workshops - DIGITAL PRODUCTION

Off to Blender School! In Mannheim from 28.7 to 30.7!

Bela Beier — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 07:18:08 +0000

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)

by Dominique-MirjamKaulab

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

by Philipp Hemmer

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

by Philipp Hemmer

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

by Alfred

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

by Gottfried Hofmannfrom2 participants (5)

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

by Tobias Günther

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)

by Gottfried Hofmann

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

by Tobias Günther

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

by Tobias Günther

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.

The post Off to Blender School! In Mannheim from 28.7 to 30.7! first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

How does grooming work with Ornatrix, gFur and Unreal Engine 4?

Patrick Poti — Wed, 17 Aug 2022 04:00:46 +0000

In nuce: Anyone who reads Digital Production knows: “That’s enough cat pictures for me!” is a sentence we’ve never said before. Fittingly, we recently published a workshop report that set our cat content radar off! Lead Character Artist Glen Yancey has published a workshop report with our colleagues from 80.lv, which traces how grooming works in Ornatrix and gFur – and how the corresponding files are exported to Unreal Engine afterwards. The workshop report “Setting Up Stylised Fur with Ornatrix, gFur & UE4” is worth reading and was written by Arti Burton, Head of Content at 80.lv.

Who is Glen Yancey? Glen Yancey is the Lead Character Artist of the game Lightyears from Home, a story-driven survival game whose game mechanics borrow from the Metroidvania genre. Before that, Glen worked as a QA tester at Funcom, managing bug reports for the game Conan: Exiles, among other things. He then worked as a Character & Environment Artist and 3D Asset Artist.

What can you expect in the workshop report? The workshop report focusses on Monty – the anthropomorphic, feline sidekick of the human protagonist Sam. According to Glen, it was comparatively easy to give the human hero a hairstyle – thanks to XGen and the numerous tutorials available online. Grooming Monty, on the other hand, was a challenge for XGen, which is why Glen and his team switched to a combination of gFur and Ornatrix. Glen describes the grooming of the animal adlatus as being similar to video game classics such as Conker’s Bad Fur Day, Ratchet & Clank or Shadow of the Colossus. In the course of his workshop report, Glen also explains what his overall workflow looked like – always using Ornatrix, gFur and Unreal Engine 4.

Click further: To the complete workshop report on 80.lv. The teaser for Lightyears from Home is linked right here below.

Lightyears from Home – Game Teaser

The post How does grooming work with Ornatrix, gFur and Unreal Engine 4? first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

Filmuni Babelsberg organises the Virtual Production Lab

Patrick Poti — Tue, 25 Jan 2022 11:00:30 +0000

What is the Virtual Production Lab? The workshop teaches core competences in the field of virtual and mixed reality production
Cooperation with Film University Babelsberg: Experts from the field and professors from Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf will be lecturing
The deadline: The application deadline is 31.01.2022. The workshops will take place between 14 and 18 March 2022 in German and English

In nuce: Apply for the Virtual Production Lab of the Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf and the Erich Pommer Institute!

What is the Virtual Production Lab? The workshop teaches core competences in the field of virtual and mixed reality production. The target group is film and television professionals who are interested in the new technologies. The lab is particularly suitable for creative professionals from the fields of production, editing, camera, directing and creative technologies.

Cooperation with Babelsberg Film University: National and international experts from the field as well as professors from Babelsberg Film University Konrad Wolf will impart their knowledge as part of the training programme. These include Prof. Dr Lena Gieseke (image-oriented media technology), Silke Buhr (production designer and film architect) and Frank Govaere and Adrian Weber (both from Halostage).

The key dates: The application deadline is 31 January 2022 and the workshops will take place between 14 and 18 March 2022 in German and English. All further information can be obtained from the Erich Pommer Institute itself.

Tip for those who are undecided: Today, 25 January at 19:00, you will get a little foretaste of what to expect in the workshop at the online info evening .

The post Filmuni Babelsberg organises the Virtual Production Lab first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.