The 15th Blender Day and BlenderSchool 2023 will take place from 28-30 July with many face-to-face workshops and a fine selection of cutting-edge presentations from our community. The location is in Mannheim, just a few minutes’ walk from the railway station.
You can find all information here: blender3dschool.de
As a keynote speaker, Tobias Roetsch will review his history as a 3D artist, which has always been accompanied by Blender. We are also planning the epic modelling contest again and this year we want to invite all participants to submit their own work for feedback.
The workshops will again be organised in 3 skill levels: Newbee, Beginner and Advanced. The workshops can be booked individually so that everyone can choose the knowledge booster that best suits their current skill set. This year we are once again offering Blender newcomers and Blender newcomers a completely separate First Steps track, consisting of 4 coordinated workshops.
And if the Blender articles at the DP make you think: Oh, I want to learn that: DP author Gottfried Hofmann will be giving a few workshops and will be on site 🙂
The 3-hour workshops will be supported with materials provided in advance and will guide you step by step through the workshop topic using practical examples. The Mafinex Technology Centre will once again be the venue for the event, offering a relaxed course atmosphere with good coffee (Café Agatha is in the building) as well as plenty of technical equipment.
An excerpt (there are half a dozen more) of the workshops planned so far:
Materials, light & rendering (4/4)
From the 3D scene to a 2D image: We create a rendering – Introduction to materials: Node based shading – Introduction to lighting and the world settings – The camera and its possibilities – Renderer Cycles. Recommended prerequisites: You, Blender and your mouse
Scripting for creatives
This course is designed to take the fear out of scripting with Python for Blender users. A few lines of scripting can save you a lot of time. The course shows Python basics and how to use them in Blender.
Scripting Addons
You have already written your first small scripts in the Blender text editor. Now let’s turn the script into an addon together. We will also read data from files and from the Internet into Blender.
Low Poly Freestyle / Grease Pencil
Low Poly forms the basis of all modelling, is an ideal form of pre-visualisation but also a popular style in 3D. Its expressive possibilities, including line art (Freestyle / Grease Pencil), are presented using examples.
Motion Graphics with Geometry Nodes
With Geometry Nodes you can create your own tools in Blender. In this workshop we will build a system that creates an abstract miniature cloudscape from images and animate the result.
Large Scale Industrial Landscapes
Shooting infinite landscapes with wide-angle lenses simply has its own charm. With this workshop you will also learn how to master such projects. The iterative, non-destructive workflow explains how to use open street map data and satellite maps as the basis for scene organisation, from sketching to real-time compositing. Artistic rules for creating convincing spatial atmospheres are also explained. Technical aids such as geometry nodes make it easier to distribute and equip frequently repeated low-poly objects.
What if – AI in Blender (textures, concept art and style transfer)
Artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to generate some amazing images. With the Dream Textures add-on, this is also possible directly in Blender. With just a few clicks, you can generate textures for your objects, create images for inspiration and display your renderings in the style of famous artists such as Dali or Michelangelo. And there are even more possibilities.
VR productions with Blender
As an introduction to the more practical workshop, I will give an overview of the variety, status and objectives of the virtual worlds currently under development. Everyone has probably heard of Omniverse for the creation of digital twins and collaboration in construction and design, as well as Metaverse for social exchange in the Horizon and Workplace applications. We will look at the process of asset production with Blender, starting with planning the low-poly asset, previewing with Blender’s own mixed reality tools and exporting to a real VR environment. In the workshop, we will port the assets brought along by the participants for the Meta Pro and Meta Quest 2 and try them out there directly with appropriate VR navigation (VR hardware will be provided).
Recommended prerequisites: little susceptible to motion sickness
USD-driven Blender Pipeline
In professional 3D studios, pipelines are created from different, highly specialised 3D programs for data exchange. Although Blender is the Swiss army knife of 3D tools, it still makes sense to outsource certain tasks to extremely specialised programs (e.g. cloth simulation of multi-layered textiles with Clo3D or material simulations with Substance Painter etc.). This requires a standardised exchange format, which Disney initially developed in-house and has ultimately made available as a public domain with open sources since 2016. In the workshop, we will look at the features supported by Blender and discuss best practices and current limitations. A frequently used use case in our customer projects is, for example, the procurement of high-performance 3D assets for rendering in Blender. The procurement of models and materials from the Unity3D asset store and the Unreal marketplace is almost as convenient with USD as with the Blendermarket.
