 Alright. Hello everybody, thanks so much for coming. I'm Kevin Kress and my talk is called Beyond ArcViz, using Blender for small scale design build projects. So who am I? I'm an aspiring architect, I'm just finishing up my master's degree at the University of Waterloo and a designer who uses Blender as his sort of predominant design tool whenever I can. So I started using sort of 3D animation software when I was pretty young. It's me up in the corner and my brother helping me out there, I learned to use a computer. But it was a bit later when I started using a software called Animator as sort of the first 3D software I'd ever used. And it was free but not open source. And then a cousin of mine mentioned at a family gathering about this software called Blender. And I was very excited to hear about it and I raced home and I downloaded Blender 2.49 and I was met with this and I was very quickly a bit overwhelmed. And it wasn't until the 2.5 release and the Cintel open movie that I saw this and I thought, wow, the visuals that this software creates are just incredible. I should dive back into it, give it another shot and see what happens. I followed a bunch of tutorials online and eventually got to the point where I could start to create some visualization and some renders like this. And I used these in my portfolio to get into architecture school and sort of throughout my student work I've been using Blender to create sort of visualizations and renders like this and like this and like this. But what I want to talk about today, you know, there's going to be some other great talks going on throughout the conference about using Blender as an architectural visualization tool. But I want to talk about today is using Blender as a conceptual design tool and as a tool for construction and fabrication of small design-built projects. So this is a quote from Alexander Sigles and Theodora Stunas on a paper they wrote for the ECAD-E conference on education in architecture and computer-aided design. And they noted through their experience using Blender in architectural studio projects that modeling and other workflows in Blender don't try to hide the way that the computer handles 3D computer graphics and that the designers exposed the mechanics of the computer graphics and that the sort of modular approach of these modeling tools helps students develop a design thinking and use Blender as a decision-making tool in their design and not just as a visualization tool. And that's something I've found in my own experience as well as I hope I'll show through some of the projects. So I want to talk about when I got into architecture school I was up at the Laurentian School of Architecture which is now the McEwen School of Architecture in Sudbury, Ontario. And a big part of their sort of programs philosophy is doing design build. So one of our first projects in our first year was this ice hut. It was a group of six of us that worked on this project. And the idea was that it would sit and be kind of this bright sort of beacon and almost a lantern on the winter landscape. So we used Blender for a lot of the early concepts. It was really helpful and for us to be able to get a sense of the visuals of the light and the texture and the material, especially at sort of the nighttime images which we wanted to convey. So we went through a couple of design iterations using Blender to simulate how the different materials would play with light and shadow on the landscape. We were using acrylic for the windows, plywood for the main sort of sheathing of the body, and a material called Coroplast which is sort of a translucent plastic for those sort of translucent red highlights there. And this was sort of the final design that we settled on. Simple enough to have some visual interest and some facets to it but nothing too complex. And so again we used Blender to do the framing diagrams using sort of a V-framing to account for those windows as opposed to sort of a regular stick framing. And also Blender was very helpful in making sure we were getting our cut angles correct and dealing with sort of the compound angle of that roof. Once we had the design finalized, we used Blender's sort of linked data, linked objects in order to develop some cut sheets on our material. So each of these cut sheets was linked to the main model so as we made adjustments to the main model we could adjust how that would show up on our material cut sheets. And then we simply just printed those directly one to one, traced them onto our material and did the cuts. This is a bit of the fabrication process. We did that for the roof material as well. The whole thing starting to come together here and that led us to the final. So that ability to sort of link our material sheets to the main object and have them generated as we were working and working through the design was something that was really helpful in terms of managing our project budget and making the design come together. This was a more recent project. Just finished up last week. This was a trade show booth that I did for Cocoa 40 which is an incredible chocolate company. If you're in North America you should definitely check them out. I'm not sure if they ship internationally. But so this was the design of the trade show booth. So again we did that early render, you know, modeled in Blender. Using the EV render engine in 2.8 it's amazing because you can sort of prototype stuff like this right in front of the client which is great for getting feedback. And then again same sort of thing using, linking the objects and developing cut sheets for the material for that as well as DXFs and sort of more standard CAD files that were sent to a laser cutter to do the facets on the front. This is another project. So this was a third year design build project for a sauna. And what we did, we wanted to make sure that the benches in the sauna sort of were nice and ergonomic and fit to the human body. So we got one of our potential clients. We got them out in the deep snow of the cold Northern Ontario winter. We had them lie down in a snow bank and kind of shape the snow to their body. And then we 3D scanned that using 1, 2, 3D catch at the time. But now you've got tools like Meshroom and other open source alternatives to that. Brought that into Blender and then used it to develop the shape of the benches so that they would kind of match with the shape of the body. That's sort of a render of how the shapes worked out and the shapes under construction there. This was another project experimenting with one thing that I really enjoy about using Blender is the ability to very fluidly navigate perspective views of a project. So this was for a charity event called Canstruction that's run for the local food bank where they bring in different artists and design teams to do little installations. So the idea was that this is a forced perspective illusion. So when you stand from a certain point it makes the A logo that you see in the first image. And this was all done with cans of chicken and tuna. And there's the final result. And again, so this was we mapped this all out in Blender, used some projection mapping to get the logo correct and figure out the number of cans that we'd need. And then we just printed this plan out one to one, dropped it down on the floor and did the construction. This is an image that's not loading. Anyway, so this next project is a pavilion that we did up for one of the science centers in Sudbury, Ontario called Dynamic Earth. And they wanted sort of a pavilion that spoke to the history of Sudbury. So it's a mining town and they've made a lot of effort to become more sort of environmentally conscious in the operation of the mines. And part of that is what's known quite fondly in Sudbury is the Superstack. It's a 370 meter tall smokestack that helps disperse the pollution that's coming out from the mine smelting process as an alternative to the large roast beds that they used to use far back in the past, which is the bottom image there. And one thing that's really great about how the mine operations have changed over the years is that they're getting to the point where they've reduced emissions so much that they no longer need the Superstack. So it's going to be being removed and brought down in the next couple of years. So we wanted to design a pavilion that framed that and would still give people a sense of where the stack was and what an icon it was to the town when it was up and kind of memorialize it but also talk about sort of the environmental progress that the mining companies have made. So the idea was this charred wood pavilion kind of reminiscent both of the old roast beds and of the stack itself that frames the stack. And again Blunder's perspective tools were unfortunately the video's not loading. Incredibly essential in making sure those perspectives lined up and making sure that when people were sitting in the benches in the pavilion that top line of the stacks would be top line of the slats would be right lined up with where the top of the stack was. So these are just a couple images of the construction process. We went about sort of burning red cedar as a finish and then collecting it into this sort of almost octagonal shape and there's that's sort of the final image of the stack there. This project we started to come up against one of Blunder's limitations in this type of project which is you know because this was a public project on public land we had we had to submit a set of working drawings and construction drawings to the city for approvals. And this of course is something that's sort of not natively supported in Blunder's feature set so we had to export a fair bit of this work was done in Adobe Illustrator and rhinoceros for the actual working drawings. This is another project probably the most conventional architectural project of the ones that I have but so this is a set of two mass timber cottages up at the Lodge at Pine Cove also in Northern Ontario and the Lodge knew that they were looking for something that was sort of modular and something that could be prefabricated so we did a couple experiments with sort of parametric framing ideas in Blunder. Originally we were looking at standard stick frame prefabrication but we ended up going with stuck on the slide here we ended up going with a mass timber solution instead but these were just a couple of the mock-ups that we did early on. At this point we were using Blunder internal but now we've sort of updated the operation to use EV. Is there a couple shots of the construction? But again we ran into that limitation of you know because we needed to send these out to a manufacturer because we need to get approval from the city we had to export these Blunder models to a more traditional CAD software to do the working drawings. So the big takeaway was that sort of in my experience using this in my education and in a couple of the outside projects was that Blunder can be a really fantastic designs tool for these small scale projects especially if you're constructing them yourself or with a small team that you're involved in but you start to run into challenges when you get into the need to produce more traditional documentation and drawings for you know approvals by planning departments manufacturers etc etc so when I finally got into my my masters here and was starting to try to come up with a topic to work on for my thesis dissertation I wanted to see if I could take a look at addressing this and seeing if I could make Blunder into a platform that could be used an open-source platform that could be used right through the architectural production process and actually start to produce some of those simple working drawings within Blunder itself so I've been developing an add-on called Measure at Arc and it's based on the Measure at Tools that were developed by Antonio Vasquez I'm not sure if he said the conference here but he's also the developer of the grease pencil tools one of the main developers on the grease pencil tools and he had this you know really strong foundation base of an add-on for adding dimensions into Blunder models but they were sort of drawn in screen space they wouldn't be occluded by objects there wasn't sort of a fully fleshed out style system so I wanted to see if I could sort of address some of those those issues so Measure at Arc the add-on adds support for doing sort of standard line work dimensions and annotations within Blunder the line work is kind of a real-time alternative to the freestyle line drawing system which I had been using previously whenever I had to export line work from Blunder but I wanted something that was you know much more simple a freestyle of course offers a lot more stylistic opportunity when you're rendering your line work but I wanted something that just did simple line work that was very fast and responsive and worked in the 3d viewport so there's just a couple of options for you know dashes and silhouettes and that kind of thing but it you know responds adaptively in the viewport and this is just it working on a larger sort of GIS model of Sudbury Ontario and I wanted it to be sort of very simple to add in this line work in the 3d view so it is based on manual selection of edges unlike some other systems but there is an operator that I've put in that will select those lines based on the crease angle that you have specified in Blunder I just streamline the process if you have some complex geometry dimensions themselves are an attempt to deal with sort of one of the frustrations I've had with common CAD software which is the need to redefine a work plane when you're dimensioning in in 3d so you know unlike tools like Rhino and Revit where you're constantly having to redefine that work plane for every you know different planar surface that you're dimensioning these dimensions are based instead on the actual geometry of the object and they attempt to place themselves intelligently based on the objects topology and your current viewpoint position in the scene another sort of frustration I've had with sort of conventional CAD software is that you've got sort of the the click a point click a point drag out to place workflow for placing dimensions and I wanted something that you could just select a whole set of edges and hit the dimension button and it would bring them all in this was something that was present in in Antonio's original measure add-on but it was something that I wanted to maintain as I was sort of refactoring the dimension code to make sure that it would work in sort of proper three-dimensional space with proper occlusion and that sort of thing the other thing was sort of the automatic orientation I wanted the dimensions to be able to adjust themselves as you move around so that if you're you know in a plan view and you're switching to a section view and you want those things to to stay consistent and not have to redefine dimensions as you move around the object for different views and right now I've got a single axis and aligned dimensions in place so you can a lot have a dimension that just measures along any of the cardinal axis axes or ones that say aligned to the line of geometry that they're measuring hopefully the internet's gonna run but this was just a quick demo video of some of the tools in action skip to where I start sort of defining line work and so I'm using measure it to draw the measure it out to draw the contour lines the landscape as well as sort of the silhouette lines around the darkened edges that you're seeing in the cut views are actually done with a Boolean modifier because the resulting cut from the Boolean modifier will inherit the material that the cutting object uses so that's a fast way to do to do cut lines in Blender and so what you get is sort of the option to take a simple unidentitated Blender render and add in some of that sort of architectural detailing to it and it lets you sort of combine this with all of Blender's other feature sets which are phenomenal for architectural design you know the ability to use the grease pencil tools and EV and all of these other amazing features you know that the amazing developers of Blender have been adding in 2.8 which can be you know huge time savers in an architectural design project and you know grease pencil especially helps kind of bring the sketchbook into the 3d software which I think is phenomenal so these are just a couple composite images are produced using Measure at Arc and EV this is just kind of showing how I'm using sort of the workbench render engine and EV in combination here so how you can transition from sort of a typical working drawing style over into the fully rendered image very quickly and these are just a couple more plans that I've been producing this is more work that I've been doing for for the Logic Pine Cove they've been great and very very supportive and very patient with me as I test out these tools on their projects and I can't thank them enough for that so and again you know it just allows you to switch back and forth between the rendered preview and the plan drawing very quickly which is something that's kind of unique to Blender and then that's just showing how the dimensions sort of start to reorient themselves as you move around so that's kind of it for me today but I just want to bring up sort of some next steps and things that I'd like to work on and improve in this add-on and also sort of talk about some things that other people in the Blender community are doing IFC support would be a huge one for architectural work using Blender and Dion Molt down in Sydney Australia has been developing an add-on that handles IFC export of Blender geometry and it's really phenomenal you know it's a work in progress but there's a whole lot of potential there there's I've lost his name and I apologize but there's also someone else in the Blender community on Twitter who's been working on dimensions that are actually reactive where you can sort of click on the dimension number enter a new number and it will adjust the spacing again which is sort of commonplace in in most CAD tools so adding that sort of interactivity to the dimensions and sort of a constraint system another thing would be you know scheduling Blender has so much capacity to add custom metadata to your objects that I think some kind of scheduling system that makes use of that data and can export it into you know an Excel file or a CSV file would be phenomenal and then something that I've been working on as an next step would be sort of individual camera sizing and better sort of more intuitive orthographic scale settings to allow you to sort of set up your panels and your drawings yeah and that's it for me thanks so much for for listening to my talk if you're interested in in testing out Measure at Arc that's the GitHub link there and the YouTube link to a channel where I've been trying to post update videos as things move along I also want to say a big thank you to all of the conference organizers you know it's amazing to get to come and talk about about Blender and yeah and thanks so much to to all of the team members you know each of those design build projects was was a big team effort with teams ranging from you know five to 18 people so I have to give a thank you to the all the team members yeah thanks so much are we on time does anyone have any questions one of the one of the problem I had with the measure it add on is that you have to use it at the end of the projects as an example you make a cube that is the shape of the house you put the misery the measurements and then you make loop cuts to put the windows and then you lose the because I think it's real and I think the do you think there is a way for your add-on to handle this that you can keep the the measurements if you add geometry yeah that's actually one of the things I've been trying to solve I've been working I've got it a little bit more stable if you're using modifiers so you can make sort of Boolean cuts and not not affect it but as soon as you apply those modifiers then you do start to run into that same issue I do think it's definitely something that's possible to overcome I need to look into a little bit more of the Python event handler system and and that kind of thing because there should be a way to you know when that mesh data is updated to just do a quick run through and check if the vertex index still matches the position that it was at before or is at least within some sort of you know tolerable threshold and then sort of reassign the end to see based on that so I do think it's a solvable problem but it's not one I've I've solved yet also not yet what I'm looking at too is an option to convert measurements line work into grease pencil line work and I believe there's some work being done on vector either SVG or or other sort of vector formats for for the grease pencil object data so I'm hoping that will be kind of the the best path forward for that are there different levels of metric measurement possible millimeter centimeters meters yeah so right now it's pulling all of the unit information from Blender's unit system so in the same way you'd change your scene units measure it's measured arcs annotations will change your reflect that yeah great thanks so much everyone