 Λοιπόν, πρόεδρο, πολλές άνθρωποι εδώ, μιλάμε για το μπλέντερ και όταν θέλω να μιλάμε για το μπλέντερ, ποιος θα πρέπει να βρεις ένα μπλέντερ. Λοιπόν, δεν υπάρχει κανένα να μιλάμε για το μπλέντερ. Οπότε, μου name is Dimitris Kristo, I'm from Greece and for two and a half years now, I've been salaging myself by putting together CG images on a daily basis. Οπότε, από τα δεύτερα από τα δεύτερα έχουν κάνει μπλέντερ. Είμαι very glad to hear Andrew Price during last year's conference talk about making the creative process part of your daily life. Είμαι glad to hear that both because I was in agreement with whatever art you said, but also I was already there at about 550 images back then and I was pretty much enjoying the whole process. So I knew more would follow. Now putting together daily images is an exercise similar to running long distances daily and learning playing an instrument again on a daily basis. What happens is that you don't just get better at it as time goes by, it also changes your mindset. So a guy that runs, say, 10 or 20 km a day also takes care of his diet and a girl that plays the piano for a radius rate also avoids scrapping music. Of course, junk food and pop hits can still be fun, but you get in tune to the stuff you do. Call it the power of habit or the effect of neuroplasticity, this is how it works. An example of another state, I rarely have the time or in the mood to admire my own images, even the rare good ones. Spending an entire afternoon looking at your render and thinking about how good or crappy you are, no way got to work on the next one. Today I'll try to answer the questions I get the most from people that follow the block progress. Now one, can I be creative? Am I creative? Two, how do you keep moving forward? Three, can I do it? Four, do I have everything I need to do it? Five, where do you get inspiration for your daily images? Six, is it true that you throw your cut on your keyboard to build yourself in Blender? And seven, what is the most important question about it all? Now obviously the point of interest here is abstract graphics, but pretty much the same thing can be said for motion graphics, for non-narrative source, for interactive art, and pretty much for any free creative process in Blender. We are lucky to have a tool so versatile that we get to use it exactly the way we want to. Let me have a zip. Now one, let's get this out of the way, because it sounds important but in my opinion it's not all that important. Am I creative? The short and quick answer to that is that yes, you are indeed creative. And if I was to take it one step further, I would say that you and I are both equally creative by design. There are many things that can be said about creativity. Better or full-blown books about it. Never read one. But I've heard that it's good to have drawing parts around so you can quick sketch your ideas. It's good to have art books around so you can be inspired. You can even have rocks on your desk so you can see and touch to feel the texture on them. Just make sure you've got some space for your mouse and keyboard on your desk. What happens is that all that are good, they're fine and all, but in my opinion there are nothing more than props that help you act the way, help you act like you are creative. Their external stimuli that can, at best, amplify what's already there. They put you in the mood. We can build majestic worlds in our dreams and imagination with no training whatsoever, so I think that we are indeed creative. To take it more lightly, you can take a dog, surround it with the finest art, offer it a high-end PC, and even have a glab-souting at the poor animal about the importance of HDR maps in blender cycles. It won't end well. Unless, of course, you plan on doing a daily image with it, and it's done by the idea, so you can call it silly really, and this is tomorrow's daily image. Now, too, how do you keep moving forward? What you have to do is put the creativity of yours in good use. In order to keep moving forward, you have to be both the grumpy master and the impatient disciple. While this sounds extremely hard, there is an easy way to do it, and this is by setting your goals close enough and make them easy enough so you can reach them, and put them far enough and make them challenging enough so you can be talented by them. You can find nice middle ground there. People say, I'll have a shot ready in a year, and people will be no. It happens that you can't pull yourself by your sustrings. I've tried it a few times and I couldn't get it. You'll be bored, you'll use your will and determination, and a good chunk of work and time before you quit. It can be done, but by a very small minority of people. Now, what you can do is small things at first. If you're lazy like me, you can put together a daily image. You can even split your daily images into photorealistic or abstract graphics. What you want to do, what you enjoy doing, what you want to be better at. You can do modeling, you can do sculpting, you can do game engine. You can see some examples right here. Now, I'm stuck. And pretend to think. Okay, let's go to three. Now, can I do it? This is the third question. Now, usually for newcomers this has to do with modeling, and I'm guessing that this is a question about skill. This is about modeling mostly for newcomers, simply because there is no use of rendering or shading coolness if you don't have something to present. Just to get this out of the way, you don't have to model everything on your own. Now, let's say that you have a deal with a client about a car speeding on a bridge in a two to three weeks deadline to pull it off. Now, imagine how it would sound like if the client was to call you, say, after a week, just to hear you go like, no worries, pal, I'm modeling the car headlights as we speak. Now, pros only model custom objects they need, and they also model the products that the clients want to showcase through still images and animation. Pretty much everything else is found online, models, made by people that do this for profit or for fun. For absurd graphics and motion graphics, what you can do is use the tools that Blender puts in our hands, not much modeling skills are needed. You can use the object modifiers or you can use add-ons like animation nodes for advanced users. I mean, we can let Blender do the hard work for us, why not? You wouldn't imagine the amount of images on the block that have started from the humble default cube. And you know what? Screw the default cube, we don't need it. All we need is a plane with solidify modifier on it, so we can even change the thickness later on to have a taller or a shorter cube. We can then add a subset modifier and I want to keep the extra geometry and not to have it change the way my object looks, so I set it to simple. Let's add a wireframe modifier and feel free to fiddle with thickness settings. Now then, I'll add an edge plate modifier, you can see nothing happens, and I set the edge plate to zero and I want to break my object apart. Just so we can see what the edge plate modifier does, I'll add the display modifier to it. I won't even use a texture, but what I want is to push the faces away from each other. Now that I've got this interesting shape, I'll add another solidify modifier just to add some volume to my faces since they were flat before. Now find a nice little angle, move your camera around and find a place when you can see some patterns emerging, something interesting. And then keep being playful with your render settings, compositing with your lighting and all that, and in a few minutes you can have an interesting image. It's not all that great, but considering that this takes about 10 to 15 minutes to make and it's daily takes about 2 to 4 hours for me to put together, you can see that you can do a lot of stuff without knowing how to model. Now we're dealing with a procedure here that's full of reward without risk. We're shooting first and asking questions later. What happens is that A, we're learning the tools as we go by fiddling with the modifier settings, B will be more confident the next time we'll try it and C will get a nice render for our blog or portfolio, what's not to like. And what's also very important is that when you're having a nice little render nothing beats the I can do it feeling nothing. Now 4. Do I have everything I need to do it? Do you have a decent laptop or desktop personal computer? It would be nice if you had web access, but you can go on without it. There are many people that consider a piece of coal to be a big rock or a wall cave to be the ultimate tools. Since they bring their artist closer to his creation. You have no middlemen and that also happens with Blender and Blender Foundation. Blender Foundation puts the coal in our hands and tells us to get cracking. You don't have middlemen, you don't have hidden or monthly costs, you don't have clothes cold and all that. What you have is the tool in your hands and you can get cracking. So to sum it up, Blender and deep technology equals win. See, I got an application, I got a program at home that cost about 3,000 euros, at least that was the cost when I got it. And I bought it simply because it was pretty much the best for motion graphics and abstract and all that. But when I started the blog, I asked myself a simple question. Can Blender cover my needs for an abstract daily image? And surprise, surprise, Blender can do that. But you see, one can tell you that Blender can do that and I can tell you that Blender can do abstract graphics. But it really doesn't mean a thing until you discover this on your own. I'm very glad I did. Now, five. Where do you get inspiration and ideas for daily image? Now, inspiration is everywhere but since I'm here to share some tips and all that, let me share what I consider to be the still like an artist technique. Now let's say that I'm on art station looking at cool images and being surrounded by hundreds of images until I see an image that I like, something that I like to tackle, to reproduce or remix. I take a good look and what I then do is scroll down to see a few more images. Now when I'm done browsing and in the mood to start working, I fire a Blender and I'm trying to bring the image in my mind. Now we have to use our weakness, not just those strands here. So I have a weak memory and there are parts of the image that I remember and there are parts of the image that I forget but when I try to remember the image my mind fills the gaps in a nice and interesting way and this is where the magic happens. The brain uses my memories and my experience to fill those gaps. It uses, say, a walk in the park, an insect or some architecture that drew my attention, a dream I don't fully remember and what's also cool about it is that every single person fills those gaps in a different way so we can have literal billions of the same image and that is what exactly an artist is to do. That is what exactly an artist is to present. He is her own point of view of the world that surrounds him. This is what you have to do whether you're a painter, writer or a CG artist. Now what happens is that when we have some popular art and some popular movie and all that we get a flow of same of sameies, images and animation. Now it's good if you do it to sharpen your skills but it's not your story. Still the composition, still the lighting, still the mood, still the colors but if you want your art to be unique, in my opinion, never still the entire thing. Now six. Easy to do that you throw your cut on your keyboard to build stuff in Blender. Well to be fair with all the keyboard shortcuts and all that Blender has you can get some result by using this secret technique and there are people that say live nothing to luck and I go like aren't we lucky to be here? I guess we're pretty much feeling all right and then we're on a three-day Blender celebration here so I think that Blender has something, Blender, luck has something to do with it all. Especially when you're building abstract graphics and motion graphics you have to embrace randomness, you have to trust your luck. Now two quick examples. When you're dealing with particle system you have some sort of randomness through the seed value. Of course the seed value isn't exactly random since you're getting same results with same seed values but I'm pretty sure that all of us have struggled with the seed value when we want to build a particle system and we just can't get it to look right. We go from seed zero to seed one, to seed two, to seed three, four and we still can't make it to look right. I was in a similar situation and I was using big particles so the seed has had everything to do with the way the whole thing looked until I said to myself 68 and then I went to the seed value and put 68 there and moved my camera around and built a scene around it. It was pretty fine. Now another example. I was browsing Blenswap and I was pretty bored and I didn't have the slightest idea about what I was going to do for a daily image until I said to myself 24 and then went up on my browser and at the page number said it to 24 went on to page 24 and I didn't have the slightest idea what kind of objects were on page 24 I grabbed the one I liked used it in my scene and even got some inspiration from it to build a daily image. I've done this quite a few times and it worked like a charm. Why not? Now seven. What is the most important question about it all? Now I'm very happy to see Blender Foundation experimenting with the tools and experimenting and working with stuff and working with tools to make every artist a part of the big Blender family leaving no one behind. For example, we have a small team and we don't have access to cut-in-edge technology like render farms and all that but we still want to make a cute little film a cute little short. You can do that. I mean, even if you're not a traditional 3D artist and you're still searching for a platform to express your ideas and to tell your stories you can do that. See, in my opinion, Blender the important thing about Blender is that it's free as in free beer and we all love free beer of course. The important thing is that Blender is free as a bird and it flies around and I grab it and I make a bottle of images with it and a small team grabs it and decides to build a nice little soul with it and a girl grabs it and she's into coding and she can build a cool ladon and even change the entire experience of working with Blender. See, Blender in my opinion at this state is a breathing living thing that takes a bit of me and a bit of you to be better to make itself better. Obviously, artists affect each other and all the artists affect the developers. You can say that the developers are the brain of the system and the artists are the heart of the system but still they are part of the same organism part of the same ecosystem and really the only thing you can do with the breathing living thing is to enjoy it. The same thing that you can do with your friends the same thing that you can do with your dog you can boss them around you can be nasty at them and they will eventually ignore you. So people ask me whether I get frustrated or hungry and all that and I all curse a lot and now I shout at my screen but nothing happens. But there are times where I see my idea take shape there are times when I'm rendering the final render of a cool abstract image and right there in the middle of the night with my headphones you can see a huge smile appearing on my face simply because I'm exactly where I want to be doing exactly what I want to do and that is finally the most important question about it all are you having fun and only you can answer it but if you're really having fun and you got to trust me on this then no one and nothing can stop you. Thank you.