To the Christmas and you can just open them and take the chocolate out of the box So we've designed the website which was quite similar to this idea So each for me furniture you could just take from the website and rotate it and just see it and Though the choco is from chocolate and for is for furniture furniture, so and The project was abandoned very quickly But the name was like stayed in my head for a long time We were also Maybe I can show it we were also creating this No textures that come website and I was always confusing the names I was always calling this website choco for so that's why I thought oh, yeah Let's just keep using this name for the blender site and About this website. It's actually not working to be honest This is the website where we wanted to sell some of the textures We were creating as a team, but right now all of the textures to see here Or maybe most of them I would say are shared through The chocolate for store Which is under store chocolate for calm here in the free sections you have Sorry in the shaders of all the different Categories, let's check concrete for example So all of all of those shaders are available for free. You can download them after logging in to chocolate for account and All of the textures. Sorry. I just clicked something all of the textures are shared under the CC zero License so you can base it's like I would say they are open source textures So so you can you can just buy like download all of them all of the stuff you you find here and Use them in your projects use them in your scenes use them I don't know you can even sell the textures themselves if you want If you yeah, if you want And yeah, so if since we were speaking about it. This is the bricks a Section which which was added a few weeks few yeah This previous month so all the textures are also created with the new micro displacement feature in mind and Same thing you can just download them for free and use them with CC zero license So they are open source basically you can use them in your projects some of the textures I don't think the bricks but most of the textures are also available through blender cloud So if you you have an account there you can also use them this way Do Yeah, I think that's quite a long explanation for the name Sorry Yeah, if someone else would ask like to ask anything do you develop furniture? You create furniture That was the idea a few years ago, but in the end We've ended up doing a 3d furniture, but also not our designs some of the designs that are wide of available on the market So we are doing 3d representation. We don't stick to a certain brands like we only do Three companies who we which we like we just pick Different furnishings we find interesting because Me and my friends I work with we most of us have the architectural education So we are also kind of in this Industry for a longer time than I'm just using blender and This all mixes all together Personally, what is the most difficult thing to you when you are trying to model furnitures? What is the advantages there the worst thing is finding references? complete references for example Sorry for this product placement all the time, but it's I mean these are the examples I can Talk about Experiencing everything myself. So for example creating those windows Windows and doors models It was real pain because finding a correct references. I know there are many manufacturers on the market who provide the technical drawings and stuff but Finding a complete reference because I'm also not modeling all the stuff myself. I would say 90% of this of the models aren't modeled by me right now But to create For example when I send when I need a model like this I send a briefing to the people I work with mostly online and I need to describe this model Right, so I need to find the correct references. I need to make a descriptions For example, don't model all this stuff inside the window because we won't see it and it will increase the polycount to 1 billion so we don't need it but You try to combine all those little elements all together and create a nice briefing and In the end receive a model like this. It's I would say it's 50% of my work so In terms of modeling, this is the biggest issue. I would say Finding a references finding correct materials Combining them all together making a nice brief but speaking of myself if I would have to answer the question What's the biggest problem? with model like that was the question for me When I model furniture, I Would personally say furniture Aren't this hard to model? perhaps Or maybe the other category I Would say the sofas could be the most difficult because of the details you have to add and So all those wrinkles you see You could try using bump mapping and Right now we could try using the displacement modifiers and shader features, but I think it's quite hard to do it using the Textures so you always I mean always we always just model it and the hardest thing is finding a proper balance between adding enough detail not having the meshes too heavy and Finding the proper quality so so finding this balance because for example if you create a model like this and Someone wants to use it in a super close-up picture Then you have this issue. Yeah, not everything might look super nice, but When you add too many details and then you use those models only on the like second plan or a third plan on the picture It's Way too heavy. So finding a proper balance is also an issue and The modeling of those kind of wrinkles isn't this hard in my opinion when you go to the website and to the quick tips Category there is a wrinkle modeling tutorial Explain on this kind of a model which you can also download for free Yeah, I'm using those slideshows. Everything is quite Clear I would say thanks to the knife tool Right now which which is working really really nice right now in my opinion Yeah, we have two more minutes and I really hope this mic is gonna work related to that so Never did you ever use or? For the need to use baking and I put an iPolly and a lower poly even if it's not for real time or Or never out how often if ever Did you bake down the details like these creases or other details to? So if I understood correctly your question is Did I ever or how often do we create a high poly models? Sculpt them for example and then downgrade to lower poly never Never we Yeah, the thing is we only have one hour So if I would like to explain all the modeling processes we use and the shading I think even three hours wouldn't be enough, but our base approach to modeling is Having the models Subdivision ready I would say so for every model when you apply sub the subdivision surface modifier It gives you this little bit a bit more dense mesh So all the details that might be not visible At first when you add the sub the sub device surface modifier, they kind of kind of pop out and With this one modifier you can have this basic control over the mesh density So for example if I have a nicely detailed model and I but I just keep it in the background I can disable the modifier and all the details are gone But the the shape is more or less the same And we just do it by let's call it poly modeling. So we just do it by hand I would say with Traditional modeling techniques no sculpting involved For some of the models we I must I must admit we use marvelous designer. So it's a software which is made like exclusively for modeling Fabrics and and this kind of stuff, but I would say we know we don't do furnishings with with this Maybe maybe the beds I think on the website were made Yeah, I think the beds were made using marvelous designer and it's also not because blender can't do it. I Would just say there are some tools more efficient at work at certain areas that blender and If you if you want to you can even hand-paint textures all all in blender, but why Why would you do it if you can use to the applications, right? You can do it, of course Yeah, okay Can you give me one minute, maybe I will just ask if the mic will be working or not. Do they both work? Okay So Yeah, we can start. Hi everyone Thanks for coming and I really hope you're gonna enjoy my one-hour workshop I would like to talk a lot, but I also think it would be very nice if we could have Let's call it a conversation. So you ask questions I answer them because I get quite a lot of questions online about various things not only blender related but Blender and let's call it business related questions about freelancing and stuff. So I'm open to all of them if you have any So I would like to Start my and I Hope it's not I hope you won't be mad at me if I use just the chrome for presenting some of the stuff Because it's just way faster and crash-proof so I would like to start with a small animation I created last year and Let's hope it works isn't I created this animation a year ago was I really wanted to show Some people what's actually possible in a free 3d software using completely free freely available models today because in my opinion I work in a professional industry I can say Really a lot of people Isn't aware of what's actually possible in blender today because they are this they they touched the blender five or six years ago while it was still in 2 Point for whatever face and Yeah, that's the only thing they know about Blender up until today So I've created this animation to show show it to my colleagues show it to some other people from the industry That you can actually do it spending zero zero money on software zero money on assets and Why I found is important is because I was using like first of all The blender is an amazing tool which I had this conversation during this conference Which I would also use if it was paid because very often people say oh, yeah It's a nice free tool, right? But I would really pay for blender nowadays if it was commercial commercial software, right? I'm not using it because it's free. I'm using it because it's really the best tool for the things I create commercially for many years right now and This is the the standpoint of my presentation because I think in a difference to many people I started using blender not as a hobby's not as a Something of interest. I was just studying architecture and I needed a tool to visualize my projects and I don't know how the architectural market work looks in other countries But in Poland I found it way more profitable to do Visualizations and CG graphics later on instead of architecture But I still find the studies very interesting and it's that's very Well funny and interesting that many people with architect architectural background they they later migrate to CG industry to VFX industry to other Automotive industries and so on so My website. I'm also sharing Sorry, sorry for this product placement. It's really not my intention to do it But I just have all those slides embedded to the websites. I really hope you forgive me that So on this slide shows I just wanted to quickly show the the stuff I create in blender and The most fascinating thing for me is the cycles Features which were already there in 2011 We all we often think like yeah until we got the micro displacement and volumetrics and Subdivisions surface scattering. It wasn't a professional tool, right? But I think that's that's a well That's not a correct thinking It really depends of what you can do with the tool and not what the tool actually necessarily has from the very beginning So maybe I will show a few more works and Oh, yeah, of course, I will just repeat it maybe It really depends so I will repeat the questions if I look for references when I'm creating my work, right? That's the question For example the pictures you see here Those two they are crossed. So I hope you can imagine the look more or less These are commercially based projects. So very often I Receive some references from the clients and they say yeah, I want to have an interior in this style or in this style So I just kind of try adapting to this Approach they they are kind of forcing on me, but very often I Of course create my own kind of interiors if I can just show one There is a one scene on my store, which I basically created myself and I wasn't even having any references for this one and I'm really honest on that and I don't know. I think some of the Some of the thoughts some of the inspirations that may have on the projects just Come from from the general knowledge you may have in this certain area. So for example, if you Just watch the architectural pictures for five years for ten years You just kind of get saturated with it with it and sometimes it just comes by itself. I would say But I personally like you can see this picture this furnishing this let's say style is Quite I would say Distinct so you can say this is definitely not a Scandinavian or A rustic interior, right and This is more or less the style. I personally like this is the interior the imagery the the architectural style I just like and Yeah, maybe this is I just remember those kind of references and pictures. I like which are appealing to me and I just Later recreate them. I think this is the answer But very often the references Just come from the clients sometimes some clients just say yeah, do it make it nice So I just I just do it the way I find nice and it to be honest it usually Gets there. I would say eight out of ten times Yeah, so I Would just very quickly say why did I even started this this website and in the store? the Main reason was since I have this commercial approach to blender. I really was lacking the assets Available for it. So and I of course know you can always Buy or download models made for other software, but you always have to convert them and always have to go through this Troublesome process which gets really troublesome when you have projects.  I would say so that's why I gradually started creating this database Mostly just for testing to be honest as I as I explained the the websites that the names like backstory Before we started so we we were thinking with a few friends of doing a website where we would just share our own Design ideas and we came up with this website idea of those little Advanced calendar thing where you have those little windows in December I don't know if it's in your country and you just open those little chocolate windows and you eat them, of course So we had this choco chocolate for furnishing ideas. So we could just Play with those little furnishings, but it didn't work out But the name stayed because it was very catchy. I would I would say So yeah, the main reason of creating the website was the simply the lack of professionally made assets and I have I've been working at Evermotion Company. Perhaps some of you know it. It's a Big Developer of 3d assets for 3s max. Hi guys, if you're watching Maybe Yeah, so I would say I had a quite solid background as well in that field And I just started doing it and it I'm doing it up until today up until now and I would like to know Ah Smoothly switch to the making process of those little pictures you see here So these are I call them a pack shot renderings. These are the renderings you can very often see in a Furniture catalogs or even in the in your local shopping malls sometimes when they advertise the food and stuff So it's usually a product shoot on the white Background so it easily blends with the layout of the newspaper or a website or a catalog and Yeah, I really hope you In my opinion, there is no rocket science behind it, but there are some things I would really like to talk about quickly and Yeah, and just show you the entire process. So I'll be taking the Unfinished model placing it in the scene creating it from the scratch and just Hopefully having a final renderer by the end of the presentation Let me just see if I didn't miss anything Yeah, and if during this process I skip something because you know When you work sometimes you just do things you don't find them hard for others So if I just skip something just wave your hand and we can I hopefully will be able to explain it So yeah, by the way, you can see my blender layout is a bit different to the default ones So I have a The main 3d screen here additional screen here just to help me out with camera navigation To the layout here and know the editor in here and just some buttons and basic stuff here. So Yeah, let's let's get started if you have any questions. Just just ask them Maybe before we go. Okay, so I guess we're good. Oh, yeah, maybe before we go. I will just show you quickly Because obviously when I'm creating those huge amounts of renderings, I'm not creating the studio from the scratch So, oh, yeah, and by the way this whole presentation. I would say in a nutshell is Available to download from from the website. It's not everything I'm saying of course But I would say the most important steps you would have to take to create those kind of renderings some things You have to pay attention to Yeah So if you if you just go to chocofour.com There's a my account thing which a lot of people complain about because it sometimes doesn't work and I I get it It's all very rough roughly made, but I'm not an IT guy. Unfortunately. Yeah, so when you log in there is a Whole list of free free available stuff and there's a blender conference folder where you can download the PDF Yeah, so repeating a question the models look nice and They seem expensive to produce and if there are enough sales or is the business even Profitable right is this whole idea even making sense? I would say it didn't for It didn't until I started committing myself to it So for a well to say for two and a half years I was just doing it as a side job more or less. So I had some assets I had to create myself. I was just putting them online as many people do But it was a side job. I would say but last year for several reasons I decided to spend a little bit more time on the website and everything and this year I really decided to commit and I would say it makes sense at least so yeah If if that explains the question. Yeah, so be let me just see okay So before we move I will maybe just show you the the basic studio I use It's really nothing in my opinion fancy That's it a little bit different layout, but you Hopefully get the idea. So there is a additional navigation window I have here There's a main window where I place the models and do the composition and there is just the color Shader adjustment window because I I don't know how to do it right now. I'm just too focused Sorry Yeah, I really hope it's visible on the stream, right Yeah, so anyway let's just start I Usually just start with a simple very simple plane and that's it But that's definitely not all if I would have to recreate the studio I just showed you I would start with a plane like this and Add Shader library I've created which is also available online. I won't be focusing on that on that right now So it's a chocofour node groups. I Just put it somewhere under the big plane Which is the center of the scene and yeah, this allows me to this gives me a quick access to all the shader group groups I use and Thanks Bartek for a very nice introduction to the What's behind all of this to the whole science behind it? Because I would I wouldn't be able to do it, but yeah, I've created a For example as Bartek was showing you you can build your shaders using the certain attributes like reflectivity color diffuse transparency whatsoever and you just I In my opinion, this is the best feature of cycles because it really show it's really very similar to the traditional Creating process when you're drawing for example when you draw you focus on the shape at first Then you focus on the color and then you when you see the reflections you just add them And this is very similar to how cycles works so I just create the basic color and I add just the Just the diffuse node right later when I see okay, there are some reflections visible then I create the Glossy node then I start combining them and making the picture You know realistic or whichever effect I want to achieve So yeah, but getting back to the studio. I start with those two very basic planes and Then of course, I just add the camera No, and this is the first mistake I made actually I just I always try keeping the camera to those Global axis so it's always rotated especially in the X or Y axis So it always keeps the 90% degree and I will explain that in a second I very quickly change the render resolution to let's say 1200 so I have this square Layout and You can of course use the other resolutions, but this is what I start with and yeah Just just very roughly drop the camera somewhere So I have the basic view of the scene and then I import the model and We will be using a model which is not available online yet so I really Ensure you this is the It's happening live so Yeah, the first thing I think is really important to mention at this stage is the object scale you have in your scenes and very often I Kind of understand it is very often easy to forget about it when you're working when you're in a rush So you just start adding the objects sticking them together and in the end you have the everything is made in kilometers for example It might not be an issue and it probably usually isn't but let me just show you the very basic Example for example you create a plane For some reason you just scale it up and then you add Solidify modifier So you add some values to it. Maybe that's not the way yeah and Somewhere during the process you apply the scale the actual scale to the model and then all of a sudden all the settings you might have Done here Let's say also with the displacement modifier. Everything's gone and you don't know what happened and The reason for that is because we we just very often omit the the importance of using correct scale and and Units in the scenes so what I To me It's also a very practical thing to do because I really want the models to work as fast as possible when I really need them So for example when I import a chair to the scene, I don't really want to have this huge Blob appearing out of nowhere, so I really would expect it to behave like a real chair So the yeah the the main reason the the basic thing you can do is just using the units In your scenes which are found under the scene settings And I'm just using the traditional metric scale And This chair actually looks pretty pretty well made So I would say the this element is usually somewhere around 40 centimeters. I also don't do it like super Precise because very often Even if the objects are in a correct scale you have to you know scale them up and down slightly so they maybe look better or worse but It's I think you know what I'm talking about. It's just good to keep the things in a correct scales, so After scaling up or down the model. I just apply the scale sorry So I use control a shortcut there. We have this apply and all different different options here, so it's a I Always choose rotation and scale and what it does What it does it it makes all those modifiers predictable all the Particle systems and simulations predictable and for example when we rotate the object Just just to give you the very clear example of how it works When we change to the normal orientation Then I have all my navigation axis Following the rotation of the object But let's say when I apply the rotation then it zeros all the Coordinances which were all the transformation which was applied to the object So right now Blender reads this object like yeah, this is the zero rotation zero scale zero everything. I Know it sounds Unnecessary maybe but it's quite important. I would say Yeah, so let's just get back to the chair we start with a very simple camera and And I will make this wrong at first so later on we can compare the correct Camera work I would say with Incorrect one so very often and this comes quite naturally when we would take a picture of something We would just stand up point the camera like this and just shoot the picture and this is what most of people Do in Blender as well? So yeah, I'm just pointing to my picture if someone read a Bit about composition. He knows. Yeah, you could use this rule of thirds. So let's let's use this Here in Blender. We have those composition settings or guides and yeah, let's just Maybe even do it like this. I could say it's done, right? Yeah, so let's just keep it because very often You see those kind of pictures, right? So I want to have my object in the center. I want to have it fully shown Voila But I think there is really Much more attention has to be put to the camera work when especially when doing packed shot renders So I will just duplicate this camera Clear the rotation and start once again So first thing I would say it's really essential to doing a nice packed shot renderings is using way higher focal length Value I would say 50 is like them the minimum you should use and What I personally use very often is at least 80. So This might require you to move the camera away off the the screen and the reason for using the higher lens values is that it it it just Negates all the perspective this this distortion you could you normally have with a wider lens with Yeah, wider lenses for example if I move the camera Close to the object here. I still have it in the in the full view But you see in those vertical lines This this whole model gets kind of you know distorted and that's that's really not good When you want to show your product to the or when the customer wants to show the product to someone because he wants to show the product as it's actually Viewed in real life and those kind of lenses don't help us with with with this process. So First thing I would say is using way Higher focal length value. The second thing I would really Recommend doing is instead of rotating the camera in x axis. I Would recommend using the shift lens shift values. So what it basically does it? The best way to explain it I would say is when I move camera Off of the screen you still can see the chair, right? And for example, I Move the camera like this And I really like the way the chair looks here in this in this actual View right but but my my camera is rendering this blank space So how can I make this actual chair appearing here in the middle of my camera? And that's why we use those for that we can use those lens values. So for example, I move Come on and never update Because it's so unpredictable you updated day before the conference and then you open your laptop and Yeah, so first thing I Would say are using the lens shift values not necessarily for the X Axis but definitely for y axis because again when we rotate the camera when we rotate the camera It also distorts the the way the model is presented Sometimes you can use a little bit of rotation in the x-axis, but I would really like wouldn't go To too far with it. So doing something like this and let's say I want to show more of the seat I Would definitely Decrease the value and just move camera upwards. So now it shows I can even extend like over show this effect to you So yeah, and this in this particular case. I will just use oops those values Zoomed camera a little bit closer and I would say in terms of camera camera settings. That's it for this particular scene What's also quite quite important at least Is the way you you you show the model so You could you could think like this kind of presentation is right, but from my experience Why why not show this nice leg element what which is behind those elements Why why would I cover an interesting parts of the model with the other parts of the model? And with this very simple trick I can trick right I can just show more of the model. I'm presenting, you know So it's really and it happens very often when people just present their stuff and They just don't emphasize all the amazing things that are happening to their To the thing they they spend so much time modeling and they just Don't emphasize it and it's not about em emphasizing it in here. It's just about show, you know showing All I can about the model So for example, it would be nice to show those parts a little bit more But maybe the seats should be a bit more visible it and yeah, and here you just on this stage you just play and and I Don't know if there are any Advices I could give you just have to Do it till it's good. I would say Remembering those very basic principles so not covering the back elements with the front elements and Keeping the camera settings So they don't so the perspective is not distorting the model And yeah, and the rule of thirds also helps you in that I would say because it helps you keeping the the correct composition of the the entire picture So yeah, I've spent quite a lot of time talking about camera, but I think it's really important because now when you compare When we compare this camera work to this camera I think the difference is It's quite obvious, right? I think this picture just looks More pleasant in my opinion. It's a little bit more technical, but it's also showing the model in its fullness So when I come back to the Perspective view when I see the chair when I can rotate it I more or less get the idea of the shape, but when I have just one picture. I really need to show The most of the shape. I'm actually able to view in 3d. So I hope it's I Hope you follow Yeah, there is also one bug I've noticed in the model before I brought it here as you can see there is Small offset in the geometry. So I have to fix it quickly Before we move to the shading Or maybe before we move to the shading, I will talk a little bit more about the the scene illumination itself So when we just press shift z button right now, we have this very basic illumination and to be honest I very often I've very often seen Renders in professional catalogs, which have more or less the quality you're seeing right now Which is quite striking because in blender. How much time did we spend right now on this five minutes? Maybe of the actual work without explanations and and my talking so I guess that's a Something you should really remember because those kind of pictures you can make actual commercial projects creating this kind of stuff And it really takes not this much time to do in blender. I would say it just takes a few minutes So the basic illumination of the scene I'm using is just the white Background without anything added. I also Just to make sure if if we have no difference between yeah So in order to negate this color difference here I just create the very very basic shader for the ground plane, which is also fully white Which is I know It's not physically correct as many people say but In this environment, which is artificial anyway, we can we can use it this way So before I move to shading I The problem with uh having a nice reflections in this kind of scene is the The white nature of the entire environment So I I have to cheat a little bit And I'm tweaking my My environment light settings a little bit And I will very quickly show you what I want to achieve I will add an environment texture Oh, sorry. I just edited the material Yeah, so in my production pipeline, let's say I'm using a real real-life Studio hdrr map So this map was uh, this hdri map was shot in the actual photo studio with the real equipment Established around the the object and very often I I'm When I do some preview renders for myself, I I just use this kind of a setup So I have those nice shadows cast by the real-life equipment Yeah, and that's it. But in the production Environment, I need to keep this white background thing So I can't just later photoshop all the details from the picture all the shadows. So it's white and bright and To do it. I'm using this very little hack Which is also explained on my website and I If some of you saw it already I just Apologize, but so I basically mix two background notes And one of them will have this texture attached to it The thing I would like to achieve is having this nice environment visible in the reflections only So to show it a little bit more in a bit more obvious way I will Create a susanne Add a very basic glossy shader When I get back to my hdr a I always This name is so hard You know what I'm talking about. So you now you see those nice reflections appearing on the surface and In order to keep both the white background and the reflections I'm using this little hack where I have two background notes. One of them has the texture applied And I'm just adding the Um white path note Which might be quite confusing but the way I understand it is Here we mix two things just make this one or this one. I always have problem Finding which one of them works just make one of those visible to the reflection to the reflections only So we use the glossy input here Yeah, it's it's not working. But when I switch those two pins, then voila, we have this nice cheat but That's the only way to have a nice reflections in this kind of white environment. So this is something I use And in order to rotate this texture so we can point the reflections light reflection lights a little bit more I'm just adding the very basic setup here. So it's textured coordinate node And vector mapping So then using this value here, we can rotate the The sphere around the model say we set 90 degrees Just really need to keep keep my timing So let's get back to our chair and now even though it's not visible I'm pretty sure when I start adding or adjusting my shaders the reflection is going to work nice on here And yeah, let's let's move to the materials. So I as I showed you on the very beginning I've added this Plane here. So I have all of my nodes set up ready to go So the whole process is way faster than creating the nodes by myself every single time I I import a new model Let's do it very quickly right now. So For making this wooden material, I will I I personally always start with creating this very basic shader which is Diffuse mixed with glossy the way Bartek showed you already mixing them together And plugging yes, and I here I have to pause for a second Because uh, this is a very like to me. It's a very common bug. I don't it's a feature Not a bug Um, I I guess there is a science behind it Um, but I want to show you one thing uh physically speaking there is There isn't something like I'm creating right now. So surface which is Which doesn't have any thickness, but it exists, right? Something everything around us has to have any thickness some thickness At least one atom of thickness or whatever, but in 3d world we we can't we kind of Cannot we don't have to do it as as in a real world So for example when we have model like that and when you have the double-sided feature disabled you can see Blender needs to know uh, if I have an object like this, what's the front and what's the back of the object? So in the viewport this it's very easily Visualized by having those back kind of faces darkened and the front faces brightened, right All all makes sense all works good until Until we we start adding a Fresnel here So let's say we want to mix this color diffuse attribute of the material with the reflectivity we add let's say Yeah, for now And it seems to be working fine when we view the model from the Let's call it positive normal side, but when we move back then Then we see some strange things happening here It all disappears when we use this Solidify modifier So we have all faces kind of pointing outwards. They are they are all positive So to speak they have no negative values, but as soon as we remove it Then we have all those strange things happening and you might be thinking Yeah, so let's just use solidify modifiers and that's it But when you have three models for example, which have lots of leaves and usually you create leaves Just by using a simple plane because there Yeah, it's the best way to do it the fastest way to do it Then you might have this problem with this incorrect reflections on your leaves And what I found out basically By mistake one day is when you use the layer weight node It has those two features Two to outputs for now and facing. So when you use the facing node here It always works no matter if you're Pointing on the negative normal Normals of the geometry or on the positive normal. So that's Yeah, one thing I really wanted to mention because it's a For some reason a lot a lot of people doesn't know about it So that's why in my shader. I'm using the facing node and if you if you pay the attention to the Bartek's presentation He showed those very nice Curved graphs So what I'm doing here is kind of a Yeah No, I I just deleted the plane, but it doesn't work Yeah, the question was if I use the fernell output in this node Doesn't it work like the facing? So is the bug produced with this? Output as well and it is I know there is a science behind because it's a negative value and and so on if yeah There is a question Yeah, so this is what I actually understood. So that's why I said there is a science behind it So when we have the negative values of the when we have the negative normals Everything works as it should it just Needs a different shader. So I know. Yeah, I'm calling it a bug. I know it's not a bug It's a feature literally Just to make it more easier in a production environment. I'm just using the facing output here, which is not physically correct, but When you apply this curve here and to explain What this curve actually does I? Um, I very quickly Will link to my website So the fernell thing as it was explained Simulates this effect you can see here. So on the edges of the Geometry you have this little reflections when you And I have the node setups here So when the curve is very flat in this area, it makes the middle of the object Basically a color right when the curve gets a little bit up and upper We get way more reflections here and what's very important in my opinion is having this little Offset in here So the curve never touches the zero point because there there isn't such a situation when Working that on the object. There is no reflection and this is this is what happens when we just Connect the facing node like this. This is exactly what happens when we have this A 90 degree view on the geometry. There's absolutely no reflection, which is not correct So what I what I very quickly Want to show you is no I just create this kind of a flat curve With a few few points So it more or less simulates the reflections. I know it's way from physical correctness, but But it looks nice And it works throughout the projects and that's the most important thing I would say What I'm just trying to do here is clamping the Some of the light sources And to do it very Very quickly because we just have 10 more minutes I will add I'm using the in my In my pipeline in my projects. I'm using the very basic Diffuse textures I'm not using procedural textures and it's not because I don't like them because they're very awesome uh, the problem is The people who who buy my models are not only blender users and if I would like to to share my models with Within the other applications, then I have the problem of of blender textures, which are not transferable to Outside the blender, right? So that's why I decided. Yeah, let's just keep the things quite primitive I would say but at least working so something I would say about the obj format that which I'm also supporting Because we have many different file formats, but obj always works somehow And same here. I'm also Very often adding this hue saturation and value note here just to quickly call color correct the texture instead of jumping To to the applications. I just do it Mostly do it in blender. So I add a little tint to it Sometimes well, usually I'm just decreasing the saturation a little bit. So it's more natural and I could also apply the same thing on the threads here but The thread material is way way less reflective than this polished wood materials. So I would just probably Well in the final product, I wouldn't wouldn't just use the diffuse material with texture on it But this presentation is really Ending soon. So I want to make at least this this One picture. Yeah, this could definitely use more reflections Some reflections I would say so To find a quick solution right now. I will probably use one of my group notes Which is I usually use glossy shader node Just quickly plug in the texture and let's say Just do 0.5 reflection glossiness these values are Working a bit different to the normal glossy shader values I'm not happy with it to be honest, but Maybe if I change the color a little bit I can also use my one of my group notes here, which is called color correct This is quite a big group. But what it what it basically includes I just jump in Looks quite complex, but it really isn't It just separates rgba channels into I don't even I don't even remember what to be honest But anyway, you can There is one thing I would have to mention here, but we really don't have time because Each texture has three color channels, right Red, blue and green And each one of those colors can be also used Just the color channels can be used as an input for let's say glossiness or bump because usually those textures Which we use for bump mapping are white and gray black and white and Yeah, so Why won't why why should we create another map? Just to simulate this one effect. We could just use one of the channels Which is already available in the Colored diffuse texture. So that's why I've created this color correct node and it uses some of the color channels. You can You can switch between those channels Somewhere bump look. Yeah with this look setting. So minus is red zero is green and one is blue And the mixing between them doesn't work that well, but at least I can switch the channels here But yeah getting back on track. I would say We just changed the hue of this thread material. Yeah, and it It's more or less there. So I will just launch a very quick rendering And hopefully manage to do some color correction Looks okay Say while we are rendering. Oh, yeah, maybe I should have checked the samples, right? Let's say we can stick to it Yeah, so we have five more minutes I would really like to do a quick color correction on that But if you have any questions right now while it's rendering, I'm very Open to answer Yes, because Yeah, thank you The question was if I use the separate color channels for Impacting the particular effects like glossiness bump or reflections. Yeah The thing is it's When you when you have the surfaces like this table, right the reflection isn't uniform So it has its bumps and highlights and darkers Darker areas So you can use a texture to simulate this effect and instead of creating a separate map which is usually Black and white in different values. You can use One of the color channels of the diffuse texture. So I will very quickly jump to Photoshop and Sorry for not using gimp, but I started with gimp So when we go to the channels This is more or less how Let's say a bump mapping looks a bump mapping texture looks like So why create a separate map and load it to blender and increase the memory use when we can just use rgb and just point to a certain channel and Yeah, so what you can see here is this glossy look. So this is channel rgb more or less and for example, here I have the glossiness level and I can Uh same with the reflection strength. I can plug those Inputs here to my to my shader. It's all explained on the website to be honest No, it's not it From the back end it works correctly, but it's not physically accurate In in like scientific sense. It makes a visually correct results. I would say but it's not mathematically correct whatsoever So having this I forget adding a spot lamps to the to the picture, but yeah, let's let's let's just continue um Yeah, this this rendering looks good. I would say that's why I've saved it But to make it even better. I would just add two spot lamps And there might be a question why I'm using spot lamps. Well, because they they they create much better shadows in my opinion Uh They can be adjusted so I can I have a control over the the lights If it's smooth enough or if if it's strong And I can just very quickly adjust it all here um one thing Another thing worth mentioning is that all the effects like bump mapping and let's say Specular reflections highlight reflections are not visible until you add any kind of point light source. So it could be a It could be just just a Point lamp. It could be a sun lamp Area lamp. I don't know about hemi, but it has to be some kind of a spotlight Point light. So we have all those Features material features like bump or or specular reflections visible The hdr map I've added it kind of generates this here But I am I'm never happy when it comes to bump mapping So I always add those two lamps Just in case I need to have more depth in my materials But it's all explained in the pdf and just jumping very quick to photoshop Since I'm Creating quite a lot of these models. I really had to create a A quick way of sorry I had to create a quick way of processing the pictures And I never Try to cheat when it comes to the final pictures. So What I always just stick to is increasing the contrast The basic contrast using the curves and I could do it in blender as well. I just don't like the way blender curves work So Please forgive me that And it's just just way way quicker here because I can also save the The entire process Sorry Here as an action as an action. Yeah Yeah as an action And then just launch it to every single picture. So they are all all of them Are more or less Color corrected, right The second thing I just very quickly add to my pictures is the color balance and I'm not trying to cheat on the colors to be honest when the colors aren't matching my expectations I just go back to blender and do it. But for the presentation's sake, I would just very quickly Do some adjustments here And you can see those adjustments are probably barely visible Shift and scroll The question was what's the shortcut for this and you just hold the shift key and scroll up and down The touch I really Feel is Adding always something to the rendering is increasing the blue color in the highlights. I don't know why why it works like this It just makes the picture more Kind of natural I would say Yeah, and this is basically it if I had the spot lamps added to this picture. I wouldn't have to use levels so harshly in here so you can see using the levels to This graph here shows the The amount of Amount of white and gray values up until up down until black values around the picture So you can see I have lots of whites and different Very bright grays in my pictures. So I will just Very quickly cut them off and now I have a perfect white background yeah, and I just yeah showed a little bit more of gray here I just flatten everything and in the end just use the very basic sharp and on on sharp mask Just some small values So it adds a little more crisp to the picture It's a little bit noisy, but yeah And that's it. So unfortunately no time for questions, but I'll be around for a couple more hours So if you have if you would like to ask anything just go ahead


An explosion in Kaduna has claimed the life of one person, living two others injured. The spokesperson of the Kaduna State Police Command, ASB Mohamed Jalige, confirmed the incident and said it occurred at about 4.30 p.m. in Badagawa area of Kaduna North Local Government area. Jalige said after the incident, the victims were taken to Baraudiko Teaching Hospital for treatment where one of them died and another was treated and discharged while the third person is still receiving treatment. He said investigations have commenced and its outcome would be made public upon completion of the exercise.


So I say with all love and warmth, that part of the concern also for people who are progressive thinking and liberal-minded or just progressive thinking in terms of just fix it, fix it is that we all have these posters in our closet that is attached to a stick that we sometimes will cart out when we're talking about criminal justice policy and those statistics that you first heard when we opened it up, incarceration and we run around with these signs, build more schools less jails, build more schools less jails and we walk around everywhere, build more schools, we protest, build more schools less jails, put money into education not prisons. There's a fundamental problem with that approach in my opinion and it's this, I agree with that conceptually, but you have not addressed the reason I have three padlocks on my front door. So part of the discussion about reform of criminal justice policy has to be an acknowledgement that crime does occur and especially when it is violent crime and serious crime, there should be a broad consensus that there should be serious and severe and swift consequence to crime.


Here we are with the first panel of the day, the second day. And this will be with Christof, Baptiste, Adam and Michael. So we're going to have both the speaker in the talk and their collaborators. We have this mystery about Mr. Egg that you posted online in your background while you were doing the talk. I'm going to show you. Pavel, you got that. Yeah, I can ask you because I thought there's actually two Easter eggs. Maybe that was by accident and great minds think alike, that kind of thing. I saw the dots on the table, so I thought that was the one Easter egg. The other thing was that the books that you had on the bookshelf were really familiar, right? And I think all of those books, well, most of those books, at least on the shelves on the sides were listed on Rich Hickey's bookshelf, right? Like Rich Hickey posted at some point, he's, you know, whatever, reading that inspires closure. And I think all of those books on the side bookshelves were, was that intentional or by accident or just like the same books or what happened there? So for foundation of databases, it definitely comes from Rich Hickey's bookshelf, but the other is an accident. That is uncanny. Great minds think alike, I guess, that's the answer. So I'll leave it now to John to see if the other guests are available. Thank you, Renzo. So let's see if Adam is online. Hi, yes. Hey, there we go. How are you doing? I'm quite alright, thanks. That was an excellent talk. That's an impressive microphone. I thought mine was good, but yours is even better. Oh, it just looks, you know. What I'm listening to you is, is there anything curious or interesting you'd like to share about your surroundings about what's going on at the moment? In my surroundings, well, it's a bit of a peculiarity. But usually on my desk, I always have a deck of cards, you see. It's a bit weird, I know, but the thing is, when I was quite a bit younger, I used to do a lot of magic tricks, you know, and so I don't have much time for that these days. So usually I always have a deck of cards, so that when I have to do some readings or long session and all that, it keeps my hands kind of busy and can help me concentrate. So a bit of a fun thing to say, I guess. Excellent. I suppose it's good for keeping the dexterity in your fingers and stopping RSI and things like that as well. So great stuff. And do we have Michael as well? Yes, indeed. Thank you. And Giselle, if you've got anything you'd like to share briefly, you've got a very nice seat you're sitting on by looks and things. Yeah, this is this is secret lab chair. So this is I'm supporting, so I live in Singapore, I'm supporting a local company secret labs that makes gaming excellent gaming chairs so I can put it in the sponsorship plug for them. Excellent. Thank you very much. I really want to ask the first question. Yeah, let's go with the first question. We want to know, first of all, if that bookshelf was Christophe or Baptiste's but I think we saw that live and we know that now is Christophe bookshelf. So another question is, what is the meaning of that dot ampersand enclosure dot? The dot ampersand is mostly on its way out, but in the enclosure dot, you can have named parameters to a function. So the, the trick we, when we started designing closure dot was to find a way to tell closure that from this point on, these are name, name parameters that you have to pass to this dot function or Mr. So the, the dot ampersand was used as delimiter to, to instruct the compiler that it was an interval form with named parameters. But we had to, to resort to this, to the solution because at the start of the project we, we made all variables dynamics and by making them all dynamics we would go to to produce code quickly, but it was, it wasn't efficient and we had other problems in the world. Now that we have proper typing inference on all methods, we know when a method is going to have name parameters so we don't need them anymore. We are just facing them out at the moment. So basically it's just a syntax to use the name parameters right now. Okay, thank you for the clarification. John, you want to take a question for Adam or Michael. Question I guess for Adam is like, what do you see is the overall vision for cortex world. What do you expect that that will enable and grow into. And like, is it comparable to things like Ethereum and so on is that or is that like very different kind of tangent and what we're trying to do. Oh sure you could very much compare it to Ethereum, but because we have this ability to build complex data models. And it's also much, much faster, at least in our bench concurrent benchmarks. Much, much farther, right. I think that this kind of tech has the same kind of effect on blockchain that Cluster had on Java or on the GVM I could say right the GVM by itself as a way of, you know, just having a virtual machine and, and it's very capable right, but you want to have something that is more sophisticated and allows you to, to, to handle more complex data and you can go very, very far. I think that's Mike has many examples you'd like to give you, I guess. Okay, thank you. Yeah, well, certainly I think the vision of the vision of convex is definitely that it can be a building block for people who want to build the sort of next generation of decentralized applications. And I think some of the things that I find particularly important is I was horrified by the energy efficiency, inefficiency of things like Bitcoin and Ethereum. It's just ecologically unsound and one of the motivations to be certainly contributing to convex was was building something that was super energy efficient super fast. And it has a sort of low latency, which makes it usable for things like gaming or consumer mobile applications web applications, these kind of things, which are currently impractical with the current blockchain technology. So, so my hope certainly is it becomes a valuable tool in the in the building block for people who want to build these different applications in the future. And can you say a little bit more about the energy efficiency is that due to closure or is it just kind of like your design or the infrastructure. I think there's, there's two things one the JVM is actually a pretty good execution engine and we all know from closure that you know the JVM gives a very solid foundation and wants to build a very good performance and obviously did compiler and stuff like that. The garbage collection turns out to be really, really useful for decentralized apps where you've got these big immutable data structures with structural sharing and sometimes you have to discard large chunks of it. The GC is very valuable, but say the main reason that it's efficient is that convex in the design of convex we found a way for the peers the decentralized peers to agree on an ordering of transactions without burning energy. You have to spend a bunch of time or compute or storage in order to reach that consensus on the order and that's kind of the key innovation. It's how do you make the ordering of transactions stable consistent and consensus without spending any electricity or other computer resources to work that out or at least minimal. If you have a local test network, you can you can you can you can literally pump millions of transactions with convex. It's incredibly efficient. Okay. And with resources, if I may add, there are a couple other innovations I didn't talk about today because it was kind of more advanced. But for instance, there is a kind of a memory allowance, right, because on networks like ethereum. For data, you pay things fees just once. And that's it. Then the peers have to store it forever, which is kind of unlogical if you think about it right where there are here what you have is is the fact that you have some amount of memory that you can use. And then if you, you, you lack some, then you can automatically buy some for context coins during a transaction I mean it's completely automatic right. And if you release memory because you you undeath some data, for instance, then you could sell it back for instance right. So you have that kind of mechanisms that have been embedded in the network so that you have some incentive to keep things clean. And so there is also this category of innovation that prevents things like wastage, essentially. Excellent. It's obviously a lot of thoughts be going into that aspect. I'm very happy to see that. Thank you very much. We have another question for Christophe and the test from Ben's less who is next to speaker, by the way, how much of these conclusions and techniques could be applied to closures compiler. Anything from inferring NILs for tests to project the HALA, which should allow the JVM to get past type of measure and much it would be possible to type in terms as it is a plug in the compiler. And to be less I don't understand the goal of a project. So maybe Christophe do you have input on this project. So, basic type inference would be stuck to closure dots. Okay. Christophe, are you with us? Yeah, I'm not familiar with project HALA, but for the type inference itself it's really tied to closure to dot itself. It tries to mimic and simulate the own dot type system so as to be able to please the compiler, because otherwise the dot compiler is pretty harsh. There are even some cases which I consider borderline as bugs. For example, I remember with NIL labels, you have an operator dot question mark which allows to, it wasn't even with a special operator. We add one line, which was checking a value against NIL. And if it was NIL, it was throwing an exception. And then because the code generation wasn't quite good, further than the line, there was also, there was the same test anew. And that compiler was complaining because once it passed the first if, which would throw if the value was NIL, he was complaining that we were testing a non-NIL value against NIL. So the type inference is really there to be able to be as smart as the dot compiler. Otherwise we get weird errors as well. Yeah, it seems to be premature to think that there is anything we can introduce into the closure compiler in this kind of sense. That was the original question, that's why I'm asking. Okay. Yeah, just maybe NIL and some could be helpful, but I believe there are already some some handling of that enclosure. Thank you, Christoph. John, any other question for. Yes. So there's a question from the discord channel. Could you please explain the consensus procedure used in convex in regards to pound pause? How does it differ? How does reaching consensus work? That's a very complex question because this is the hardest part of the whole stack, I think. And it has to, you know, it mixes with a bit of economics and game theory. But so proof of stake is a class of algorithms. So conversion proof of stake, which is what Mike has designed in the first place is under the very first one ever, but it has been in the workings for like three or four years. I think Mike, it was. But yeah, about three years. Yeah, so could you tell us how is it exactly different from usual proof of stakes algorithms? So I mean, I think Adam's exactly right proof of stake is a class of systems where consensus is agreed by a stake so some kind of weight and convex does use stakes and it's effectively it's a type of proof of stake and algorithm. I think the most important difference with convex and potentially other other decentralized networks is convex consensus is actually implemented as a CRDT. So it's a conflict free replicated data type. And these are these data types that have this beautiful property that you can merge two instances together and get a new instance. And if you happen to do that in a repeated fashion, e.g. by gossiping the values around the network, then as long as the merge function has the right mathematical properties and there's some lovely math papers if anyone's dive into this. You can actually prove that will eventually converge to a stable state. And that's what you want for consensus you want this convergence to a stable stable state which then you know forms the basis of your agreement around the ordering of all the transaction which is then how you compute the updates the global state. Now, can't go into too much detail here on how that merge function works, we basically found a merge function that enables you to implement proof of stake as a CRDT. Yeah, so that the merge function takes into account the stakes of the different peers, and the merging happens in a way that is consistent with the boats of the of the peers in the network. So it's all in the white paper if you want to dive into more depth but hopefully that's given sort of a brief overview the key idea is a conflict free replicated data type therefore it's guaranteed to converge under the under certain conditions. And two things that are apparent from this is that so in blockchain the word blockchain you have the word blocks of course because what you end up with usually at the end is a chain of blocks that are indeed cryptographically linked right but here it's a bit different. So transactions are being grouped in so blocks, this is what appears emits to other peers groups blocks of transactions. But there's effectively no leader so any peer can emit a block of transaction at any moment right where we're asking even older flavors of proof of stake. You tend to have quite often a notion of a leader so that only one peer at one given time can broadcast a block of transactions. So that's one of the reasons also why convex is so fast even on the network level, we could say. And having that kind of CRDT also means that those blocks are not cryptographically linked. They so peers vote on an ordering so there is a sequence of blocks at some point, but it's a bit different from the usual blockchain in that aspect right technically we could say that it's already something a bit different from from a typical blockchain. Okay thank you that was really useful explanation and yes I'm kind of looking forward to having a look at the white paper that's on the website as well that should dive into a lot more detail I expect. Oh, okay thank you for that. So we got more questions for one more question for sure and yeah remember to raise your hands for live interaction. This is for Christopher Baptiste from Yakub. I gather there is a some impedance mismatch between closure and art due to the types Neil handling and such. It seems you have made great progress, but do you think you will get to a point when writing flutter apps in closure script will be painless without running into the into the mismatch or will there remain some corner cases where the interop will remain painful. I'm going to start. I'm writing a closure that application. I rest application right now and I found the experience awesome. We are still like Jacob Jacob Jacob said. We are not still at the level of interaction greatness like closure and closure script to be honest. I don't know if we can achieve that, but I don't, I don't think types will be necessarily an interrupt would be necessarily the main pain. We really have to find out how we could have a better, a better repo and auto load experience. Actually, actually, we don't have a repo right now. But we try to design. And it's working. But, yeah, what's your opinion, Christopher. To on the impedance mismatch between closure and the and that I've got we, I think we have got it mostly under control now. There are some, some things with which are going to to be addressed by the but what we call the magic cast, which, which are workers which are automatically inserted by the compiler by the closure compiler to to make sure that we transform the input into a wrapper of the of the suitable type for that. But yeah, just from the relationship between the two languages. I think we, we don't have much to much to fix yet. One thing that's worth mentioning is that we never designed crucial that code to be credible from that code. The intent has never been to be able to create leaves to be used by regular that code. That's either to add to what Betty just said. Well, we don't have a weapon yet, but we have made a proof of concept very early in the development. And the focus currently is on the on the batch compiler, which, which we can then couple with the auto editing feature of doubt to produce the same developer experience as the one that that developer used to, or even some, some people in the community, which can work with auto auto reload. That being said, writing a mobile application sex, it's, it's hard. No, it's true.  And let's say to package assets. It's, it's, it's not like rating the web app or shows a very crucial application. You have many rules. Okay, thank you. We have probably another question from Jones. Yeah, we've got a couple of questions ones actually follow up from the last question. So just querying if there's any trade offs in the convex approach compared to traditional POS networks. Is that something that's in the white paper or is there something you can say about that. I think it's probably a very, very long topic. I think we have the best approach to POS in the sense that the CRDT seems to be a perfect fit for the centralized systems and then we use we use POS. Well, there are obviously challenge with POS. Yeah, I mean it does require people to put steak on, on nodes and or steak on other people's nodes. And there isn't yet a long history of POS networks and how they behave from an economic perspective. So, I think that's still a bit of an open question. It's one of the reasons we're taking a lot of time to get this right and also to make sure that the economics are viable and sustainable in the long term but I'd say there's still a bit of an open question around what is the best way to make proof of steak work. I do think there's too many trade offs. I think we've genuinely eliminated some bottlenecks and some some pain points in some traditional blockchain approaches. I don't think we've given up too much, but you know, people can argue this all day because there's a lot of complexity and a lot of different, different aspects of it rather than so. Sure. Happy to make further on the convex channel or something if someone really wants to get into that. Good. Yeah. On the discount channel there, asking a couple of questions about that. And just one final question as a query about adoption, I guess the question is really aiming at like what does this COVID need a covex need anything to be successful. It's like we'll move from this core product into actually being widely adopted in production or is it just a matter of people using it. Yes, two things like to say here is that that kind of open source, you know, community project, whatever we call it, it can show some limits where we have to actually hit actual production. So we have released an alpha version it was in September I think so not that long ago, we are slowly but surely go for beta. But the problem is that when you want to actually launch a mainnet, as it's called, then you its best, usually to have some kind of audit for instance, from a third party company who will try to to break it and ensure that it just works perfectly that, you know, security wise, things are just as smooth. And unfortunately that kind of steps require a lot of funding, right. And it's a bit hard. I'm going to be honest, it's a bit hard to found that kind of project because it's a bit too abstract. So if you know Clodger and Lisb and all that, then in a bit of blockchain, then you can realize the value of a network like convex but if you have never heard about Lisb or anything like that, then it looks just very very abstract, right. So we have a bit of a Lisb curse going on here. That's the first thing I could say here and the second one would be about just having a strong community. So that's why we would like talking to developers who aren't really into blockchain because first of all, that's the vast majority of developers today, only tiny fractions of developers actually work in blockchain or decentralized tech, because we'd like to expose that kind of ideas more and more, and show that it's interesting for other use cases than just NFTs and cryptocurrencies. And so yeah, we would like to see more people like that coming in and building a stronger community and have something going on there, a bit more impressive. Excellent. Thank you very much. Well, hopefully people watching this live and in the future will be interested and take up that call to join our community as well. Thank you. I wanted to just add for Christophe and Baptiste that I saw your tense grittics closure dart repo. So you mentioned that is something is my code might appear there in Q1 of 2022. So I wanted just to close asking you where people can go to help you out or follow your work in general. Twitter, just follow Christophe and me and we'll have the last news about the project. Okay. Or create PRs on the empty repo. Okay. Well, looking forward to the evolutions of that. And yeah, I'd like to thank Christophe, Baptiste, Adam and Michael for being with us today answering questions, your effort in putting together the talk very appreciated very interesting projects. Thank you very much.


Am I? What's that? That's life. Alright. Alright.  You smoke? I smoke. I drink? I drink too. Well good. Cause we gon' get it out tonight. Got drugs? Got drugs. Got drugs. Got drugs. Alright. Cause we gon' take a ride tonight. So Mike. Alright guys. What is going on? Welcome back to another vlog. This vlog is titled My Current YouTube Vlogging Setup. So if you've come here to find out exactly what I use to make my YouTube videos we're actually gonna have to wait a few minutes because what this video is made with is my current YouTube vlogging setup. Not only camera, tripod, microphone but also laptop and well that's really all you need. So with that said I thought we'd take just before I do get to today's date I thought we'd go in chronological order and take a little bit of a walk down memory lane you know because reality is is that with the progression of my YouTube channel from zero subscribers to 100 to 1000 and now to nearly 10,000 along the way my equipment has improved as well.  I didn't even know about a camera like this. I didn't know about content creation. The amount I've learnt along the way is just unbelievable. I have and you know that's what I think when I'm sitting here some nights you know busting my ass on editing these videos and thinking fuck it is anyone even gonna view these you know does anyone really care but at the end of the day I think to myself you know what it doesn't matter it doesn't matter all of this that I'm doing all of this work all this hustle is all knowledge it's all expanding my knowledge base and it's only gonna help it's an investment in myself okay and the greatest investment you can ever make is in yourself so before I go on too much because I do have a habit of doing that when I first started watching YouTube I had no idea about the fitness community I had no idea even existed in fact when I first started YouTube it probably didn't exist so when I first started watching I had no thoughts of becoming a creator I had no thoughts of having my own YouTube channel so at that point I used it to basically just sit up late at night and watch random shit just like a lot of you guys do so I was watching top 10 worst plane crashes top 10 worst you know police chases for shit like that shit that would keep a teenager up at night watching videos you know entertaining stuff so before long I found the fitness community in my normal day-to-day life I was getting into the gym I was you know training more and YouTube seemed like the natural place to type in exactly what I wanted to find out and and watch some videos so that's what I did and I started seeing people like the hodge twins I started seeing people like Louis Marko Matt Ogis Chris Jones you know all of these people that have been around since like 2010-2011 I started watching them when they pretty much first started so I've seen I've seen the fitness community or especially the YouTube fitness community come along the way along the years and here we are today it's 2018 and I am in the fitness community myself you know so that's that's pretty cool anyways the first video I made was a rugby tutorial video I woke up one morning I thought you know what my phone's actually got a pretty decent camera why don't I go down to the field set it up no microphone no no fucking notes nothing like that just set it up and start talking to the camera I know I've got a message to give I just need to try and give it and it was so hard it is so hard to get yourself in front of that camera the first time and it's so hard to hear your voice over and over again it's hard to edit yourself and blah blah blah but once you get used to that once once you get over that first hurdle of putting out your first video and you actually get some views and you actually get some good feedback don't have paralysis by analysis what that is is basically knowing that you've got something you really want to do but you're never going to do it because it's not going to be perfect enough you're always thinking oh this person's done it like this oh it's not you know I didn't say the right thing there or the intro is not good enough or you know the camera is not good enough anything there's so many excuses guys and the beauty of YouTube is fuck the excuses you know anyone can put anything up there that they want if you're that concerned about the reaction turn off the comments turn off the like and dislike feature you know if you're that concerned but reality is guys if you're ever going to make it if you're ever going to make a good go of YouTube you need to bury any worries that you have about what anyone else thinks of it you really do I mean trolls come along trolls come along I've got a pretty decent like to dislike ratio on my channel but I still get the trolls and if I have put out a video that I've spent a shit load of time on and I really really think it's a good one and it should be received well to get a trolling comment it's fucking it it's annoying man it really it starts to bring you down and if you've got that day in and day out geez I don't know how some people get through it you know anyways once again I've actually rattled on way too much we're gonna go back to that day that fateful day back in 2012 where I woke up grabbed my phone went down to the field I actually sat it up against a shoe I believe just like this walked out in front of it and started talking so let's have a look at that step by step on how to do a drop kick now drop kicks can be used in rugby union and rugby league for various amount of points but basically they're a good skill to use good skill to know gameplay situations are a lot different than at practice tell you that much so it's really important to get the three fundamentals down and then hopefully it goes well so on that day I actually took two videos one I put out that day and it took me about three more months to put out the second one because I was just too scared I didn't want people to be negative I didn't want people to critique me I didn't know what I was doing at that point so it was scary and took me another three months to put out my second video and funnily enough guys it took over a year after that for me to put out my third video which was a fitness related video now at this point I had watched Louis Marco explode I'd watched Chris Jones explode I'd watched the Hodge Twins explode I watched all these guys do so well in the YouTube space and I thought you know what it's my turn so I started a cut I started my first ever proper cut to get lean to get shredded and that started in February of 2014 so right now I'm going to take you back to that what's up guys well as you can see by the title of the video and if you're lucky enough to have clicked on it this is the start of my fat loss journey weight loss journey whatever you want to call it cutting up getting shredded etc etc I've been personally thinking about you know I get inspiration daily from YouTube fitness community various different pages I could I could list them all here but you know there's probably too many to list I watch and subscribe to quite a few and you know what for a while now I've been thinking about sort of putting my face out there and seeing if I can inspire anyone or you know at least at least put something out there so that in time I can look back on it and see where I'm at see if I've achieved those goals that I wanted to achieve so basically this is the first video of I don't know how many it might be my first might be my last but yeah I'm going to put it out there for you guys to see now at that point I was still just using my phone just using the front facing camera that's all I had that's all I needed at that point I might have had 50 subscribers I didn't know who was going to watch I didn't know where I was going to end up who does know but that was at the start of 2014 and so four years later here we are today I've got 10,000 subscribers I've got a whole lot of camera equipment and I'm going to show you guys exactly what I got when and why so let's start the first thing was the phone okay that's what I started with anyone who is who is out there wanting to get the perfect shot the perfect video like I said don't be paralysis don't be paralyzed by don't be paralyzed by analyzing too much all right use this use whatever you've got it's going to be good enough as long as it's 720p you don't want to be under 720p because that's somewhat of HD you do want to give a high quality image if the person that's watching wants to watch it in that that's very important so I kept using my phone I kept using you know things to prop it up against the next purchase that I made was a tripod and the reason I did that was to give me give me some you know better angles especially with my rugby tutorial videos I was sick and tired of having to put my camera up against things or you know find a spot where I could sit my camera or sit my phone I was sick of it because it was really limiting where and when I could do these videos so I bought this tripod and I went smack bang in the middle of the field put my camera on it at that time I actually bought my first recorder voice recorder so my bright idea was to go to the shop buy the tripod buy the recorder have a microphone running up my top so it was here so that I could be far away from the camera and still have perfect sound well you know I gave my best shot this is how the sound turned out what is up what is up everyone we're down here at the field this is my local rugby union training field my rugby league training field is over that way but today is a Saturday and of course games are going on so I've just sneakily come down here in the morning and I'm going to make part three of my rugby skills tutorial video series so I actually started this series about three years ago man long long time ago this was my first ever youtube video it was a rugby skills tutorial one and you know I've come a long way since then physically mentally emotionally you know I've got over 200 videos on youtube now I'm proud of what I've achieved what I've what I've made but um I think it's about time to go back to my back to my roots back to my that's what I know best you know which is rugby so as you would expect I got trolled because of that and um that put a bit of a dampener on my youtube vision and my youtube uh you know determination and I took another break what's that let's slide all right all right and we gon' get it on tonight