 Thank you. Thank you for having me and thank you for being here. My name is Conrad Justin and for last 15 years I've been drawing and for over last 20 years I've been riding a bicycle. So it would make perfectly logical sense for me to be able to draw a bicycle, right? So I never draw one and three weeks ago I did experiment. I Charmed myself to take one minute and draw one from memory and Say hello to little monstrosity It would just break right down. You wouldn't even be able to go one meter with it and end up on the bottom of canal with the rest of them So it is crazy to me that I can look at something my entire life and not see it This means that my inner inner form of a bicycle is completely different than a real thing and This is what is this presentation is about about how to improve our inner forms to become better artists a Little bit about myself. So I'm not small. It's just Bobo who is really big So this is my sister cut if you ever visit Sweden Keep your wits about you because Bobo is really good hunter So I do have a little bit of traditional artistic background drawing painting sculpting And I'm a civil engineer musician and level designer not not exactly in that order and I've been only using Blender for four years prior to that. I've been using 3ds max, but with 2.8 release. I The user in this place become very clear very nice. So I moved over and You might find me Walking like lunatic sketching sometimes always with within my sketchbook And I like to write down think some things down and draw some other things And I think this is a wonderful way for an artist to develop their inner forms Here's another sketch page from my sketchbook and Ten years ago. I started making game environments first for zoonotic Very simple in geometry old engine basically with with plenty of limitations Then I moved to unreal tournament. I could finally make bigger open more open environments I Did a collaboration with German architect on a map for the optical a fast-paced FPS game We at the map became official map in the game and Since then I'm making asset packs and environments for Unreal Engine 4 and Now Unreal Engine 5 and here's the collaboration. We're doing with students from Delft Really creative and smart people. We're making a game where you Invert gravity to solve puzzles it's like portal with gravity and Here's my most recent asset pack for Unreal Engine 4 and 5 steampunk Chinese it's a synthesis of steampunk and Chinese architecture and Four years ago, I started making render models here some of them you can see English is not my native language and Four years also four years ago. I discovered sketchfab a platform where artists can put their 3d models and Make them Available to see real time for everyone and it was really a game changer to me You can zoom in orbit around, you know inspect textures inspect materials So here are some of the scenes that I made there using simple modular set different compositions And here's one more photo of Bobo because he's just too cute Also, this is like a trap position if you if you reach out to pet him. You might say goodbye to your hands All right, so artistic perception of reality. I think a lot of Creative processes done outside of your workshop not in front of the screen, but when we are out there exploring discovering new things just like Ada said yesterday Nature is the best inspiration so when we aren't out there and we Look at things we learn new things with perceived reality We take everything new we see when put it on a specific shelf in our mind And this shelf contains list of symbols meanings definitions simplified images of that particular thing and We use those these shelves to communicate with each other to communicate to communicate internally and to recognize things speaker audience screen unfortunately Reality is very complex and our brains simply do not have the capacity to store all the data So we are forced to simplify and our brains get really good at recognizing very simple Patterns, so this is not a face We might think it is a face and the fact that we can see face in it means that our brains are really good at Simplifying things and keeping those internal form forms that are not only only simple, but also wrong Here's a photo I took in Sweden and here's how my brain sees it Stores it So it's easy to recognize every every object, but yet there is no detail Here's another example a painting by a Rembrandt I saw it in the Royal Castle in Poland and this is how I saw it and Here is how my brain stored it and my favorite thing to draw when I'm in nature is trees So here are two beautiful trees that I took photos of the other day one the one on the left is It was struck by lightning, but it's still is still alive. It still grows this one. I like I liked watching I like seeing children climb up But they they put like this thing around so children can no longer have fun So here's a simplified version of these trees. You can still recognize that these are in fact the same But it's easy to recognize it's easy to learn and communicate with this But it is not enough for an artist artist. I think have an obligation to Train their inner forms so that they can choose whether they want to do this or something more advanced So here is again Okay, so how do I improve my inner form of a bicycle? Let's imagine a scenario or Not just a bicycle anything that we want to depict really right So imagine a scenario you are looking at the piece of art in front of you And it is very complex. It's you don't understand it, but right next to you stands an artist who made the piece So You look at it. You don't understand that your category for it is not quite wide enough for you to understand the symbols the meanings the abstract So you but you have a reference Something similar that you have seen already You look at the artist and you say, oh, yeah, this looks just like something else. You must have been inspired by something else And the artist looks at us Are you trying to insult me? Are you trying to undermine my creativity? I took my time to make sure that it is original artwork That is not just a copy of someone else's work No, we're just trying to communicate So when artists realizes that their category is not quite allow us elaborate to to contain information Within and to understand the painting artists should say Listen, they're similar but not quite the same Let me explain you Let me explain the difference and then the beautiful thing happens There is a conversation between the viewer and the artist The viewer expands their categories and inner forms and the artist who often does things subconsciously Doesn't stop to reflect. Why do they do something like that? It's often very into intuition or intuitive They also learn about their own art So that's the process of conversation and this is artwork by Tycho and Magnetic Anomaly and I I don't understand it. So I reached out to Tycho and talked to him and so we figured it out So now we know that we do store simplified images in our mind and there are an obstacle When proceeding art made by others, but also when creating our own art And that is because when we lazily look at something we don't actually see it We see our inner form of it So what we should do is probably discard them or learn how to improve them You already know one of the methods talking with the artist conversation and second one is Well, Aristotle has said that every thought and idea we have we learn through the sensory experience So we are when we are out there and we fully perceive reality when we are exploring discovering when we are thoughtful analytical and We should also be positive because if we don't learn to see beauty in things around us We cannot create beauty ourselves So here's an example of this James Gurney is an amazing painter. He created dynotopia a world where dinosaurs and humans live together in harmony and One of the paintings he did for one of the illustrations he did for his book was the waterfall city and He didn't just do it in his workshop. He didn't just paint it there He went out to the location when the water when there was a waterfall to feel the droplets of the water on his skin To hear the roar of the waterfall To see how the water changes color as it goes over the edge of the cliff and he sat there and painted it So my advice is painting is a little bit hard and it's easier to draw So whenever you can go out with a sketchbook or a piece of paper and pencil and draw So there are three cool techniques that I'm using when I draw first is squinting eyes So I don't even have to do it. I just take off my glasses same result All the detail vanishes the shape distribution becomes clear and the contrast between values becomes really strong It makes it easier to recognize good composition. So you can squint at the world You can squint at someone now. That's rude. Sorry. You can squint at your drawing and see If the composition still holds clarity after all the detail vanishes another technique is synthesizing every a lot of artists Does that do that? so you walk and you draw and you pick objects around you and integrate them in your drawing into your composition by This is how you learn how to combine things and Add put them together and add additional value. So let me explain Let's say you pick up a car There is a piece of foliage There's a squirrel Put them all together and there's some human bones lying on the sidewalk put them all together Into drawing and all of a sudden you have a post-apocalyptic world Where human race is extinct and squirrels rule the world? So you might ask me now Why do I have to draw it takes time? Why can't I just take a photo? Excellent question. Thank you so The drawing let me put it this way your drawing no matter how crude and how basic I think it is still going to be better for you Than taking photo because it is how you interpret reality how you see it and also it is a reflection of who you are And what you feel at the moment Every everything you draw is expanding your visual library in your head that you always have with you and that enables you as an artist in future projects And also your art is based on your style Not on the How you see world not how cameras sees it When we when we take a photo we forget everything immediately most of the decisions are made for us But when we do when we draw we have to have make hundreds of decisions as we transfer reality onto a piece of paper We learn about the nature of the object, but we also learn about ourselves in photo everything is static everything is fine But in drawing everything is dynamic you can rearrange reality in front of you you can pick objects You can enhance them you can remove them entirely if you don't like them So here's an example. Let's say you go outside now And in the middle of Amsterdam you see a mountain a beautiful mountain So you you take it right you pick it up and multiply it put it in the background There is a windmill used for pumping water put it in the golden ratio There's a bicycle obstructing view throw it into canal With your imagination you're rearranging reality in front of you and that is just the tip of the iceberg If we go further down Yeah, this is the final composition Yeah Thank you Who wants this We can stretch reality if we want let's say we have a building We can draw a one thing with features of completely different thing building goes straight But the tree goes like this. Why don't we draw a building that goes like this? Although you shouldn't probably live in the fifth floor of the building It would be dangerous to go to the balcony If we invert it we can put small windows in store small doorways onto the tree someone could leave there Some small creature the hell with it. Let's make entire town on top of the wooden log All right This is blender conference. So I should probably talk a little bit about blender So I'm gonna Talk about photorealistic rendering Something that Andrew Price talked about yesterday. So I won't go into detail photorealistic goals in photorealistic rendering in general is basically An attempt to make a render look look like indistinguishable from a photo So goals for photorealistic renderer are filming color management. I think it's by default PBR textures that can be obtained through our various websites Or you can make them yourself if you take photos of different surfaces high poly sculpts quite difficult skill and lighting simulation cycles So what is amazing to me is that all these goals in photorealistic art are tools and many more in NPR non-photorealistic art Or or called artistic rendering Which is basically any other type of render than photorealistic rendering So let me show you the practical Example use of what I just talked about So here in near the place I live there is like this beautiful gate. I saw it and I liked it But I didn't exactly know what I liked about it. So I did speed sketching I forgot to mention this before and there was a third technique speed sketching So speed sketching is basically when you look at something you don't know why you like it But you like it you draw it as fast as you can And your mind subconsciously focuses on the best parts So you look at your drawing. Oh, so this is why I like it Very useful you you're capturing essence of what you want to depict So I this is the first photo and this is final version in night and die day cycle I'm using synthesizing as well. I see a chair. I pick it up I see like a nice foliage in between the cracks and crevices of a concrete. I pick them up as well And so here is a speed sketch that I made there and these are more I take more time to add more detail also Outside and this is sketches. These are sketches that I do at the workshop When I need to figure out the details like how the ornaments are gonna look like How is the chair gonna look like from side or The lantern First step is going to be a block out very basic shapes very basic primitives The whole the opening is done with boolean. The tree is made with curves the taper Then I make scouts I'm using them to render to bake the textures into to create stylized textures not photorealistic textures Then I add the details. I use hair emitter to scatter around the foliage Then I I do Positioned camera Take a screenshot put it into Krita paint over it because there are some cool brushes there And I projected back onto the 3d top a 3d geometry in blender the other side And this is final version of the diffuse but something is missing. This could be work of art. I suppose But I'm not quite satisfied So the magical part comes here add painting light So I add hdri 35 lights spotlights area lights directional lights point lights And the emissive foliage And for the day cycle, I do have a diffuser in the back 28 lights hdri And negative lights you can have negative lights So if you use the slider, you don't you don't get to the negative you get to zero But if you type in minus 50, you're actually subtracting the value and the hue which is amazing So next step is baking lighting. I bake all that information into the textures. I have two versions now daytime and nighttime And yeah, this is what I saw and this is how I interpreted it One last thing before I end is Fluffy Here's this is a photorealistic fluffy snow owl, although infinitely cute Fluffy will look always the same on every single photo But in stylized art in npr art, we're not limited by it So we have a much wider range of tools at our disposal to convey emotion and to convey style So this is a trap of photorealistic rendering if we're not careful, we might lose that emotion. We might lose that style Okay, let me summarize what I just talked about First thing is to know that everyone It including you categorizes and stores simplified images that are also quite wrong Our task is to improve those images By talking with the artist And experiencing things being thoughtful respectful and positive When we draw or paint or we just visualize We should do like speed sketching, synthesizing, experimenting, reimagining reality and I Encourage you to use photorealistic rendering, but as your tool not as your final goal Okay, thank you for having me