Green team
Download the movie

Red team
Download the movie

    

   

 

Five days have already gone by and the first TOSMI is near its end. But hold on tight, although its near its end, its far from over, just read how hectic it has been for the last 3 days.

Animation
Theodore started Wednesday morning with the hard task of getting the trainees to go from basic or no experience in animation to actually animate something and understand the concept behind it.

Our setup was to have a first introduction to animation, covering the basics and then repeat the same steps but this time covering the more complex aspects of animation.

Theodore messed a bit with the array modifier and most of them were thrilled when playing with it. We could see it in their faces, they just loved what they were doing and many of them showed a big imagination.

I was quite thrilled with the results, (again) we got amazed at how fast our trainees could pick up the theory and apply it to practice. They had alot of time for practicing and although they wanted to stay longer after the training it was impossible because we had to attend to another event called Upgrade.

Upgrade! Sofia
We had to pack ourselfs after the training to get to another facility close by where we would present the work done in TOSMI, talk a bit about ourselfs and actually show (quickly) how Blender works.

When we arrived at the small amphitheater there was still no one inside and we were able to set things up and get ready.
Our thought was that this would be something small with 10 to 20 people audience, at most, but many more came.

After showing our work on TOSMI we asked for the audience to ask for something they would like us to show in Blender. The answer was a Character, specially the monkey we talked so much about.
At this point Sanu just load Blender and in five minutes he had a low poly version of the monkey head done. Everyone was just amazed with it and Sanu thanked the crowed with his cool Indian accent.

The event finished and we got to talk to some of the audience and see their reactions. I was blown away when this guy comes to me saying that he works for Ubisoft and how he loved our presentation and Blender itself, and that he would definitely get into the game-engine to see how it works, so that he could improve it.

Sofia so far has been the place of surprises, who would have guessed ….

Materials, textures and the Gimp
Another day, another session, this time Sanu explained materials, textures, uv-mapping and how to unwrap a mesh.
Of course, this couldn’t finish without our good old friend GIMP. Sanu explained how you could use GIMP, how it differs from Photoshop and its interface.

Half of the afternoon was mine, I had the time to show the first session on Compositing, explaining the concept behind 3D compositing with Render Layers and Passes and also covering the nodes window, how it works and some examples.

We were really tired at the end of this fourth day and couldn’t wait to get to bed. The Upgrade event and all the work started to drain our batteries, but there was still alot to come.

Audio and Video Editing
At a more advanced stage now, the trainees got their first feeling with audio editing, using Ardour and JACK. I consider it one of the most funny session we had so far.
The main subject was foley, grabbing ordinary house equipment and just make it sound like something else.

In our animation we have a car moving across town, so we needed to get the sound of a car engine working, with this said, a vacuum cleaner provided us with enough audio we could play with.

After loading everything into Ardour and also using JAMIN for some tweaking we got the sound of a car that appeared like a ferrari, everyone laughed a lot with this and it helped us keeping the moral up.

In the afternoon was time for some video editing where I showed the Blender Sequencer and Theodore showed Cinelerra. Most of the trainees didn’t really like Cinelerra because it was clumsy, heavy and also buggy …

First conclusions
Our first conclusion so far is that perhaps Cinelerra shouldn’t be part of our training, no one really liked it and even Jahshaka seems more stable and a better option at this point.

The second day of TOSMI ended and we are really happy about how things are evolving, not only are the trainees catching up but they are also enthusiastic about it, we can surely say they are more motivated then we anticipated.

But lets go back a little and talk about the first day of training.

The trainees
Everyone arrived safely and all 14 trainees showed up as expected. Some of them from Germany, others from Greece, UK and of course Bulgaria.
All of them with a different artistic background. From directors to students, all want to learn Open Source Multimedia Instruments.

The group is composed by 11 men and 3 women, which is quite nice considering that the OSS creative industry is mostly driven by men, we were excited to have this balance.

They all got well with each others and the moral was high.

Getting to know Open Source Software (OSS)
Vladimir was our first trainer, his task was to get the trainees aware of OSS and to dismiss some of the bad myths usually associated with Open Source. He gave a little bit of a history lesson on OSS and went forward with a show on how to use Linux and how it differs from other Operating Systems (OS).

Vlado (as we call him) was really funny when presenting the subjects and quite emotive with it, this really helped the trainees to relax a bit.

During the afternoon we screened Elephants Dream and then it was time for Peshka to show the command line. At that time all the trainees felt strange since they didn’t knew why we were showing them the command line on a Multimedia Training, but this is an essential tool when using linux and we decided that they should get acquainted with it.

Our training approach
Well, TOSMI is not a classic training like you have when you go to an Institute or similar to learn CG.

We decided to focus specially on the balance between theory and practice, so we setup a 50%-50% weight on both.
This is really important in our case, we have a 7 days intensive training where we want everyone to end the training knowing how to use the tools and have the foundations on how to properly do things.

Our approach is to have the trainees learning theory in the morning and practice during the whole afternoon. So far it has shown to be a good approach and everyone is feeling even more motivated, because they get to use things and mess around with it. And to avoid a big overhead in just one of the trainers, during the practice sessions all the trainers wonder around helping everyone.

After the first day ended we were quite excited because everyone was really happy and eager to learn, so we couldn’t wait for the next day.

The teams
Since its just a 7 days training we needed to keep everyone focused and motivated during the whole training, so we decided to spice things up a little bit and create sort of a competition between them.

For this to work out nicely we set up two teams, red and green, then split them in 7 people per team. We even went further and got each team in a different room so they can work as an isolated team and compete with each others in a healthy manner.

But this wouldn’t work well without a project leader, so we nominated a project leader in each team that coordinates the team effort. Everyone got excited with the idea and it went perfectly.

The Blender interface and modeling
Sanu was our second day speaker, he started the day showing Blenders Interface and the paradigm behind it, to lay the foundation basis for the trainees to understand things.

He then moved slowly to modeling and allowed the trainees to do a bit of practicing with each of the subjects so they could get used to the software.

Practicing
The afternoon was the practicing session, all of the trainers were there.
Trainees started by doing a lamp model, all had the freedom to do any kind of lamp they wanted, this was just a quick exercice for them to get into modeling before their next bigger task.

While the first task was an individual task, the second task was drawn as a team task, each team had a list of models they needed to do, this list was delivered to the project coordinators and they had to setup a small pipeline for finishing the job in the next 3 hours. With our supervision they were able to start things going quickly.

By the end of the training all of them had finished their models and had really cool things to show, we expected them to do some nice things but the end results really surprised us, they were much better then we anticipated.

Staying after hours
The motivation was so high that half of the trainees decided to stay after the 8 hour long training session had finished, just to improve their models or ask for some guidance on how to fix some issues with their models.

Again everything went better then we expected and everyone is really eager for the next day to arrive. We are glad to be able to exceed our own expectations so far and we thank the trainees for all of their motivation.

 

The training for the second day is finished and we are very happy and enthusiastic about the training team and the trainees, because the rythm here is really intensive. The trainees are from Bulgaria, Esthonia, Greece, Germany so the multi cultural environment is a given. Most of the participants are really enthusiastic about learning 3d (since more than half of them do not have any experience in ANY 3d program, not just blender) and today Sanu Mana, the trainer from India managed to take them from novices to a median level where the could complete a simple or complex task accuratelly. Even thought character modelling was not on the menu today, 80% of the tasks were pretty much complete, and ready for materials and texturing.

Stay tuned, as tomorrow the training program is devoted in deformations, rigging and animation, from basic setups to advanced scenes.

 

We are in Bulgaria for the first training session which started yesterday. We have a full session with all trainee seats covered and work from 24/7 to make this session a success!

We have set up the training process as a series of lectures and practical tasks on producing a small animation with a 30sec duration. We have set up everything in the production pipeline beforehand so as to let the trainees focus on learning the tools without worrying about actually producing everything themselves. The trainees are divided in two teams and in each of the sessions the files and production material of the best team is going to be elected for use in the next session. For example the best models from each team are going to be used by both teams in the texturing sessions. In case none of the teams manages to complete something for a session then they will work with the models etc we have setup before hand for that purpose. With such a setup every trainee is getting exposed to different parts of a pipeline and focusing in each one rather thanstopping at lighting because of problems in modelling.

Until we have the first seconds of animaton ready take a sneak at the walk cycle of one of the characters from the production: our beloved girafe, in a polygon version

Wednesday, May, 16th, 2007
Cammer Hall, National Theatre of Satire “Aleko Konstantinov”, 26 Stefan Karadja Street
19:00

Focus on: Blender & Open Source Communities

An evening of three presentations. Three professionals from three different countries with long experience in 3D graphics and open source software and communities. Three points of view: Why is Blender one of most successfull open source projects in multimedia?

Presenters:

The point of view of a developer:
Rui Campos (Portugal) - Head of the Blender Foundation Education Board. Developer and Trainer of an e-learning platform for internal use. NewsForge writer.

The point of view of a 3D game designer:
Sanu Vamanchery Mana (India) - 8 years of experience in the broadcast, gaming and web Industry. Thorough knowledge of 3D Max and Maya’s capabilities. Skilled modeler, excellent lighting, dynamic procedural texturing, compositing, keying and mattes, motion tracking and
rotoscoping.

The point of view of an architect:
Theodore Dounas (Greece) – Research in architectural design and threedimentional computer games Phd candidate. Teaching of architectural design in Intergraphics College, Intergeraphics educational group - www.intergraphics.gr
Teaching of computer aided design for architects and designers, in educational organization Papiotis.

The presenters are official trianers at the TOSMI (training on open-source multimedia instruments) organized by InterSpace and supported by the MEDIA programme of the European Commission.

theupgrade.i-space.org
tosmi.i-space.org
slovo.bg/satirata/
blender.cult.bg
intergraphics.gr