windows which are pre-compiled. You can also compile the libraries yourself. It's just two Python libraries which are not by default in Blender's numpy in some Blender compilations it is already and then it's a polygon. It's for work with polygons and maybe there will be more because it's always about optimization and but also about support. For example now Blender cam is stuck with Blender 2.69 because the polygon library is not for Python 3.4 and these kind of issues but basically I tried to have it so that everyone who wants to start with can download a working package. That's it. I think it's just time for questions. Actually that's a great question because I'm already working on that and I actually have the code finished for it. It's just in prototype stage. So if you look here on the web page there are some subversion commits and some of them you can read that I actually coded already four and five access support where there is, I don't know, any other open source package that is working with this but I don't have a machine like this. So that's the question. It's a very responsible job to do this because it can be dangerous like if people collide but now a guy who is really giving feedback he can purchase access for his machine so we are going to the next step with this because I have it one year already ready for five access operations but that's the state of it. But it's planned and it's almost there. Is there a support for a rough part and a finished part or do you only place the finished part and then set the levels as offset to roughly get your rough part? Yeah, there is no wizard to prepare it or to... You mean some kind of rest milling? Of course you can do... There are layers and you can do rough and finished part as I did show but there is no wizard now which would do it for you. Basically each operation has the layers enabled by default. That's it by now so each operation is handled almost like rough part but you have to switch it. Okay. Next question. I'll hear down. In the first row. Do you support laser cutters as well and how do you deal with the material properties in terms of motor speed which is going to be different for wood or plastic or leather? By now there is no library of materials that would set the spindle speed or the speed for laser cutting. Laser cutters are not yet supported because nobody requested it. I always try to respond very fast to requests but they have to be posted somewhere either into my email or into the forum which is also on the web page. It's basically a Google group. I didn't have access to laser cutter but soon into weeks my friend is getting one so that's also a way to get one. Two questions. One, how much does a CNC machine you are using cost? Second, for example the sculpture of the goddess how much did it cost to create it? Okay. The CNC machine I was doing this with all of the works you saw cost 1,600 euro. But it's a hobby machine and it was kind of like the last work I had to do in four parts then to glue them and bind them together because it was already bigger, it was like this size so this is the cost of the machine without a spindle for example and without a computer. But if you want to do complex... this was like really the furthest you can push such a cheap machine and it was really... it was a real pain to work with it I have to say so maybe it's better to invest more to get more job done in short time. Now we purchased with a friend a bigger machine which is 2.5 meters so we hope to work to do some nicer work. And the work like... there is like the cost of dried wood which can be quite expensive but this piece for it could be I don't know 40 euro and then there would be for this one 12 hours running time but the goddess is not in enough detail it should be double detail I know it now so the last work is in the detail which is supposed to be and it's like 30 hours for it but the preparation time was much longer because I had to for example realize how to shift the work in the small machine if I would have a bigger one and also a lot of problems like this for example BlenderCram has support for splitting the files because you have many million instructions and the control software sometimes does not support so many instructions which happened to me with Max3 or I'm not sure most people probably use Linux CNC or others so this kind of things I had to overcome so like the material cost would be like I don't know 102 euro 200 but the time cost would be 10 times more Okay so another question but I think we are running out of time Very nice I actually have an answer to another question regarding the laser cutting question I think there is a workflow already in Blender that you can use because the fall cut device has just finished his patch for freestyle we can export SVG so basically you can now just output an SVG file and throw it into your cut zone That is true but are you sure that SVG will have correct measures? I can only speak about my laser cutting workflow I set all the lines to a hairline or I actually don't understand the question probably Maybe we will rephrase it That's interesting because then you probably use Inkscape has a very good plugin for laser cutting for example or you use some software you got with the machine We use the driver of the machine The self-developed driver at our hackerspace now since one week or so called control cut I don't know the details but basically the driver comes with the machine you just feed it just a vector data as hairlines and that's it Thank you very much Thank you also for perfect timing Yeah, yeah Okay, thank you for your attention Now there is a small change in our schedule and about 3 p.m. is going to talk Antoni Okay, so now it's Terry to speak