 Maybe you see why I didn't raise my hand here, but maybe if you look at the background, for some reason I'm still doing stuff that in some cases turns out to look quite pleasant to the eye, even though I'm totally in no way an artist. So how and why? Well, maybe let me introduce myself a little more, as a kid, of course, everybody has to go to school. I did so too, and in art I probably sucked the most of everybody in the entire art class. I got the worst grades, so I always knew I'm not an artist. I had a lot of interest in the scientific things like chemistry or physics, but no way anything like an artist. But later on in my life I started to become interested in moviemaking. On the SEMA professional or amateur level, I helped out a lot of people in my area with their movies and did compositing and stuff, but yeah, I never did any special effects because they looked so arty and cool and I thought, well, you will never be able to do this. And there's another thread of the story. I became also interested in open-source gaming, and I thought, well, I'm doing a little bit of coding. Maybe I can help out. But it turned out that there's a little discrepancy in the developers of open-source games. I mean, there's like all coders and no artists. And during those days it was like there were more game ancients than actual games made because everybody was coding, coding, coding, and nobody was creating the required assets. And I thought maybe I can help out on the asset side and try to do texturing, modeling, but I completely failed. In the end I ended up making sounds. So time passed, a few years later the two threads would connect. We had a class in university and we were required to make a game in teams of two. And I asked my colleague, well, why don't we try to create a complete game? Let's not rip the assets, let's create them ourselves. But he didn't want to create the assets. So at that, well, maybe I will try one last time. And I did a little research on the internet and discovered something really cool. It was a plug-in for my compositing software that mainly looked like the left side of the screen. It was all just your entered values and out came all this cool stuff on the right. So literally you just enter the values, maybe you turn some sliders and a few colors and you can do all this stuff on the right. And even more, I mean, even the background I had done in this application. And this is just a few assets I could recover. I made a lot more. I made asteroids, explosions, nebula for the background, a complete star shooter game except for the ships. We ripped them eventually. And I thought, wow, how can I do this? I mean, I failed so much at anything that's anything like art and now I am able to create such cool stuff. And I discovered that this approach to creating assets with just turning knobs and entering values, turning sliders is very much like engineering or science. And so I thought, hey, I could tell all those nerds creating open source games how to do it properly and create cool looking stuff for their games. I created a tutorial website, but it got hacked before I actually released it. And I lost track of that university stuff and stuff, but I took the techniques that I learned here into visual effects. And for some reason, once I started to do visual effects, people in my area didn't just ask me, hey, can you cut this? Can you do the compositing stuff? They asked me for the effects. And it was the first time I was able to charge money for my work because people were very interested in the shiny stuff you see here. I mean, it's glowing. It's shiny. People like it. So I thought, well, I'll keep this. And at some point I discovered Blender. And I guess, you know, the rest of the story, but there was something I also discovered when I got into Blender and visual effects. And that was that my big, big discovery about those programs. And you're just turning knobs and you're doing science instead of art and creating cool stuff. It's common in the visual effects industry. Actually, take a look at this on except from a job offer at Pixar's. They're searching for a TD. That's a technical director. Basically, he's the guy who's telling the four X guys what to do and runs around those problems and directing the technical side of the visual effect things. And the last line is the most important one. They want, if you're a studied computer sciences, mathematics, physics, or engineering, you'll more probably get the job than somebody who didn't. And wow, so my big discovery wasn't that much of a big discovery. It was a common thing. And so now I'm standing here and tell you that it's a common thing. And I didn't discover anything big. And there's even a school in Germany where you can learn how to be a TD. But to enter it, you have to have a such a degree like in the last line. And so what those students want from a TD is a certain way to tackle problems. And basically, that's what you learn at university. When you're studying computer sciences, you don't so much learn algorithms or stuff, you learn how to think like a computer scientist, how to tackle those problems in a specific way, how to look at problems. And of course, today there are theories for everything. I guess there are even theories on how to build a perfect convention and stuff, how to organize things. There's everything you can get a theory for. And so I discovered theories for a scientific process for how scientists or engineered things and how this works. And I'll just present you my favorite one. It's called Diagrammatic Reasoning. And if you're reading those two disclaimers I've put down, let me put a third disclaimer. I was asked whether I'm presenting any cool demonstrations of simulations here. No way. That's on Sunday. Today I'm only presenting you the theory. And theorists are people living in disguise in ivory towers. That's not down to earth. It's very abstract. But if you want to stay here, I guess people are staying here, why not solve a small puzzle or riddle and get the theory from the practice? Because that's what theorists do. They look at stuff and people are doing stuff and they look from the top and think, how are they doing this? And then they're describing what they're doing. So who knows the answer already? Who knows the answer to this riddle? Okay, please keep it to yourself. So we get the square here and yeah, it's got a side and an area. And we want the area to double. Let's say and we know from school that you just have to take this side, multiply it with the length of this side and you know how big the area is. But let's see if we can solve this visually. Here we got our side. What will happen if we double it? Oh, obviously that didn't work out. Now we got four times the area. But we only wanted to be doubled. So who's seeing the answer now? Okay, a few more people. Okay, now if you turn your head sideways, try it. Can you see the answer? Okay, take a look at the square. I mean we have four times the area, but we only want to have it two times. What if we cut one of the squares in half? Then we have here only half the area and if we quadrubble this, we have four times half the area, so we have doubled the area. Pretty cool solution. So now let's do everything again, but look at it and check the theory whether we did everything right. So how does this so-called diagrammatic reasoning work? Well, it's very much, it's pretty simple. You need to construct a diagram, experiment, observe the results. That's what we did. We constructed the square and we did a little experiments and we observed this, see that we were wrong and we did things again. It's an iterative process. And of course we also would need to know what's a diagram. And we just need to keep in mind, for this definition, it's a system of relations that follow a certain rule. And the important thing is the relations because there's no way for your brain to get an insight into anything, to have a good idea without having some relations in your mind or before you. And of course, that's pretty simple how this works. I guess everybody knows how your brain looks. It's got all the cells and they're connected. And think of the cells as objects and the connections as relations. And then you see why you always need relations if you want to learn something or if you want to get an idea when you've got a problem beforehand. Without a relation, no way to solve it. And in this case, the relation, of course, pretty easy. We got the length of the side and it's related to the area. Well, so, but you still think, how can we get an insight this way? Well, we did this experiment and the diagram, the structure we built, it structured our prior knowledge. We had this prior knowledge about the area and the side and through the experiment, we got an idea of a new relation we might discover and that was the diagonal line. And I asked you to turn your head because that's the most important thing in everywhere when you're working like an engineer or when you're working in a scientific part and you want to solve a riddle, change your perspective or your focus. If you don't do this, you won't be able to solve many problems. And actually, the spreadsheet process is sometimes called thinking outside the box and that's something, if you're reading chop boards, you'll always have to have the description and it reads some way, you need to be able to think outside the box and that's practically it. That's what you've seen here. Yeah, literally. So you might ask yourself what's so cool about this and this is something I grabbed from a German course on learning theory and they are describing it this way. The top one is normal learning like vocabulary and the bottom is learning by insight and I guess you get the difference, lower your capillary, you have to learn, you'll learn, learn and some time you have all the vocabulary you need. When you get an idea or an insight, you're having a moment, you didn't know the answer for the riddle and from one moment to the other, you know it. So you're learning this way and I think that's a lot cooler at least to me, it was cooler in the school and that's probably why I was more interested in physics than in languages. And okay, I've seen some guys pointing up to this. It's an error, but I kept it to show you that this is from a real book and not something I made up. Okay, and also if you'll forget when learning vocabulary, you'll keep forgetting them, forgetting some, forgetting them and stuff you know by insight, by ideas, you will keep the idea. Even a month after that, you will still have the idea in the back of your head and if you encounter the same situation, you will be able to solve the problem once again. So that's of course is pretty cool, but there's something about it that's way cooler and that's something that's fascinating to researchers and that's the thing that is working on a subconscious level. Once you're deep enough in your problem, it won't go away, even if you become angry and you get away from the computer, don't solve something else, make yourself a good meal or go to sleep, it might occur to you that your brain keeps working. You don't know it, but it keeps working and then at the morning you wake up and you got the answer or imagine the following situation, guy sits in the park, reads a book, he turns the page and stops in the middle, then he closes the book very fast, puts it away, goes out of the park very fast and you follow him home and you see him opening up Blender and he starts working on a recent simulation he did and he's very hectic and everything. I guess you've seen me. Yeah, that's something really happening and when I got the idea, I usually have to stop everything I'm doing else and have to go to Blender and try it out whether the idea is any good. So yeah, that's basically it, how the theory is working. But the answer, the question is, can we apply this to Blender? I say yes, because in Blender, the simulation, you have a system of relations and then you got a display of the outcome. So each of these buttons is relating, has a relation to the outcome and it's consistent. So if you do a simulation, run it, save the file, give it to someone else, he opens it, it should be exactly the same simulation on his computer. And now let's go to the, say, meaty stuff because I've told you so much and I guess you wanted to know how this relates to Blender and what you can implicate. Whether there are any implications for your workflow. Well, remember the second disclaimer, it's in a pre-scientific state, so it practically means you have to derive your own hypotheses and your own theories and your own implications, but just a little bit, it can already help you. First thing. Sometimes I get approached by people who ask me, so we got this project and we're at the very end of it and we want to do now the simulations, but we got ran into this and this problem, can you solve it? Of course I can help them, but they got it wrong in your workflow. They should start as early as possible with all the simulation workflow, work stuff and if they're running into big problems, they could maybe do something else for a while, maybe a day or so and then return to it. So the work, the time is not lost because you can do other stuff, but it might be a lot easier for you to tackle the problems yourself without needing to consult outer help. And of course if you're a simulator, I guess everybody who's doing a lot of simulations has discovered his own mental toolbox of techniques, how to analyze the simulation. I've also got a few for myself and on Sunday I might present one or two of those. And the learners, it's a little more difficult because I guess it's, you already noticed, don't just redo the tutorials, do them yourself and go further and explore because that's the part where you have the diagrammatic reasoning kick in. It's not about doing something step by step, that's the normal kind of learning, but once you've done it, you need to go further and play. And also something that's for me, I'm often doing this is I'm searching for tutorials that cover a topic from different perspectives like five ways to create a spider web. That's the cool tutorials, I think. And maybe are there any teachers here? Okay. Do you could of course use diagrams. There's some research that diagrams are way more effective in teaching than, for example, text. But of course it's really problematic because how to create a good one. And it could also happen that you're creating a diagram and the learner gets what? And then he doesn't learn anything. But another idea is of course the multi-perspective tutorials. We already had that. I'm trying to do this on Blendety-Bloom a little by creating series of tutorials that cover the same topic every from a little bit of different outcome. And the last time one is actually tried and true. That's one where they actually did research and if you place explaining elements directly inside your picture instead of beyond the picture, your learners will remember things a lot easier and it will really help them to get an insight. I guess it was around 10% higher chance of getting it if you're putting the text directly into the place where it belongs in the image and not a bar beyond it. That's something I'm also trying to do at Blendety-Bloom but I think that's not perfect yet. I think you can do a lot better. And of course, is there any interface designer here or any Blender developer? Hey, what do you think about this? That's how Houdini is. Giving you possibilities to analyze simulations. They're giving you a new perspective on the simulations and it's also very cool because it's a diagram inside the diagram. I think that we want, I want this in Blender. Can we get it? Okay, thank you. So, any questions? Yeah, that's also very good. I also think that the node workflow is also very much like the mind works and like diagrammatic reasoning works. So I'm really hoping for a node workflow in particles in simulations, of course, in material worlds. We're getting this in cycles. I'm really looking forward to this kind of development. Are we getting it? You're doing node stuff. Maybe I should ask Lukas, right? Lukas is doing all the node work. Okay, so I guess to see you on Sunday.