 Hi to everyone. I am Gianluca Vita. I am presenting you this speech that is, as you can see, Blender is easy. And I'm presenting you the work that we do is eight years as a workshop and the work that we do to teaching Blender. I do a lot of stuff. I am professor at the university at Milan in Polytechnic at Milan, both architecture and fine art. So we try to match these different cultures and to make a workshop that works both for students of architecture and of fine art. And most of all, I have really 10, 15 years. I start with 2.49 that I try to push Blender. And to oblige my student to learn and to use Blender. Just for beginning, I am professor of droning. And the big problem of droning is ever this. This is a very old paint of Magritte. It's a very simple paint. And maybe it's a stupid paint. This is not a pipe. Oh, yes. But I have to ask, why is so important? Why this paint is so important in our culture? Because this paint tried to work us to the relation between reality and representation. What is real? What happened to us when we imagine an object? What happened when I see and I touch an object or I close my eyes and I imagine it? We don't know exactly how it's work. We don't know how it's work or brain. But we can try to say something. And this is the reason. Because if you have an answer to this question, probably you are in the wrong way. Because there is not an answer. So we are trying to understand which are the difference between dronings by hand as in the past and today when we draw and we make projects with the computer. And how the digital tools are changing the way we project. Because we never project in our mind and that's all. We never project, I don't know you, but I'm sure no one makes this, OK? I'm thinking, I'm thinking, I'm thinking. Brr, brr, brr, brr. OK, I have the project and then I draw it. However, when we start to make a project, we start to use a pen or the computer or a tool. The project is an interaction between us and the object that we use. But this later, I will speak about this in some minutes. Before I present you the workshop, the idea was to take students and to take in a cultural heritage city. In this case is the city of Cortona that is in Tuscany. It's eight years we do that and take students from different universities. You see Polytechnico di Milano, Cadimie di Brea, and two Spanish universities. All students of art or of architecture and try to teach a blender and to make a project using the software, not just to draw, just to render, but really use the software as a tool to make the project. Just to give to you some idea, then it's very important the place because I ever see that the project in architecture mostly becomes from the place, from the place where you are. Alvaro Cizza ever says that he sits in a place and he makes the project not in the studio, but in the place where the project has to be built. And so I give to you some idea of the place. So this is important. It's a very little city. It's a city of Etruscan age. The walls are Etruscan again. It's typical Italian city of Tuscany. Amazing and wonderful place. But some people just to give to you the idea of the surroundings. And at the end, we explain you better why it's so important, the place. This year and the past year, we work in a castle. There is a castle in the top of the city. The name is Castle of Giri Falco. And we go there and we make a project inside the castle. Every year, we change the team. This year was a museum. Then the use of the wall, Smart City project. Every year, the project is changed. But the important thing is that student has to use Blender to make the project. Not just to render the project, but to make the project. And they start from scratch. All the students start from scratch, from zero. And they are here there for one week, 10 days, more or less. The first days, we do the software, the curse, and then they use it to make the project. Again, very fast. Some imaging of the castle and of the people working. That's not just because a nice picture, but because it's important to see how the people works. Because, as I say, the place, the way you work, this is very important to the development of the project. When you invent something new, the inspiration that you can have from the place where you are is really, really important. And just again, something very old city, very nice. And people working, sketching and modeling, everything. We work, obviously, in the church, in the castle, and that's it. OK, but the team is, Blender is easy. Really, really Blender is easy. Yes, it's a noble shuttle of light. My students sometimes say that incredible thing now, because Blender is known to be amazing software, but not really easy. And that's again, so when a student or a newcomer opened this, for us, it's home. For us, we went for everything here. But the first impact, the first idea that they have is more or less this one. They feel in the same way, oh my god, if I touch something wrong, 100 people die. This is their reaction, ever. And 2.8, obviously, is amazing. It's something new that we like very much. But at the end, not so much different for a newcomer. Better organize it, more clear and everything. But for a newcomer, is ever like to drive an airplane. What? I ever go crazy with this. Sometimes students are very stupid, high students, when you see. Late, because what they want is this. I know, it's burned my eyes. But when it's normal, it's not a stupid thing. But when I ask all my students, I have tried to use this, and not other software. Most all have tried with this. Because they give to you, but it's a very intelligent interface, it's not stupid. But they give to you the three things that you need in your life. You have a reference, a reference system, the free axis, and horizon, a point where you can go in your life and a girlfriend to go with to the horizon. So that's all. So at the beginning, it's very difficult to push them to understood that no, Blender is not difficult. Blender is easy. But you need two, three, or four hours at the beginning to climb the hill of the knowledge. So we start immediately, and in three or four hours, more or less, they do something like this. We start to teach, we start the bottom, how it works, do it, and so on. And then after half of a day, we push them to do some simple things like this. We have a cube, the Susana, two modifiers, and some light, some materials, very fast immediately. We don't start from the beginning and then everything. We start immediately with the light, the colors, and the material. And that's what Blender is amazing and is very important for new students, mostly. So when they do that, they start to think, maybe it's not so a bad idea to learn Blender. And then we go ahead. Obviously, not everything is so easy. This is not Blender, but the most difficult thing to teach is how to manage the UV image window. It's incredible to explain how it works. For us, it's in your brain. We don't think at it. We use it, and that's all. But the logic that is behind this is very difficult to explain. It's a thing that I work hard to do. But the opposite, the more simple, is the sculpting. Sculpting is incredible. I say, OK, guys, there is sculpting. It works. This is five minutes. Then I go out. When I come back, I see babies, dragons, sculpting people. It's incredible. When I give sculpting to the students, normally, mostly the students of Fine Art that they are able to sculpt in reality, the real material, they are very, very fast, and they learn very, very quickly. So sculpting is incredible. But that just gives you an idea. But all what we do becomes from some theory, some idea, some principle that is behind this. Is that, as I told you before, when we make a project, we don't do it just in our brain. We do it using tools. And for us, there is two kind of tools. The tools to do it, like the pencil, like the paper, all of that, like the computer, and the tools to think. Like, as you can see, the circle and the triangle. A triangle is a tool. It's something that we invent that don't exist in reality. You never see a triangle or a circle. You ever see something similar. But the real object is something that we invented. Remember the pipe of Magritte? This is not a pipe. It's something that we imagine. And when I make a project, I imagine the circle. So I use the circle, the idea of the circle. And then the idea, not the idea, the object, like paper, like the mouse, or like the pace. And that's very, very important. Some example, we say object to note, not like the paper. I forgot. Why I have written prosthesis, not object? Because the object that you use to make a project becomes a prosthesis. It's like a racket, or a bicycle, or a ski. When you start to use the ski or the bicycle, every moment are thinking to the object that you're using. You're thinking to the bicycle, oh my god, or to the racket, to the ball. When you learn to play tennis, to go bicycle, to ski, then you forget that you have the ski or the bicycle. They become part of your body. It's like you. When you use the racket or the bicycle, the bicycle is you. This is the reason, because we call it prosthesis, like a cyborg. We are sort of cyborg. And that's true for the practical object, paper and pens. And the same for the imaging, the circle and the triangle. So I think that maybe before now, you never think that the circle is a tool. You think that the circle is something that is in your mind. So some example, the knot is one-bit information. There is just one bit of information, the basic object that we can use to make, to note, to keep the information. Then this is, I think, is funny, because this is nuke central. But the workers, I forgot the name of this, but the workers ever make mistakes because the level was equal. So they put these two objects to avoid to make errors again. I'm very happy about this. And then there is the post-it. You may see the post-it is the little piece of paper that you can stitch on object. And that's very important and very interesting, because the post-it is a very simple object. But what is it? It transforms an object that is a normal object, like your fridge there or your door, in an object that communicates and communicates through the message and through the space to the fact that you see the post-it in the moment you go out. And I don't have much time here. But the tools that we use change the project for sure. I don't know if you know, these are two very iconic projects. One is the Bauhaus in the South, the beginning of the past century. And this is the Guggenheim of Bilbao at the end of the past century. And it's possible, these two projects is the mold, the age, the construction material. But most of them, the tools that you have, you can't do a project like this if your tool this. When I start learning to draw, I use this. It's impossible. We can do that now, because we have nerves. We have curves. We have all the software that we need. And so today, sometimes I think that the idea of the architecture becomes from some very simple move that we made normally on Blender or the 3D software. For example, this is a very famous project of Frederic de Meron in Basel. And you may see that the shape is like to move a vertex, the basic of this. Or this project here in Amsterdam, I'm sure that it becomes from this kind of work, this kind of tool, the tool that we have inside the software. This one is some torsion that we can imagine that comes from this. This is like a box with the surface that is rotated with a proportional editing. So you can see that the tool that we have changed the way we make the project. And this shape, I show you some shape that for me probably becomes from the use of the 3D tool. But there is a problem more, creation, invention, shapes that a different way our brain works. For example, when you throw some stone on a plane, what you have is a shape. This is the basic, is like the knot, is a shape. You make a shape, a form. More interesting, for example, this one is the tanglam, maybe you know it, is a square. You cut the pieces and you can create new shapes and new forms. Or this, you know this, is Rorschach. He is a doctor that thinks that he shows you one shape that is made just with ink, is a random shape. And he understood if you're crazy or not, asking you which is the first idea that becomes, in your mind, looking at this. Normally, sexual ideas, 9 times 10 is this. The human is made in this way. But it's not this interesting. It's interesting that how it works, our brain, is every time looking and searching for forms, for shape, everywhere. And we think that we can predict the future using this technique. We try to read. There is, I don't know if it's famous here, but in Italy, it was in the past, very famous. You can read what remains on the coffee and you can read shapes. And from this, you can predict the future, like the itching, like the horoscope. The idea is ever this one. And becoming with the age of the computer becomes something new, because this is a Greg Ling project. He takes and he creates the shape, starting from a noise in this situation. The noise was the creator of the shape of the project. So two ways to use the tool. One, more notation, more a list, more an Excel file. And the other way to use the tool is to invent, to have something that gives to you the possibility to invent new things or to predict the future. So until now, we have this. This is procedural modeling, just to give to you some idea. And in our workshop, this is the idea. It's the place that gives to us the idea to invent shapes. So we have the software, that is the notational tool, and the place where we are going to work that is, we can call it the fantasy tool, the tool that helps us to invent, to see, to imagine new shapes and to have new ideas. So this is, again, our workshop. And as I told you, what is very important is the idea to use the Blender software to make the project. And Blender is fantastic for this, because you have a lot of plug-in, a lot of tool different that makes different things. And it's an incredible possibility to invent something different. So I show you, just to give the idea, some project, are not particularly amazing rendering or imaging. But you have to think that there are students that start from scratch. And they have 15 or 20 hours of direct lesson, frontal lesson. And then there is the workshop. So they develop the project using Blender. And we help, obviously, to go through the difficult. But this was a diffuse concerto. There is a lot of these cubes in the city. And every player was playing in this cube but connected with earphones and so on. This was also interesting. It was like an antenna for free places that were going to work. The smart kit, a cardboard kit to have everything that you have in your smartphone, but by cardboard. So you have a camera and you have maps. All the imaging are created, as I told you, made by using Blender, starting from zero. This is, I don't know, I think it was a part of a museum. But inside this kind of bubble, transparent bubble shape architecture, this is one of my favorites. It's a bench where the Wi-Fi and the telephone is blocked. So you can't use your smartphone when you use it. Some other point of view, part of to rebuild a new museum that was destroyed during the war. Some other nice point of view, a bicycle parking to put around the walls of the city. I think that's nice. It's a project for a museum of Mario Sironi. And they made these shapes that are around all the walls of the museum. Another one, they have the same project as before. Elvedere, another one, some graphical idea, I think. So as you see, there is a lot of Photoshop. But the basic and all the models are made in Blender. Then at the end, they Photoshop a lot. In architectural drawings and rendering, the use of Photoshop is enough. So I'm going to finish. But for first, I want to say that what is very important in using Blender to make and to create a project? Is that, is the opposite than AutoCAD? One of the biggest problems that we have as architects in the architectural school is that the first tool that the students are using when they start architecture is AutoCAD. That is a magnificent software, is incredible, and so. But it has a problem that AutoCAD asks you every time, every moment, the dimension, the measure. Do this, do this, do this. Every time ask how much, how much, how much, how much, all the time. You have to know every moment how much is it. And that's important in some part of the project. But at the beginning, it's not the dimension that is important. It's the proportion. In architecture, when you start to make a project, what is really important is not so how much. This is more near to the end. When you have to build it, you have to know how much. But at the beginning, what you need is the proportion of the object. This is what is very important. So you need a software that helps you to work in this way. Those are brain, not. And Blender is magnificent in this, because you can do stuff, you can do things, and not being too much precise. Because precision, dimension is information. It's time. So you can work very better if you start working Blender and without the dimension. And to use the dimension just in the second situations, and just at the end, just later, not at the beginning. So this is the most important reason, because I ever hope that students start to use the 3D software with Blender with something that not needs so much precision, but is impossible. That's it. Just to finish, I have one minute and a half again, is this, the question is, but before we are drawing by hand, now we draw, we make project using the computer. So it's just faster, it's just a little bit different, but more or less it's the same thing. We make not so different project. It's so different to project with computer than before. I think not so much yet. I show you the Bauhaus and the Guggenheim, and the difference is perceivable. Every object that you use today, every project has the shape we can control, complex curves. We have a big control on it, but it's not totally a change of paradigm as we thought. Now when, I don't know, the renaissance with the perspective was a change of paradigm. Everything is changing, has changed after the renaissance. Why? Because they start to use new tools, the perspective, and so they start to make new project. And are we in this moment? I think yes, and the real reason is this, is this draw, as maybe you know it, is a fractal, is a fence made using fractals. And that's something interesting, because everyone of you can understood which plant is this, or you can understood what is this. But in fact, this shape, this draw, is made by the computer making points at random. Is ever impossible, there is a very little equation that makes the number going inside, very complex equation, but very short. And he makes point at random is impossible to know where the next point is going. But if you let the computer work for some times, at the end, yeah, this equation that draw a plant is something that everyone know what is it, but made in a totally different way, is not made as we draw before, as we have drawn in the past, and how we draw today using the computer. So, obviously, they discovered this in the 70s. It's 40 years that this exist. We don't use it in architecture again, because there is a lot of problem in make this object real. Mostly because they are, one of the characteristics of this object is that they are infinite. You can go, you can zoom, you can zoom, you can zoom, how much as you want, and you can see ever the same shape. That's one of the most important part of this. But you use it every day. When you go in a plane, the flow of the air on the wings of the plane is calculated using this. When you make, when you work with some video games, all the trees, the sky, the clouds, is made using this kind of shapes. This is a real picture. Now it's, it imitates the reality in real, very best than the cube, the circle, the cylinder, and so. So, I hope next year, we're trying to put some tools that use fractal or workshop and trying to make project using this. We already don't do that, but I hope next year I will show you something. And the idea is this. Now fractal is something like an art made in this way. This is part of that, where it's not the paint, the shape that you draw that is important, but is the process that becomes important, that is the drawing or this. This is Buri that uses the fire and the melting of the material to create art. But I hope that we can, inside the software, to find some way to use this, don't just to create art, but to create normal projects. Okay, this is one example. This is a tissue, is a plug-in that we start to try to use to see when it's possible Okay, that's all. Thanks a lot. I hope you enjoy it. Go ahead.