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@ -2,9 +2,9 @@ CHRISTINE LEMMER-WEBBER: hitting record and drinking this tea. hoping my throat
MORGAN LEMMER-WEBBER: Fingers crossed.
[Music]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
C: Hello and welcome to Foss and Crafts.
C: Hello and welcome to FOSS and Crafts.
M: A podcast about free software, free culture and making things together.
@ -28,7 +28,7 @@ C: Mhm.
M: And it also has this connected free culture open movie project arm as well.
C: Right, because Blender, well I guess now Blender Studio, previously Blender Institute did this part of it. But the Blender Studio does these open movie projects in collaboration with programmers. I guess we'll get a little bit more into that later on in the episode. But yes, Blender is interesting because it's not just a piece of software, but it's a software that very much so owns being part of cultural production. So I guess very FOSS and crafts.
C: Right, because Blender, well I guess now Blender Studio, previously Blender Institute did this part of it. But the Blender Studio does these open movie projects in collaboration with programmers. I guess we'll get a little bit more into that later on in the episode. But yes, Blender is interesting because it's not just a piece of software, but it's a software that very much so owns being part of cultural production. So I guess very FOSS and Crafts.
M: Yeah, it's one of the few things that is free software and free culture working so seamlessly together, like at its core.
@ -88,11 +88,11 @@ C: Completely the opposite, right? You know, it was furry and funny, like, you k
M: Yeah. And now Blender is used much more broadly than it used to be.
C: Yeah. I think if you're starting a new video game company, for example, if like if you're an indie animator or an indie game producer, you're almost certainly using Blender. Like it's the default these days for such things. There's a bunch of big companies that still have large productions where they're still using other tools. But like we watched that video about the second Spider-Verse movie. And they used grease pencil in it. Right?
C: Yeah. I think if you're starting a new video game company, for example, if like if you're an indie animator or an indie game producer, you're almost certainly using Blender. Like it's the default these days for such things. There's a bunch of big companies that still have large productions where they're still using other tools. But like we watched that video about the second Spider-Verse movie. And they used Grease Pencil in it. Right?
M: Mhm.
C: And so they kind of, I think that was one of the big first times we saw really like a huge production kind of insert Blender in a very visible way into its pipeline. It's using grease pencil for a lot of the line art that's in that movie. But I think one of the other big differences that's happened between now when I was learning it and then is that like the prominence of internet video with YouTube and etc. It's much easier to find resources about how to learn things and with Blender being open source, It's much easier for people to default to. So anyway, that was kind of a tour of the history. So nowadays I think there's about three institutions that formally are doing the development of Blender stuff basically. There is the Blender Foundation which holds on to the code and the trademark and stuff, the Blender Institute which is I think mostly where the software is being developed these days. And other projects like that. And then there's the Blender Studio which is the ones doing the open movie project stuff. And those latter two tend to be funded by the dev fund for more of the software side and the Blender Cloud for the open movie project side of things. We talked about this in the governance episode about how kind of all three of these things come together.
C: And so they kind of, I think that was one of the big first times we saw really like a huge production kind of insert Blender in a very visible way into its pipeline. It's using Grease Pencil for a lot of the line art that's in that movie. But I think one of the other big differences that's happened between now when I was learning it and then is that like the prominence of internet video with YouTube and etc. It's much easier to find resources about how to learn things and with Blender being open source, It's much easier for people to default to. So anyway, that was kind of a tour of the history. So nowadays I think there's about three institutions that formally are doing the development of Blender stuff basically. There is the Blender Foundation which holds on to the code and the trademark and stuff, the Blender Institute which is I think mostly where the software is being developed these days. And other projects like that. And then there's the Blender Studio which is the ones doing the open movie project stuff. And those latter two tend to be funded by the dev fund for more of the software side and the Blender Cloud for the open movie project side of things. We talked about this in the governance episode about how kind of all three of these things come together.
M: Yeah, and how and how having the three separate things allows it to--they have somewhat of a shared pot of money but that also allows them to have like different governance setups for the different focuses.
@ -108,7 +108,7 @@ C: There is some sample bias but I also happen to have quite a few people in my
M: Yeah.
C: And we're starting to see more 2D animation studios picking up Blender because grease pencil is really powerful. Since it allows for the combination of 2D and 3D intermixed. It really allows for things--I think grease pencil is one of those things that really feels like it's a thing that other things kind of really couldn't do before in some ways.
C: And we're starting to see more 2D animation studios picking up Blender because Grease Pencil is really powerful. Since it allows for the combination of 2D and 3D intermixed. It really allows for things--I think Grease Pencil is one of those things that really feels like it's a thing that other things kind of really couldn't do before in some ways.
M: Mhm. And I think part of part of the reason for this more broad adoption is has to do with the GUI and usability of it. So Blender 10 or 15 years ago was a different user experience than Blender today so I.
@ -144,226 +144,156 @@ C: And you needed to know the keyboard shortcuts and then later on like when I w
M: So the usability of Blender and the usability of the interface is like so much more accessible these days.
C: Now we should say that Blender--that all 3D software that is sufficiently advanced enough for artists to get interesting things done with these days at least tends to have a high learning curve, and Blender is no exception.
C: Now we should say that Blender--that all 3D software that is sufficiently advanced enough for artists to get interesting things done with these days at least tends to have a high learning curve, and Blender is no exception. It's just like one of those things that there's a high learning curve.
It's just like one of those things that there's a high learning curve.
Well I just talked about how much I hated the two pieces of software I was using in those classes too which were the software that they chose for fairly introductory courses.
Right and I think that there was a certain amount of threshold stuff where people when Blender had much less adoption people would come in from like Maya or Macs or whatever and they would have invested themselves in it possibly with a large amount of money.
And then they experience Blender which has a very different set of user interface details and they would feel very turned off by it because it wasn't what was immediately familiar.
And I think a Blender has tried to streamline some of its aspects a little bit but there's a certain amount of momentum that when something kind of crosses a threshold of the number of people using it it becomes much more likely that
it's not just it's the hard thing because it's sometimes people's first experience I think.
Yeah so we were talking about how it's kind of being used more broadly and that it's grown in popularity you know and it's increasingly being used by a number of 2D animation groups especially because many many 2D animation things now combine 2D and 3D and Blender does that.
This one I feel like is not even that smug to say nothing combines 2D and 3D currently as well as Blender does and it will get better as grease pencil 3 comes out.
And so that's pretty exciting but I mean kind of Blender is used for like so many different things you and I were watching like we spent a couple nights just watching random videos from like the Blender conference right and like there were some different things
like that that is being used for that weren't just traditional animation etc.
Yeah if you want to go down a very interesting rabbit hole just look at some of the videos from Blender conference to look at the wide variety of things that people are doing with this software because it varies quite a bit.
Well let's highlight one of them.
There is one video in particular which as a historian I found really interesting.
That was by a human rights group that uses community crowd sourced resources to do reconstructions of things for human rights purposes so like disasters and fires and things like this where people are trying to figure out how things happened so they're doing
this kind of like community led investigation and taking all of these like cell phone photos and videos that people are just taking as they're like fleeing or observing from a safe distance and then using Blender to kind of like compile all of these into ways to reconstruct what happened
and as a historian I find this fascinating because we tend to have very small amounts of information that we try and reconstruct the past from because what survives is what survives.
So this idea of kind of like community crowd sourced investigations is really interesting to me so like the ways that you can use this software to compile things is interesting.
Yeah just adding a little bit to that one I thought was interesting is that they would actually like they used so many parts of Blender.
So yeah I was crowd sourced from a bunch of different sources from different people but they have like dedicated staff using the software and they're doing 3D modeling of the city and the environment and then like actually projecting the video is a different angle so you can see that it lines up in every angle
and even using things like the smoke simulation tools and stuff like that. Yeah to see how so using video the combination of the videos plus like simulations to see how like smoke would spread and the rapidity and things like that.
It's really interesting we will link that video in the show notes. Yep. So now we're going to talk a little bit about Christine's personal experience with Blender.
So we talked about your early lurking days on the Blender forums when you were in college but at that point you weren't really creating like some Blender right so what was when did you really get into making things in Blender.
Well I was trying to create things in Blender but struggling basically like some between I think about 2003 and 2004 as reading the forums heavily I had the manual and I would keep opening it and trying to make things and kind of struggling to get anything done.
And then you know like kept kind of making little bits and pieces of things. And like I made some characters I made some like you know small animation tests and stuff like that.
I didn't really do anything but like just to give a view of what it felt like at that time to use it like I remember at the beginning there was this tutorial. Nowadays like the most popular tutorial is this donut tutorial by this person who calls themselves Blender guru who and it's not the official Blender tutorial but it's very popular.
And but like way back in the day there is this tutorial for something called Gus and Gus was a gingerbread man and it was a great tutorial because you could do it in like five minutes and it taught you everything wrong.
Like it was really great because you learned you learned how to do a bunch of things and then you kind of did not know how to apply those skills to anything else.
But it felt cool because you started you had like this.
You know suddenly I felt like I could do something in 3D space.
But like it was hard to make progress I made very small things and really didn't understand them. Blender's interface was very difficult. All the animation tools were extremely difficult and not really ready until elephant's dream happened.
And then during the first media gobbling campaign was the first time that I really did anything serious that was like I made during the well the two campaigns I made these two videos and they were both animated and I got help.
And then from our friend who we will link to their episode again you know about how to be able to help me when I got stuck with things and also ideas for how I might do things visually.
And I it was so much fun and then I kind of just dropped Blender for about a decade.
So this is your free software interfering with your free software.
Yeah, it's my free software interfering with my ability to be a free culture artist.
Yeah, because while Blender is free software as we've said multiple times it is still a 3D graphics program.
So it requires graphics capabilities which for a long time has been hard to do using freedom of software drivers.
But these days the most recent Intel chips are actually a fantastic graphics car drivers.
They might not be as fast as the two other big mainstream ones but you can actually get a recent chip and actually have really wonderful graphics drivers that you can do cool things and Blender with.
The thing that pulled me back into Blender was grease pencil like discovering grease pencil and it's used for 2D and everything like that.
I was like I have to try this and I managed to get Blender open enough even though it would completely crash and hang my computer enough to do some testing grease pencil where I was like I got to get a whole new computer that can be capable of doing grease pencil.
And so I did and then that's really when I started getting back into Blender again.
Yeah, do you want to talk about any of those smaller grease pencil projects or do you think that's efficient?
Yeah, I can link to I did a bunch of little tiny grease pencil animation tests like I think they were really cute and then I did one for our anniversary actually for our 14th anniversary.
It was many little tiny animations compiled into like a little animated postcard.
Yeah, it was adorable.
And then I'm planning on doing some more in grease pencil soon but yeah I just did things like cool looking swords and people like this character kind of responding with shock and awkwardness and things like that.
So the thing about Christine's art style and if you've ever been to a conference with Christine you probably know this when Christine is is like looking for something to do with her hands and is unoccupied field just take out index cards and just draw tiny little drawings.
And she's like incapable of drawing anything larger than like two inches by two inches.
So she always just draws little tiny little tiny drawings that are about two inches by two inches.
So she just started drawing these same tiny little drawings in grease pencil and then animating them.
And I love grease pencil. It's like the perfect 2D software for me because it feels like a raster you know pixel based drawing program but you're actually getting a vector based system and you can you know mess with it move things around and everything after the fact and it's just so lovely.
And you know you can turn on all these other effects and everything.
And then kind of the biggest thing I've done and probably going to do another episode about this specifically but I did my first kind of like not crowdfunding campaign animated short film recently in unexpected places with the music by Vivian Langdon.
And we'll talk about that more in a future episode so I'm just going to skip past that.
But it's been so nice coming back to Blender.
And the part of the reason why it's so nice is that I really missed Blender's community.
Like I went to a couple of the Blender conferences.
And actually just recently I was just on a trip to Fosdam and I got to meet Francesco City again who is like one of the most amazing things that I've been doing.
One of the main people over at the Blender Institute and so on and so forth and it was just really nice to reconnect there.
I have this strong affinity for Blender's community and I'm just I don't know I'm just vaccine poetic over here but it's so nice to use a piece of software that really feels like it's there to be able to just
empower you to do whatever you feel like you want to do.
It's a toolkit.
It's a tool to make tools.
Yeah.
And then you kind of steamrolled over me interviewing you and just like went down this entire list without letting me interview you.
Except for the last one.
The other thing you've used Grease Pencil for recently was a much more mundane thing, right?
You've been using it to do like diagrams and create visual aids for work, right?
So yeah, I've been using it for work.
Yeah.
One of the things that I've been doing is making various diagrams explaining kind of like our capability architecture for Spritley.
And I've been animating those and doing them kind of like whiteboard style animations but like make it look like somebody drew it on that whiteboard but it's actually animated.
And just that recently at Fosdem I was talking to the geeks community about how we're hoping to combine Spritley's tech and geeks's tech.
And I had these little hand drawn animations that kind of showed visually how these things might connect together and seem like people really connected to that.
So and also just for funs I did a 3D version of the Spritley Institute logo, the flask with like the little 3D like the network inside of it and stuff like that.
That was a lot of fun.
But yeah, I actually I think that Blender is an incredible visualization tool especially now that has Grease Pencil.
It's really good for being able to visualize and animate a complicated visual, a complicated technical subject even in a visual way.
Yeah.
So now you don't work for Blender.
We're not getting paid by Blender.
So we don't really have any bearing on this.
But what are your hopes for the future for Blender?
Yeah, don't work at Blender, you know, part of the community but very off to the side part of the community, right?
But I'm really excited.
Number one about Grease Pencil version 3.
I think it's going to really open the door.
Blender is really cool tech for 2D animation.
Lee a foundation for even more powerful things.
There's so many cool things happening right now in Blender, all these pieces of tech that are being developed.
There's like if you look at the roadmap, it's incredible.
And so I think for most people, they're still the largest amount of Blender's audience is very focused on the 3D artwork.
And there's been a lot of enthusiasm about geometry nodes and the way that you can kind of do procedural.
And like animation and modeling and stuff like that using it.
And I think Blender is becoming more of an interactive tool to make tools recently, like even more than it already was.
And what's kind of interesting about that is that the node based tools that are handed to artists is a programming language.
It's a visual programming language that many artists don't even realize that they're doing computer programming.
And that's pretty exciting in some ways and you see lots of artists making really cool tools that way.
And I think we'll see more of that.
I hope that Blender is going to continue to get more interactive.
The funny thing is that even though the game engine was removed and it wasn't really that good, so it's maybe for the best that it was removed.
It had some cool ideas.
But Blender is kind of getting more interactive.
I think I saw something in one of their blog posts where they're saying, "This could be a great tool for people doing live visualizations for DJs and stuff like that."
And I think that's true.
But I also think here's a weird thing that I really hope for the future.
Maybe I definitely don't have the time to work on this.
Morgan's making a tiny nod for like you don't have the time to do work on anything new.
But I would love to see a Blender digital audio workstation.
It's like Blender is used for video editing.
It has some audio tools.
I actually think with the node system and some of the other things, Blender might actually...
Blender is awkwardly probably the best video editor in free and open source software and it shouldn't be, but it kind of is.
But Blender might be primed to be the best audio editing software too.
And I'm saying this without anything to back myself up other than a gut sense of looking at what the toolkit provides.
I would love to see somebody build a Blender.
A Blender digital audio workstation plugin.
I think that'd be really interesting.
Especially if in the same way that you can combine 2D and 3D artwork and do something interesting.
Imagine if you're combining making a visualization and making a soundtrack at the same time.
Making music and making the visualization for it together.
And maybe even a way that they kind of feed into each other.
That I think would be really cool.
That would be cool.
My hopes for the future for Blender.
And this is something that I've talked to a couple of people about.
And we've seen a couple of videos that are edging along this or making progress towards this.
But as you know, if you've listened to the podcast, I like to make things.
Including sewing.
And we've talked about the idea of taking clothing on a 3D model.
And then using that 3D model to unwrap that clothing and flatten it.
And then add a seam allowance so that you can make a sewing pattern based off of a 3D model.
Or a 3D model based off of a sewing pattern.
Or a stuffed animal based off of a 3D model.
So a pattern for a stuffed animal based off of a 3D model.
And actually we watched that video together that used Blender's UV unwrapping stuff.
Like there's a plug in that does exactly this thing.
Yeah, so we've watched a couple of videos that are doing like very similar things.
And the stuffed animal is very, they're a lot closer to doing that.
Clothing is a little bit harder because a lot of times when people are modeling clothing.
In the 3D world.
In like 3D animation or whatever.
They're not paying attention to things like where seams would be placed.
Or how like, you know, fabric would actually stretch or not stretch.
So like getting it so that you could actually get it to lay flat into a pattern.
Would take a little bit more finagling.
Is this a, is this a faucet craft joint project between you and me?
2024, maybe 2025 if this turns out to be too ambitious.
I think we could do this in 2024.
Maybe this is not a promise audience.
It would be fun to try to make either some sort of clothing pattern.
But even more so, a free culture stuffed animal pattern using Blender to be able to develop the design.
And I could maybe, I could sketch and maybe create the model and then you could.
And then I could make it like make the tweaks so that it was a functional sewing pattern.
That would be fun collaboration.
That, oh my God.
And then we could put.
And then it would be a free software pattern.
Yeah, I can have the free software tags sticking off the edge of it.
For the ones that you make.
Oh my gosh.
That would be fun.
Okay guys, we don't have a lot of free time, but if we can find the time.
Wouldn't it be nice?
It would be, it would be fun.
Okay, so with that very ambitious goal for 2024.
Well, yeah, are we at the wrap up?
I think we're at the wrap up.
Yeah.
Then I just want to say Blender developers, we love you Blender artists.
We love you.
We're, I know I'm big fan girl of all the Blender things, but like.
It's so cool to see a piece of software that has evolved so much like this.
It's free to open source software.
And again, the, the interplay between free and open source software and free culture at Blender is something that like I've.
I can't, I cannot think of another example where you have free software and free culture working so seamlessly together.
Like that.
Oh, and we'll wrap up this episode.
Strongly recommend all of our audience watches wing it.
Oh, yes.
Which is the latest Blender open movie short about.
Is it still the latest?
It's still the latest at the moment of the, um, um, hopefully this is edited and out while it's still the latest.
Uh, the, uh, of this cat and dog, which is kind of a metaphor for the cat being the developers and the dog being the artists like in Blenderland.
And then there's a whole set of production log videos that talks about, um, that walks through like the process that film being made.
And then it turns out there were two different, I talked to Francesco at Fosden about this.
It turns out there's two different directors handling these different series.
The production logs one is done by one, um, filmmaker.
And then there is a different filmmaker who's doing the Blender heads ones and both of these videos are so fun to watch Morgan and I like this with like we watch videos sometimes during lunch together.
Um, and, uh, like, you know, like our, you know, you're just eating lunch, you might as well watch either music videos or, you know, maybe tutorials.
And, um, there's so much fun. And also it's just a really funny take on the, um, I guess the artist and the developer working side by side.
Yeah.
Um, but more importantly, gotta wrap up on the, you know, like, uh, thank you Blender in all of its different facets.
Um, both as software. Can you thank the software? I don't know.
Can you thank developers for making software? The developers, the people doing the organization and also the many artists in the community that have made, um, a piece of software that is maybe, I mean, people on here probably think e-max is my favorite software,
but actually probably Blender is my favorite software. It just only has one mistake.
It's scripting language is not a list. Somebody needs to fix that. Anyway, that's it. That's it for this episode. Thank you, everybody.
Thanks, bye.
Fos and Crafts is released under the Creative Commons attribution chair alike 4.0 international license.
It's hosted by Morgan Lemmerweber and Christine Lemmerweber.
The intro music is composed by Christine Lemmerweber, meaning myself, in Moki Tracker, and is released under the same license as the show.
The outro music is Enchanted Teakee 86 composed by Alex Smith of the Cinec Project and is waved into the public domain under CC01.0.
See CinecMusic.com for more information.
You can get in contact with us on the Fediverse, Fos and Crafts at Octadondot Social, on Twitter as @fos and Crafts, or you can email us, podcast@fos and Crafts.org.
We also have a chat room. Join our community on #fos and Crafts on IRC.libara.chat.
If you'd like to support the show, you can donate at patreon.com/fos and Crafts.
That's it for this week.
Until next time, stay free.
And stay crafty.
[Music]
That's right.
[Coughing]
Ugh, gross.
Disgusting.
A, starting from being a steamroller.
B, sorry for the horrible noises that just came out of my mouth.
C, I'll answer your question after taking another sip of tea.
There's no more tea left. Oh no!
Seltzer, they're seltzer.
you
M: Well and I just talked about how much I hated the two pieces of software I was using in those classes too, which were the software that they chose for fairly introductory courses.
C: Right and I think that there was a certain amount of threshold stuff where people-- when Blender had much less adoption, people would come in from like Maya or Max or whatever and they would have invested themselves in it, possibly with a large amount of money. And then they experience Blender which has a very different set of user interface details and they would feel very turned off by it because it wasn't what was immediately familiar.
M: Mhm.
C: And I think, A, Blender has tried to streamline some of its aspects a little bit, but there's a certain amount of momentum that when something kind of crosses a threshold of the number of people using it becomes much more likely that, it's not just it's the hard thing because it's sometimes people's first experience I think.
M: Mhm.
C: Yeah so we were talking about how it's kind of being used more broadly and that it's grown in popularity and it's increasingly being used by a number of 2D animation groups especially because many 2D animation things now combine 2D and 3D, and Blender does that. This one I feel like is not even that smug to say: nothing combines 2D and 3D currently as well as Blender does and it will get better as Grease Pencil 3 comes out. And so that's pretty exciting, but I mean Blender is used for so many different things. You and I were watching--like we spent a couple nights just watching random videos from the Blender conference, right? And like there were some different things that it was being used for that weren't just traditional animation etc.
M: Yeah if you want to go down a very interesting rabbithole just look at some of the videos from Blender conference to look at the wide variety of things that people are doing with this software because it varies quite a bit.
C: Well let's highlight one of them.
M: Yeah, there is one video in particular which as a historian I found really interesting that was by a human rights group that uses community crowd sourced resources to do reconstructions of things for human rights purposes so like disasters and fires and things like this where people are trying to figure out how things happened. So they're doing this kind of like community led investigation and taking all of these cell phone photos and videos that people are just taking as they're like fleeing or observing from a safe distance and then using Blender to compile all of these into ways to reconstruct what happened, and as a historian I find this fascinating because we tend to have very small amounts of information that we try and reconstruct the past from, because what survives is what survives. So this idea of kind of like community crowdsourced investigations is really interesting to me. So like the ways that you can use this software to compile things is interesting.
C: Yeah just adding a little bit to that one I thought was interesting is that they would actually--they used so many parts of Blender. So yeah it was crowdsourced from a bunch of different sources from different people but they have dedicated staff using the software and they're doing 3D modeling of the city and the environment and then actually projecting the videos at different angles so you can see that it lines up in every angle and even using things like the smoke simulation tools and stuff like that.
M: Yeah to see how--so using video, the combination of the videos plus like simulations to see how like smoke would spread and the rapidity and things like that. It's really interesting, we will link that video in the show notes.
C: Yep.
M: So now we're going to talk a little bit about Christine's personal experience with Blender. So we talked about your early lurking days on the Blender forums when you were in college but at that point you weren't really creating much on Blender right, so when did you really get into making things in Blender?
C: Well I was trying to create things in Blender but struggling basically. Between I think about 2003 and 2004 as reading the forums heavily I had the manual and I would keep opening it and trying to make things and kind of struggling to get anything done. And then kept kind of making little bits and pieces of things. And I made some characters I made some small animation tests and stuff like that. I didn't really do anything--but like just to give a view of what it felt like at that time to use it, I remember at the beginning there was this tutorial. Nowadays like the most popular tutorial is this donut tutorial by this person who calls themselves Blender Guru who--and it's not the official Blender tutorial but it's very popular. But way back in the day there is this tutorial for something called Gus and Gus was a gingerbread man and it was a great tutorial because you could do it in like five minutes and it taught you everything wrong. Like it was really great because you learned how to do a bunch of things and then you kind of did not know how to apply those skills to anything else. But it felt cool because you started--you had like this--you know suddenly I felt like I could do something in 3D space. But it was hard to make progress, I made very small things and really didn't understand them. Blender's interface was very difficult. All the animation tools were extremely difficult and not really ready until Elephant's Dream happened. And then during the first MediaGoblin campaign was the first time that I really did anything serious. That was like--I made during the two campaigns I made these two videos and they were both animated and I got help from our friend who we will link to their episode again about how to be able to help me when I got stuck with things and also ideas for how I might do things visually. And it was so much fun and then I kind of just dropped Blender for about a decade. And the reason was not because I wanted to drop Blender but because I kept using computers with hardware that was incompatible with Blender, either because there was a graphics card bug, or because I was using something that was trying way too hardcore to be a free-software purist.
M: So this is your free software interfering with your free software.
C: Yeah, it's my free software interfering with my ability to be a free culture artist. Yeah.
M: Because while Blender is free software as we've said multiple times it is still a 3D graphics program. So it requires graphics capabilities
C: Which for a long time has been hard to do using free and open source software drivers. But these days the most recent Intel chips are actually fantastic graphics card drivers. They might not be as fast as the two other big mainstream ones but you can actually get a recent chip and actually have really wonderful graphics drivers that you can do cool things in Blender with. But the thing that pulled me back into Blender was Grease Pencil like discovering Grease Pencil and it's used for 2D and everything like that. I was like, "I have to try this". And I managed to get Blender open enough--even though it would completely crash and hang my computer--enough to do some tests in Grease Pencil where I was like "I've got to get a whole new computer that can be capable of doing Grease Pencil." And so I did, and then that's really when I started getting back into Blender again.
M: Yeah, do you want to talk about any of those smaller Grease Pencil projects or do you think that's sufficient?
C: Yeah, I can link to--I did a bunch of little tiny Grease Pencil animation tests, I think they were really cute and then I did one for our anniversary actually for our 14th anniversary.
M: It was many little tiny animations compiled into like a little animated postcard.
C: Yeah,
M: It was adorable.
C: And then I'm planning on doing some more in Grease Pencil soon but yeah I just did things like cool looking swords and people like this character kind of responding with shock and awkwardness and things like that.
M: So the thing about Christine's art style--and if you've ever been to a conference with Christine you probably know this--when Christine is is like looking for something to do with her hands and is unoccupied she'll just take out index cards and just draw tiny little drawings. And she's like incapable of drawing anything larger than like two inches by two inches. So she always just draws little tiny drawings that are about two inches by two inches. So she just started drawing these same tiny little drawings in Grease Pencil and then animating them.
C: And I love Grease Pencil. It's like the perfect 2D software for me because it feels like a raster pixel-based drawing program but you're actually getting a vector based system and you can mess with it, move things around and everything after the fact and it's just so lovely. And you can turn on all these other effects and everything. And then kind of the biggest thing I've done and probably going to do another episode about this specifically but I did my first not crowdfunding campaign animated short film recently In Unexpected Places with the music by Vivianne Langdon. And we'll talk about that more in a future episode so I'm just going to skip past that. But it's been so nice coming back to Blender. And part of the reason why it's so nice is that I really missed Blender's community. Like I went to a couple of the Blender conferences. And actually just recently I was just on a trip to FOSDEM and I got to meet Francesco Siddi again who is like one of the main people over at the Blender Institute and so on and so forth and it was just really nice to reconnect there. I have this strong affinity for Blender's community and I'm just, I don't know I'm just waxing poetic over here but it's so nice to use a piece of software that really feels like it's there to be able to just empower you to do whatever you feel like you want to do. It's a toolkit. It's a tool to make tools.
M: Yeah. And then you kind of steamrolled over me interviewing you and just like went down this entire list without letting me interview you. Except for the last one. The other thing you've used Grease Pencil for recently was a much more mundane thing, right? You've been using it to do diagrams and create visual aids for work, right?
C: Mhm. So yeah, I've been using it for work. One of the things that I've been doing is making various diagrams explaining our capability architecture for Spritely. And I've been animating those and doing them kind of like whiteboard-style animations but like make it look like somebody drew it on the whiteboard but it's actually animated. And just recently at FOSDEM I was talking to the Guix community about how we're hoping to combine Spritely's tech and Guix's tech. And I had these little hand-drawn animations that kind of showed visually how these things might connect together and seem like people really connected to that. So and also just for funsies, I did a 3D version of the Spritely Institute logo, the flask with like the little 3D network inside of it and stuff like that. And that was a lot of fun. But yeah, I actually, I think that Blender is an incredible visualization tool especially now that it has Grease Pencil. It's really good for being able to visualize and animate a complicated visual, a complicated technical subject even in a visual way.
M: Yeah. So now you don't work for Blender. We're not getting paid by Blender. So we don't really have any bearing on this. But what are your hopes for the future for Blender?
C: Yeah, I don't work at Blender, you know, part of the community but very off to the side part of the community, right? But I'm really excited, number one about Grease Pencil version 3. I think it's going to really open the door, Make Blender's really cool tech for 2D animation. Lay a foundation for even more powerful things. There's so many cool things happening right now in Blender, all these pieces of tech that are being developed. There's like if you look at the roadmap, it's incredible. And so I think for most people, they're still the largest amount of Blender's audience is very focused on the 3D artwork. And there's been a lot of enthusiasm about geometry nodes and the way that you can kind of do procedural animation and modeling and stuff like that using it. And I think Blender is becoming more of an interactive tool to make tools recently, like even more than it already was. And what's kind of interesting about that is that the node based tools that are handed to artists is a programming language. It's a visual programming language that many artists don't even realize that they're doing computer programming. And that's pretty exciting in some ways and you see lots of artists making really cool tools that way. And I think we'll see more of that. I hope that Blender is going to continue to get more interactive. The funny thing is that even though the game engine was removed and it wasn't really that good, so it's maybe for the best that it was removed. It had some cool ideas. But Blender is kind of getting more interactive. I think I saw something in one of their blog posts where they're saying, "This could be a great tool for people doing live visualizations for DJs and stuff like that." And I think that's true. But I also think here's a weird thing that I really hope for the future. Maybe--I definitely don't have the time to work on this. Morgan's making a tiny nod for like "you don't have the time to work on anything new". But I would love to see a Blender digital audio workstation. It's like Blender is used for video editing. It has some audio tools. I actually think with the node system and some of the other things, Blender might actually... Blender is awkwardly probably the best video editor in free and open source software, and it shouldn't be, but it kind of is. But Blender might be primed to be the best audio editing software too. And I'm saying this without anything to back myself up other than a gut sense of looking at what the toolkit provides. I would love to see somebody build a Blender DAW plugin. A Blender digital audio workstation plugin. I think that'd be really interesting. Especially if, in the same way that you can combine 2D and 3D artwork and do something interesting. Imagine if you're combining making a visualization and making a soundtrack at the same time. Making music and making the visualization for it together. And maybe even a way that they kind of feed into each other. That I think would be really cool.
M: That would be cool. My hopes for the future for Blender. And this is something that I've talked to a couple of people about. And we've seen a couple of videos that are edging along this or making progress towards this. But as you know, if you've listened to the podcast, I like to make things. Including sewing. And we've talked about the idea of taking clothing on a 3D model. And then using that 3D model to unwrap that clothing and flatten it. And then add a seam allowance so that you can make a sewing pattern based off of a 3D model. Or a 3D model based off of a sewing pattern.
C: Or a stuffed animal based off of a 3D model.
M: Or a stuffed animal based off of a 3D model. So a pattern for a stuffed animal based off of a 3D model.
C: And actually we watched that video together that used Blender's UV unwrapping stuff. Like there's a plugin that does exactly this thing.
M: Yeah, so we've watched a couple of videos that are doing like very similar things. And the stuffed animal is very, they're a lot closer to doing that. Clothing is a little bit harder because a lot of times when people are modeling clothing. In the 3D world. In like 3D animation or whatever. They're not paying attention to things like where seams would be placed. Or how like, you know, fabric would actually stretch or not stretch. So like getting it so that you could actually get it to lay flat into a pattern would take a little bit more finagling.
C: Is this a, is this a FOSS and Crafts joint project between you and me? 2024, maybe 2025 if this turns out to be too ambitious. I think we could do this in 2024. Maybe--this is not a promise audience--it would be fun to try to make either some sort of clothing pattern. But even more so, a free culture stuffed animal pattern using Blender to be able to develop the design. And I could maybe, I could sketch and maybe create the model and then you could.
M: And then I could like make the tweaks so that it was a functional sewing pattern.
C: That would be fun as heck.
M: That would be fun collaboration.
C: That, oh my God. And then we could put the--
M: And then it would be a Free Soft Wear pattern.
C: Yeah, and it can have the Free Soft Wear tag sticking off the edge of it. For the ones that you make. Oh my gosh. That would be fun.
M: Okay guys, we don't have a lot of free time, but if we can find the time.
C: [sighs] Wouldn't it be nice?
M: It would be, it would be fun. Okay, so with that very ambitious goal for 2024.
C: Well, yeah, are we at the wrap up?
M: I think we're at the wrap up. Yeah.
C: Then I just want to say Blender developers, we love you! Blender artists, We love you! We're, I know I'm a big fangirl of all the Blender things, but like. It's so cool to see a piece of software that has evolved so much like this. as free and open source software.
M: And again, the, the interplay between free and open source software and free culture at Blender is something that like I've--
C: It's unparalleled.
M: I can't, I cannot think of another example where you have free software and free culture working so seamlessly together like that.
C: Oh, and before we wrap up this episode. I strongly recommend all of our audience watches Wing It.
M: Oh, yes.
C: Which is the latest Blender open movie short about.
M: Is it still the latest?
C: It's still the latest at the moment--hopefully this is edited and out while it's still the latest. It's of this cat and dog, which is kind of a metaphor for the cat being the developers and the dog being the artists like in Blender-land. And then there's a whole set of production log videos that talks about, that walks through the process that film being made. And then it turns out there were two different--I talked to Francesco at FOSDEM about this. It turns out there's two different directors handling these different series. The production logs one is done by one filmmaker. And then there is a different filmmaker who's doing the BlenderHeads ones and both of these videos are so fun to watch. Morgan and I, like we watch videos sometimes during lunch together. You know, you're just eating lunch, you might as well watch either music videos or, you know, maybe tutorials. And, they're so much fun. And also it's just a really funny take on the, um, I guess the artist and the developer working side by side.
M: Yeah.
C: But, more importantly, gotta wrap up on the thank you Blender in all of its different facets. Both as software. Can you thank software? I don't know.
M: You can thank developers for making software.
C: The developers, the people doing the organization and also the many artists in the community that have made a piece of software that is maybe, I mean, people on here probably think emacs is my favorite software, but actually probably Blender is my favorite software. It just only has one mistake. It's scripting language is not a Lisp. Somebody needs to fix that. Anyway, that's it. That's it for this episode. Thank you, everybody.
M: Thanks, bye.
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C: Foss and Crafts is released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International License.
M: It's hosted by Morgan Lemmer-Webber and Christine Lemmer-Webber.
C: The intro music is composed by Christine Lemmer-Webber (meaning myself), in MilkyTracker, and it's released under the same license as the show.
M: The outro music is Enchanted Tiki 86, composed by Alex Smith of the Cynic Project, and is waived into the public domain under CC0 1.0. See https://CynicMusic.com for more information.
C: You can get in contact with us on the Fediverse, @FossAndCrafts@octodon.social, on Twitter as @FossAndCrafts, or you can email us at podcast@fossandcrafts.org.
M: We also have a chat room. Join our community on #fossandcrafts on irc.libera.chat.
C: If you'd like to support the show, you can donate at https://patreon.com/FossAndCrafts.
M: That's it for this week.
C: Until next time, stay free.
M: And stay crafty.
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C: That's right. Umm [Coughing] Ugh, gross.
M: [Laughs]
C: Disgusting. A, sorry for being a steamroller. B, sorry for those horrible noises that just came out of my mouth. C, I'll answer your question after taking another sip of tea. There's no more tea left. Oh no! Seltzer, there's seltzer.