 Okay Good afternoon everyone My name is Richard van der Oost and I've been using blender for about six years. I'm from the Netherlands and I'm currently working on a very exciting project where I use blender to protect athletes I'm gonna tell you all about it But before I do I want to quickly go over some of the previous things I've been doing with blender to give you some idea of where I'm coming from so six years ago, I installed blender for the first time and I got very Confused about the user interface at first But also kind of excited to see that there's so many things I didn't know so It should mean that there's a lot to learn and so I did I I started learning and in 2011. I started my first business Surf render, which is a 3d animation studio and we do mostly scientific visualizations and kind of for the biomedical industry So of course in the beginning that was really simple stuff, but as time went on it went more complex and Occasionally we we did visual effects things And because I I was learning about visual effects in 2012 Jonathan Williamson contacted me from CG cookie. I'm sure you've heard of him and He asked me can you do some tutorials about visual effects using blender for CG cookie and It was a pretty big honor for me because I've been using blender I've been using CG cookie to to learn myself in the beginning So it was a great way to give something back to the community using using their network So I did I made a handful of tutorials and Just out of curiosity who has ever seen one of my tutorials on CG cookie. All right, cool It's been a while ago and then I've been heard I've been talking to people and they said That it's kind of hard to find them right now Anyway while I was doing these tutorials, I was still doing serve render projects and I kind of run into a problem where the rendering went too slow So in 2013 I started Blender grid, which is an online render farm So kind of made it for myself, but I also made it publicly available at Blender grid comm and Since then a lot of people have been using it so feels great to Solve some problems that the community has So yeah, if you ever run into the problem where you need more render power you can check out blender grid comm and see how that goes So that's kind of the things I've been doing Before I started helping athletes so This year 2016 I got involved with 3d mouth guard Which is a startup that produces mouth guards for athletes and mouth guards are pieces you put in your mouth to protect your teeth from impacts from yeah, during sports and I'm involved with this because I have a background in 3d and at 3d mouth guard. We want to produce mouth guards using a completely digital workflow. So we want to use things like 3d scanning and 3d printing And I immediately thought about using Blender in that workflow. So To show you a little bit more on How mouth guards are used we've prepared a little video That yeah, it shows you some some sports where where they use mouth guards As you can see there's a lot of different sports where mouth guards are being used and these are the kind of people we We want to help using our product Currently we're not in production yet. We have to wait with our one We're not in production Currently we're doing prototypes and experiments and a lot of tests Which is actually pretty exciting to work on and just to play around with different different techniques So I want to step you through the process of making our first prototype mouth guard And it's five steps So let's start at the beginning. We start with the athlete. We want to make mouth guards fit perfectly to The athletes so we want to make personalized mouth guards so we start with a 3d scan of the teeth of the athlete and This picture might look like we're at a dentist, but The scanner we use only needs a laptop and you're basically set so this was actually at a hockey club in the Netherlands and We scanned a bunch of hockey players So the good thing about this is you can do it anywhere and go where most of the athletes are and Yeah scan them The scanner works by taking pictures of the teeth and using photogrammetry to stitch them together and to generate the 3d model and This process takes about five minutes Currently there is a new scanner out which is a lot faster because Instead of taking individual pictures it takes a video of the teeth So you can just swipe around the teeth a few times and it will generate your model And that really speeds up the process So this software that does the photogrammetry Spits out stl files. So that's great because we can import that into blender and Then it looks something like this As you can see it's really detailed and Yeah, very accurate scan So currently we have a great way to do a scan get it into blender Now we have a model of the teeth of the athlete But that's not what we want to print What we want to print is actually the material around the teeth So Now what? We we want to print the material around the teeth. So We have to come up with some kind of way to to do that and the first thing we thought of was to Somehow generate a generic model of a mouth card that's being used by by everybody basically and Then combine it with the personalized scan and create a perfect fit and The first thing that came to mind for me was to use blender's Boolean operation the Boolean modifier Because this allows you to take an object and cut out part of it based on another object And that's basically what we want to do here and I remember when I just started using blender Boolean modifier was was nice to do some something with cubes and maybe basic basic objects because it was pretty slow and not very reliable But we've come a long way with this thanks to the developers and Right now it's possible to do very complex things with the Boolean modifier. It's very Very fast and very reliable. So Now we're able to do actually very nice things like this and Here I have a little screencast of how I Prepare the generic model. This is actually a scan of an existing mouth card just for reference and I use that it's not very very nice the scan, but I used it to just test out this concept This start playing so I bring in the the scan of the mouth card the blue one and I lay the scan of the teeth on top of it and as you can see the The scan doesn't fit entirely. So I use the sculpting tools in blender to add some more material around the teeth here and it's far from pretty but it just saves time and just As a quick test we've used this this model And then when we apply the The Boolean modifier Okay, go to the next one Thanks When we applied Boolean modifier, it looks like this and this is This model perfectly fits The athlete because it's based on the the scan we made and it's already starts looking like a mouth guard so next step is to Prepare it for printing So here you can see the last steps applying the Boolean modifier and Then we end up with this. It's not yet ready for printing because there's some errors with the model Some bridge like structures You can see here. I had to remove those and they are a result of basically gaps between the teeth That if you when you apply the modifier it kind of inverses those gaps So it becomes like a connection some sort of a bridge structure, which I'm removing here and Then again, I use the sculpting tools in blender which are great for this kind of work Especially when you're working with a tablet it feels like you're working with a with a physical model and I also use the dyno topo option which ensures to make the topology across the model kind of even and This works really well for preparing it for printing So I'm kind of smoothing out certain parts Not the parts where the mouth guard touches the teeth because then it wouldn't fit anymore But just kind of the edges of the model All right, and then we're ready for printing so we send it off to a printer and That's the result I actually have this model with me. This is our first prototype. We print it. It has been printed on an ultimaker 2 Which we had to modify Because mouth guards are flexible. They need to be flexible to to wear them properly and to protect your teeth So we needed to print using a flexible plastic and this is pretty hard. We developed together with a Plastic producer from the Netherlands. We developed This material is not on the market yet And we also had to modify the 3d printer for this Because usually the the ultimaker works by pushing through the material onto the nozzle the the plastic wire This didn't work because it's kind of the wire got stuck because it was too flexible So Instead of pushing it we had to modify it to pull it through. I don't have pictures of this unfortunately But basically what we did was instead of pushing it we pulled it through and that worked and after a lot of tweaking with the temperature and the melting temperature and the speed of printing we ended up with this and Yeah, our first prototype So these are the five steps we have to go through from zero basically to scan from zero to mouth guard and The next thing we could do is just to improve on these things so Let me talk about two major improvements. We made So the first one is obviously the generic model I started off with a very ugly scan and Now that I have had proven the the concept I wand off to the blender network looking for a professional modeler who had experience with 3d printing as well and I found a guy named Julian de Ville from France and started working with him and I gave him some input and The model on the right is what he came up with and This is of course night and day the difference So yeah, when we used the second generic model and cut out the scan out of it send it off to a printer we got this green model and This we initially printed it again with the ultimaker, but then we found an even better material Which was not able to we weren't able to print it on the ultimaker. So we we used a loll's butt for printing this green one and Yeah, this this material was more flexible and work better So that's the first big improvement we made and already starts to look like a real mouth guard now I Also have this model with me so you can take a look at it after the presentation if you like second improvement is Kind of the using different printing techniques This is a print we made and at about 25 percent of printing it stopped because of an error But it allows you to really see what's going on inside How this structure is being made and we can change this so we can add Yeah, a different structure Inside what you see here And that allows us to do different tests like impact tests and Seeing how comfortable it is to wear And that's actually current currently still going on so that's the second improvement. We're we're still working on now We still have a lot of challenges and I want to talk about two So the first challenge is still finding a good material to print because of course it has to be It has to be flexible and that's really hard to print so that's already a challenge But then it has to be strong enough to offer protection enough protection and Also, it has to be safe to wear health-wise so Yeah, we don't want our our athletes to get sick from from wearing our mouth guards, so that's very important and We just found a material that Is actually safe to wear Previously we had a material that was safe, but we didn't know about it after printing because you you're melting it and you're modifying it but now we actually found a material that is safe so we can From now on we can start actually testing the mouth guards with real people So that's very exciting Okay. Yeah So now yeah, we we are about to make new prototypes with this new material that can actually be tested So then we get a lot more feedback and room for improvements. So that's what we're currently doing The second very big challenge That's probably the biggest challenge is to automate blender to do the work because it's all nice and fun to make some prototypes by hand and Yeah, play around with blender, but once we're in production we we want to make maybe even hundreds of these things So then it's it becomes a really tedious task so I'm currently looking into automating blender to Take in the scan align it with the with the generic model Do the cuts maybe we even have to do modifications to the generic model because not every scan is as wide as the other so that's very challenging and Also coming up with an algorithm that smooths out the The mouth guard after we did the Boolean operation Will be very challenging. So I Kind of want to do a shout-out to people that know Python Unfortunately, there's a Python workshop going on in the other room. So probably everybody is going there, but If you know Python and you think this is an exciting challenging project, please talk to me and Maybe we can work together So, yeah, that's That's the two challenges we are currently facing So there's the whole process we Start with a scan Scanning the athlete getting it into blender using a generic model to cut out the scan and to using the The sculpting tools in blender to to make it smooth and printable and Finally sending it out to a printer and get it printed Okay So yeah, that's how we use blender to protect athletes if you have any questions for me Can we do questions actually live? Okay, you can come to me and talk to me during the conference, I'll be here tomorrow as well If you're watching is online, you can mention me on Twitter at Richard PD host You check out the website 3modicard.fit or my personal website blender grid comm So, yeah, that's how we protect athletes using blender. Thank you