Hello, Ocelator Sync here. A few weeks ago I put out a set which I wrote and performed on the Electron Digitact and since putting it out online, I've had a number of people ask me about the process that went into preparing for writing and performing that set, so I figured I'd do a video on just that. So this video will kind of be a combination of tips that I found useful while I was putting the set together and also kind of just going through the process in general, talking about what worked, what maybe could have gone better. And hopefully they'll answer the questions that those people had and also maybe inspire some new ideas along the way. So with that, let's get to the first tip. So this first tip is probably the most important out of the whole lot and that is that if you want to put together a set like this, commit to that idea and set some reasonable goals and expectations. So for example, when I decided that I wanted to put this set together, I kind of gave myself some goals and some guidelines for the way I was going to work. So the first one was that I wanted to be done within a month, so from the point where I decided that I was going to actually do this, I knew that in a month's time, my goal was to have it recorded and written and the video put out and the whole lot. The next thing is that sort of from how much music I was going to create, I knew that I wanted to have at least eight patterns. I actually went slightly over that in the end, but that's fine. I hit my goal. The other thing that I kind of gave myself were guidelines around how I was going to actually work on it. My time availability is kind of restricted. I've got a young baby in the house, so I knew that I was only going to be able to be working on this after they've gone to bed. I was literally doing it on a ironing board in my room, but what I had kind of put in place for myself as a goal was that if I sat down and was going to be working on something, as long as I wasn't disturbed by child care duties, I was going to finish a pattern. I was allowed to go back and revisit them, sure, but I wanted to have basically established an entire pattern per session that I had working on it, and that worked out really well for me. I think I reached that goal every single time, a couple of sessions, a couple of evenings when the inspiration was really flowing. I got through two patterns and stuff. So setting those goals and those guidelines and actually committing to the idea of doing this is super, super important. So the second tip that I'd maybe offer if you're going to try and put together a set like this is try to reduce the number of choices that you are going to have to make about anything other than the actual writing of the music. So one thing that I did that made a massive difference for my workflow is that before I wrote any of the music, I picked out a small subset of samples that I wanted to work with. So I went into the samples menu. I went through all the factory samples. I went through all of the stuff that I had brought in recently, and I went through and I thought, OK, well, I need a selection of kicks, claps, hi-hats. I need some noise, some single cycle where I formed some other sounds that kind of appealed to me. And I put them in my sample pool before I started writing any music. And my intention was never to go back into picking up samples because there is nothing that distracts me from making music quite as much as kind of window shopping for presets. It's a complete distraction for me. And, you know, you can spend half an hour trying to find a snare drum that's just right when the one that you've already got there is good enough and you could be working on the actual music. You can always go back and tweak, I guess, but that made a massive difference to me. Actually, as it happens about two thirds of the way through, maybe three quarters of the way through, I realized that there were some sounds that I definitely wanted that I just didn't have in the sample set.  And you don't want to have to restrict yourself dogmatically, but kind of setting up that framework where I didn't have to make any of those choices really meant that every time I sat down to work on the set, I was only working on the music for the set. One of the other ways that I did this which is kind of a more minor thing. But again, it was just a choice that I didn't have to make. I decided really early on that every pattern was going to be four bars long. I didn't have to have that decision. I didn't have to think about how am I going to be clever with using conditional tricks to make it feel like it's four bars long when it's not four bars long. No, I just had four bars long. Every single pattern is four bars long. Didn't have to think about it. It was just another choice that I didn't have to think about. And I could just concentrate on the music. That approach really works well in the door as well, actually, as it happens. I know that Jeremy from Red Beings Recording has mentioned this a couple of times around how he has kind of templates set up ahead of time in Ableton. So that the stuff that he usually grabs for and stuff that he knows works are just just kind of there for any particular type of session. And it just means again that you're not having to make choices that aren't about the actual writing music. You can always go back and tweak sounds at the end. But you know, while that inspiration is flowing, don't do things that are going to interrupt that flow, like trying to pick out the right high hat sound. Okay, let's get on to actually talking about writing the patterns themselves. I don't really want to talk too much about the sort of ins and outs of of, you know, conditional tricks and note repeats and that kind of thing. There are a couple of tricks that I used fairly consistently, which I am going to talk about in a couple of other videos for the dig attack coming up fairly soon. And I want to talk sort of more broadly about was the workflow as I was putting the music together. So I guess probably the thing that I did most consistently while I was putting this stuff together is that I wrote all of the patterns in the set in the order that they were then performed in. And one of the things that I decided early on that I wanted to do was always have an element from the previous pattern in the next pattern, which kind of creates a continuity around what you're doing. So for example, once I'd finished this one here. What I would do is I would go into pattern and copy it. And then I would take that pattern and paste it onto the next one along. So now pattern two is the same as pattern one. And then I would decide, okay, well, what is the element which is sort of really important to me in terms of what's going to go into the next track. So it might have been in this case. So it might be in this case that the shaker that's on six, I decided was like, that was the signature sound that was going to go into the next pattern. So I would mute off everything else. And then I would start building the track backup from from scratch. So you know, I would go into one of the tracks and I would clear that track off. And I would delete everything that was on it as well. So I had an empty track and then I would start thinking, okay, well, perhaps this one's going to be a four to the floor kick here. And maybe it's not going to be the same kick sound. So I go in and find a new kick sound. And so on. So I'd start building up with this initial sound that was still kind of in there. To be honest, I'm not entirely convinced of how much that added to the continuity of the set. I think on some patterns, it definitely did. But I think in other places, it was maybe just a thing that I was doing, because I decided I was doing it. And as I said, that's kind of valuable anyway, because it was a choice that I wasn't having to make. And my workflow was always this next pattern is based off the previous one, by at least one element. The other benefit, I don't know whether it's a benefit, but certainly a side effect of working that way is that I didn't have to go through and set up my reverb and delay to be the same as the previous thing. That's certainly kind of acoustic space element to things I think probably did had a consistency across the set, even if having something from the previous previous pattern in that set did. One other thing that I would say if you're going to work this way, and probably in general, if you're doing a set like this, is that you want to be going back occasionally and checking the sort of overall perceived levels of your patterns, certainly as I'd got to sort of pattern 6789. When I went back, I'd realized that I'd let the volume creep up quite a lot. And that meant I was also hitting the compressor a lot harder, which wasn't necessarily a bad thing, but it was kind of changing the way that things were feeling. One other tip, given that way of working is that there's no point adjusting the track volumes. You want to just set those to a reasonable level and you want to then be doing things if you want to rebalance things between patterns, you want to be doing that from the AMP page rather than using the track. That is if you're not going to be moving that during the actual performance. So anyway, then I wrote the patterns. And once I'd written the patterns, I needed to work out how I was going to perform them. And that's when making notes came into the whole situation. So I created this system here, it's probably completely cryptic. But I went through and I jammed the patterns for a while and to work out kind of what worked together and what things should be brought in together. What things shall I avoid bringing together? What situation should I avoid dropping down to? So I know that one of these one of these pieces of paper somewhere it says do not do not drop to drums and bass because on pattern four dropping to just drums and bass sounded lame. And I didn't want to make it sound lame. The other thing that I ended up having to do, because I think probably as a side effect of bringing one pattern into the next and working that way is that I ended up with the situation where I had stuff all over the tracks. The only consistency really is that the kick was always on one. Thank God. That was something that I did make sure that I did. But for example, here the snare is onto where it kind of should be. And then three here isn't toms. It should says toms on the on the actual Diggatattis note. It was kind of a poppy melody. And then the two different kinds of melody here on the bass and the lead one, four and five, actually is where Clap and Calwell should be. Yeah. But essentially I ended up with kind of a mess. So this sort of note taking system allowed me to remember what was on all of the all of the actual tracks as I went along. One other thing that this kind of highlighted to me as I was kind of jamming the tracks and making notes was that there were very few times where actually I wanted every single track on at once. Some of the earlier patterns, which were a bit more sparse, yeah, but you know, often actually having everything on at once kind of you think it's getting bigger and bigger and bigger, but actually it just ended up being kind of messy, which didn't really work out so well. So that was also kind of a way of keeping track of what was going on here. But probably the most important thing, if you can see every track has got a line, sorry, every pattern. Some of the tracks got a line above and some of them have got a line underneath. This was my way of specifying what tracks should be turned on when we started this pattern and what tracks should be turned on as we transitioned into the next pattern. You know, what happened within the patterns in terms of turning on the mutes and stuff as I was performing it, that was kind of improvised. You know, I had notes on what I shouldn't do and there was some guidance about what should come in first and stuff, but it was kind of improvised. But where I started and where I ended was super, super important to me and to that end, if the camera wants to catch up, there we go. Probably the most important thing that I did was before I went and performed is that I went into this mute mode here, so shift and then bank twice, the purple mute mode. So this is the pattern mutes. What the pattern mutes is, is the green mutes here, if you change to a different pattern, these mutes will still be the mutes that are active on that pattern. Whereas the purple mutes are only for this particular pattern that you're on at the moment and if you move to another pattern, you will have different mutes set up on all of them. So what I did before I started the actual performance or the takes for the performances that I went through and I set up all of our start points for each of the patterns and then I saved that into the project so that if I did a performance where it all went wrong, I could just reload the project and I have my initial start points for the set already in there. That was super, super useful and such a time saver when I had to restart a couple of times. So at this point we've set up our creative process so that we can write as efficiently as possible. We've made the notes so that we know how our performance is going to go. We've practiced a little bit, probably not as much as we should have done perhaps, and we've come to the actual timer for recording the performance. Probably the biggest piece of advice that I could give you for that is that you need to reconcile the midpoint which your requirement for perfection meets the audience's perception of a good performance because one thing that I found when I was trying to practice is that I was sat basically going over the first two patterns over and over again because there was always something that wasn't quite right or I didn't do the transition quite right or I hadn't brought stuff in early enough and that meant that when I was practicing I was basically just spending hours going between these first two patterns and never really looking at the other patterns and if that was the approach that I had taken when it came to actually record I probably never would have put this out because I would have ended up hating the entire process. So what I'm trying to say here is that if you are doing a live performance on a synth on a groove box it is a live performance and a live performance is not perfect. There will be things that go wrong. There are three things in the recorded version of the set that are definitely as far as I'm concerned wrong. The first two happened fairly early on and they were kind of like as I did them I was like no that's probably fine it's close enough for jazz kind of situation and I kind of just carried on. The third thing that went wrong happened quite a long way in maybe on pattern nine or something and when it happened I had a panic actually and probably made it worse initially but then I made the assessment that no I'm most of the way through the set the rest of the set has been good I don't want to restart now because it's just going to bum me out and I then went on to quickly follow some advice that Prince had about making mistakes in music and what Prince said is that if you make a mistake while you're playing do the same thing again so that the mistake seemed like it was intentional which is what I did is if you can watch back and see where I do it hopefully you can't spot it that's kind of the point at the tip but yeah don't sweat the performance at the point where you end up hating the entire process you know you need to be vibing off it it needs to be feeling good for you if you make a massive cock up then sure stop because you don't want to have something that's that's bad but minor little imperfections that is what live music is it's never perfect so don't expect it to be okay we've kind of come to the end here and there's just time for one or piece of advice and that piece of advice is to go out and buy some cheap table lamps there's a hair there some cheap table lamps and some RGB lights because that made the performance loads better yay these ones I got then the lamps I got from from aster and they were cheap and the RGB oh they create ground loops which is good and the RGB lights were like five pound for two off of amazon or something tightly worth it everyone should have them for all of their electronic music videos because their ace very cheap very vibey and certainly made the recording process more fun the room was nice and dark and the the lights were vibing and so was I so anyway I hope that was useful and if it wasn't useful at least it was interesting if you enjoyed the video please do hit the thumbs up and make sure you subscribe to the channel because there will be more dig attack stuff coming up fairly fairly soon I've got a couple of ideas of stuff I definitely want to cover some of it actually it's related to the set as well and some other stuff as well and general synth stuff of course if you're interested then we've got lots of synth stuff happening on the channel at all times otherwise thank you so much for joining me I will see you again soon take care bye bye


Today, let's look at how to support tomato plants using stakes and twine. This is an option for any gardener who would rather not use tomato cages. The first step is installing the stakes. Metal or wooden stakes are available in various heights, so choose a height that will accommodate the mature size of your tomato variety. Stake should be placed between every two plants within the row. Think about the stake and stream system as a single structure. On the end of each row, it is best to drive a stake at a 45 degree angle to the first stake in the row. This angled stake provides additional reinforcement as the plants begin to grow and weight on the support twine increases. Stakes can be driven using various tools, so choose the one that works best for you. I have found that using a fence post driver is quite helpful in speeding up the process, but a simple mallet may work just as well. Once all stakes have been installed, the second step is adding the twine. The Florida Weave is a popular method used in supporting stake tomatoes. For this method, it is easiest to secure a box of polypropylene twine to your waist with a belt. Then thread the twine through a piece of half inch PVC pipe. This pipe is a huge help in guiding the twine from stake to stake. To get started, tie a row of twine to the first stake, 6 to 10 inches above the ground. Proceed to the next stake and wrap the cord around the stake at the same level. Then you will continue the same process down the opposite side, securing the twine at the same level on each stake down the row. Once you have reached the end, tie the twine off to the last stake. As the plant grows, this process should be repeated 3 to 5 times depending on the mature height of the plant. This may sound complicated, but once you actually put it in place, you can see it's just a woven pattern that uses the flexibility of twine and the strength of the stakes to keep all those beautiful tomatoes safe from wet soil and growing in the right direction.


Hello everyone. Thanks for coming to this talk. I'm pretty amazed about how many of you have come. So thanks for for coming I've been doing video games for more than 20 years almost about the same time professionally But before then since I was like a team I always have a deep passion for open source I started using Linux desktops for for like since like 94 or 95 It's been a long time. So when I started working professionally in game development most most one most of the game development is to industry users windows Which was always a problem for me because I don't didn't want to go to it to use it In fact, if you consider like the total revenue of the software industry about 25 percent Is the video game industry of all the total software industry? And for being something so big Open source has some like penetrated so much in the in the game industry as much as it is in enterprise and all the kind of industries so I always wanted to develop games with open source. I always actually did in the past. So After many years Different things that happen. I ended up being one of the original authors from gold engine You probably have heard of it at this point together with Ariel Mansour. I'm not sure if he's your own But he also came to to the Fossum So Goddard was open source in like four years ago I'll be a bit more probably five now and he's been growing a lot but so About this talk the talk is creating the next hit game with free and open source software tools The idea is to show that it can be made and I will talk a bit about how our process was for creating Our new third-person shooter demo, which you probably already saw in your booth So Let's get started What's the motivation Goddard 3 was released exactly a year ago? It we need a demo to showcase all the new rendering features before that Goddard was mostly a mobile engine to make mobile games But for version 3 we rewrote it mostly rendering So we can make something realize you can see those screenshots are our new renderer that came out a year ago But we don't have anything to showcase it So even if it was pretty good and you couldn't show that actually what it would actually do So we did a new demo to showcase it Our plan was we have these are the or simple 2d and 3d platformer demos Goddard It's a game engine where you can do separately 2d and 3d. They are like separate engines in one They work mostly the same but 3d and 2d APIs So we have this platform demo, which is almost the same code into the amp ready So you can just migrate from 2d to 3d, which is something many developers do at some point of their carrier But the thing is our 3d platformer demo. You don't look very nice The art of this one I made the art for this the 3d one the original one was made by an artist called Fernando Fernando Calabro, and I tried to replicate his style in 3d, but I'm a really achievable 3d artist So it looked pretty bad But I know that Goddard 3 was capable of much better So this is where the journey begins We use Donation money we have a patron if you're not one of our sponsors, please become one of our pensores We use some of the nations to to to hire an artist We actually hired the same guy that made the pixel art because he's actually a really good 3d artist Actually, he's a professional 3d artist and this was done as a hobby. So we hired the same guy To make this demo we started with concept and prototyping I've worked so long in the game industry that I'm very used to this If you do a really good concept and prototype and you do it properly you can get really really high quality later on You you will ensure that all the problems are solved by this face and and not later So well this we started planning it the idea was that It should look really nice It should be like futuristic design because it's very trendy to make futuristic style her it's where most artists want to do this Nowadays right ten years ago. It was like medieval. I know it's futuristic we wanted to make it cool because Something that looks very amateur when 3d is when you make like all square levels that are all lucky So we make wanted to make something really pretty which is like who which is way more professional looking We want to have multiple rooms. I had to be short but pretty so this is what kind of the idea It's kind of a round the level you go around the deck and then you get to a richer room. You will see it soon So first we started with level blocking the artist made the level blocking in blender He just took all all the ideas and he made a really basic geometry I'm not sure if you can see because from here the contrary contrast is not very good But he made all I'm looking my friend like everything that was going to be in the level He made a mesh for it, but really simple just no textures very flat. No detail nothing The idea was to test the game flow test the dimensions of the level and also test the lighting How was the general idea was going to be? So afterwards we character prototyping if there is something you learned in the game industry is When you're proper when you prototype when you prototype story You can make like a the art cannot be fine Now you can even put cubes somewhere or maybe more detailed geometry for your characters for everything But the animation has to be like near final or final because part of your gameplay is the animation always in a game Or most types of game if you're going to do something the animations have to be near final just using Placeholder animation is asking for trouble because animation is part of the core mechanic almost always in a game It feels pretty pretty much always So animation was one of the first things we do this are like a test model It looks pretty complicated, but it's not the final one. You can see this was done in Blender We did the model and an image it didn't in Blender. This was done by Fernando So yeah, never do animation placeholders if you make a prototype just from the very beginning try to make sure the animation is Final when you prototype or make three games, especially So later we try to do gameplay prototyping We didn't have a level that for some reason the video is not looking very good, but sorry We didn't really have a level yet It wasn't modeled so we started doing prototyping in this very like black-and-white scene Usually when you do prototyping and video games you try to use these squares Which I think are like two meters by two meters, so you have a better idea of distances This is just practices which are typical in the game industry Interaction and control must feel like final from a prototype You rarely try to make something that you will improve later. It doesn't look final in the prototype You're doing it wrong So this is the animation tree. I got a tree has a Actually, this is got 3.1 which is coming soon has an animation tree, which means you can Create all the animation interactions like state machines and changing states blending space This is very common in boring game engines It allows the animator to test all the interactions and all the transitions around the blendings manually from an UI And then the programmer can take these three and use it from the code like changing states from walking to jumping to Anything so animation trees are a very programmer friendly to like communicate between the animator and the programmer and make sure everything works as intended We use root motion root motion is a technique where the animator Animates with actual motion like for example originally in games You would like animate a walk cycle, but it was in place So when you put it in a game in the the food will slide that was very common I think that's as a squeeze was first game that actually did with motion properly So we use root motion, which means that you can see in the video. Sorry. It's a bit broken But that's what the videos about When you change states it changes animation and the blending and you can see that the the animation is like It's totally synchronized to the to the food of the character If you saw that the previous light this one you can see the animator actually moves with the with the object It's not in place So when in the engine will remove this trend this translation this transform I'm you use it in code that this transform is retrieved from code and used to actually move with the logic So bfx bfx is something that actually also needs to be pretty Final in a proper prototype may not be exactly the final final version But it has to be very close to final because again both bfx animation are parts of our interaction And that is actually part of a core mechanic. So bfx had to be final from the prototype Goalout is very cool It has something that no other engine has which is an animation system where you can pretty much animate absolutely anything in the engine You can't even change a mesh or change a texture called functions. You can do so much from the animation system in go All that you can like do a vfx really nicely So this is a combination of particles and physics and and shaders that change parameters all controlled by an animation Like this this shooting effect is done from there You can see a battle here in how the battle looks Sorry again for the for this So this is an interaction you can see that this explodes and then the states are trying to reach it body So they just blow up and and the fire starts emitting. This is absolutely all done from animation. There's no code involved So well texturing Before modeling usually want to do texturing So you cannot get off an idea of how to do it. I will explain a bit the texture workflow. There are two texture workflows you can use It's important to understand how to create textures if you're going to make a game understand where they can come from how You can use them and different things By the way game game the new game 2.10 is fantastic. It's really really good I will show you a bit later why and then you can find base textures somehow There are many royalty free textures around you can find on the internet people who just likes taking pictures of things just to make textures You can create them from photos. This is why I will explain later There is the I wish there was like a substance painter alternative as open source There isn't yet. So we are waiting on blender to do it. Hello. If anyone from London is here Please hurry up after 2.8 is out You can also be painted with Prita many types of game use like hand-painted textures If you remember remember games like Wind Waker. They have very pretty paint hand-painted still style Textures, I wanted to like go more in-depth on that workflow when doing hand-painted textures in Prita But the presentation was really long and you really need artistic skill to do it So I will probably skip it on one day extend on that I will explain how to make a texture from a photo you can do this both. I think in deep and Krita game is probably a better Switch it for photo manipulation Here's an example. I took this picture myself, but I was at a Roman Roman ruins while visiting Europe So I took this picture of I think this floor is from pretty old I Took a picture. I thought this was going to be a nice texture at some day This is like 10 years old, but I will use it to show you how you can make it in a in a texture So you first have to look for a region that can tile usually most textures have a region that could be nice for tiling In this example, this one is kind of obvious where it can tile of course when you Well, if it's not totally aligned to to a to a region to a fra fra texture You can use case transform or perspective transform to to align it to a box then you can crop it This is something pretty useful you can do in game. You can use a layer offsets by half the texture So this is pretty much the texture was moved half to the right and half down and then Just moved around like like tiled You can explore how well it tiles So you can see it doesn't really tile well Because of two reasons first it just doesn't match from one side to the other and the second reason is that it has a gradient You can see when we tile it here in 3d. There is such there's like a gradient each it makes the tile pretty bad so To get rid of the gradient you can use high pass filter. This was added to him 2.10 you use a high pass filter effect and then it removes high frequencies All ratings go away and just gives like pretty flat You can see here if you look in detail at the center cross It's not like matching still very well, but it's much better for tiling because it's just like the gradients are gone So to fix the tiling program you just use the the clone tool a bit and just fix it pretty much That's an easy way to do it that the most common one When as I say here it just you just use a clone tool There is another technique I will show in a bit which is pretty cool for fixing tiling So then you kind of just like brightness and saturation Contrast and hue and everything and make it pretty as you want you can see here that is tiling really well This has perspective in the bottom and it's telling very well So low contrast usually looks better try to make your textures like more color focus and contrast focus that will usually look better in the game I explain here how to create normal maps. I will do it a bit quick Usually if you want to make normal maps you have to start from what's called a Hague map You can see there in the in the middle. This is a Hague map. It shows like what is white is above and what is black is low So once you have a Hague map you can use the normal map effect in game I'm not sure if it comes with it or it's an extension. There are other applications You can download they just take a Hague map and return a normal map So this is why you can use it it shows like it has depth when you are working on it Some effects may break the tiling you can fix it again with what you have just learned Embossing may work for creating like a Hague map. You can see on top the embossing of the original texture You can use it to create a Hague map kind of like Here's a really simple magic trick I love for tiling textures You can see the original texture you can see that right doesn't really tile very well neither vertical nor horizontal It's a nice texture. It doesn't tile So what I do is I just like this is the base layer. I duplicated. I add another layer above Gimp has an effect it has a filter which which is cool make seamless But all it does is create a like a crossfade of the texture It really looks pretty bad, but it makes it seamless, but it looks pretty bad So what I do is just this above layer I make it like tile seamless with that effect But then I just use the eraser and erase everything but the border I just leave the border and then I merge it down to the layer below and you can see on the right It looks fantastic this this is in my opinion the best way to tile textures is like effortless It could be done with a script if you want like automatically It looks really well So it is just a small technique you can use if you can check back on the presentation later online And this really was for tiling textures So then we're going to modeling This is not something I use for the demo this technique, but I would like to explain it It's a very common technique in the in the industry You just make an atlas with shapes that may be like related to the way you are going to model a level or something Here you can see put like two planks of wood Something with a detail and then something's ground and then something that looks like a wallpaper or something You can paint the head map. I painted this head map myself With gimp And then from the head map you can get the the normal map there Then I converted this one to an occlusion and then you can use the rest for like Metalness and roadness, which is common in pivir workflows. I'm not going to explain pivir. You can find a lot about it So once you have those textures with your atlas with kind of shapes random shapes you put on it Just make objects that use those random shapes Just be creative like you make those shapes first and then you try to think and how to make objects that use them So they made some furniture like you have a window a table a chair another table And then you can use it and it's really quick you can model really quickly with that Because just just make the models and you will map based on the on the model on the texture It's a very quick You need to kind of use the same color for everything because when you use 3d and you use mid maps They will bleed a bit. So if you kind of use the same color, it's not really noticeable The big thing about this technique is that you can create content a lot It works really good like for futuristic things like uh, I think I read the document I think overwatch uses this technique for many of the levels. So that that can be of interest So this is an example. I made this and render it in Godot I made all this furniture and the walls and this took me like three hours or something like that It's really really quick. You just use this technique from scratch and you can make like a level really quickly So this is geometry based modeling Which is actually what we use for the the demo that this new third person shooter demo for Godot This is a really nice technique It's a very modern technique because you can only do it like know what days the GPUs are super fast and Amount of vertices in the model doesn't really matter that much So what you do is just model all your detail in geometry Just forget about painting a detail in the texture It may be very subtle if you are in the texture But most of your detail like 90 percent of your thing is just geometry You have like a hole in the middle of the thing just model the hole you have like a small Just a fin or something you're just modeling just every detail goes to the texture Model every every detail forget about like using the the the texture to paint the detail Just go crazy. It's okay. The new GPUs don't really care about so much polygons. No, but I it's little for the new GPUs So then what you can do is use tripler mapping tripler mapping is called also auto texturing. It's a way that just Just like blends between texture in three axis the texture files in every axis And blends depending on the direction the faces is having This is called auto texturing in godot. You have like this technique You can use uh, so the nice thing is that you can just set up a lot of materials And then you just assign them randomly where you you have like the metal material the tube material the screw material And then just put them there I know that for example many Companies in the in the animation industry like green roads use this technique We have somebody that that goes and models everything and then someone else makes the materials and assigns them to the object So this is a really nice technique and you can get really nice results like this is a picture It's using mostly this Then it has a bit of the Texture painting, but mostly you can see it's all geometry You can make it look really nice Here you can see there are a few more examples. It looks really nice.  It doesn't matter. It will look good And then you just assign the materials for for everything So level design I will show it if I have time in blender Uh, still have a bit of time. So when I'm done with the presentation, I will show a bit the projects in live Um, so then uh artists converse all the flocking the blocking that was done initially It's converted to final assets. They are given more detail and they are textured This is blender The idea is that artists has full freedom the level is actually made in blender Many people think that it's better or usually better to just model different pieces and assemble them in the game engine Usually when you work professionally, this is kind of a mess because the game designer doesn't really know how to like put together a level with pieces so It's better we just agree on what the level is and then the artists can go wild and do all the art and do all the detail And everything that just conforms to that to what originally was agreed with the designer So the pattern is much easier this way in my opinion Collisions are added manually also in the in here like for example We have a something in godot. You just add like minus call to the name of the object when imported to the engine a collision will be generated for it So godot converts to physics shapes You can do just minus call so the collision has the same The same shape as the object you model But sometimes you make a model really complicated and physics inches Like are really slow when you have so many triangles on the collision So it's very common to just make a new version of the model that is only like the vertices in the faces just for collision So you make it and in blunder you you add like minus call only which is means this is just for collision No, no art when imported the art is the letter so Here's an example of how it works This is like the base model which is model and the collision is another object I put it to wireframe so it's easier to see like which one is the collision and what is the what is the The object using all these very complex geometry and the physics engine is going to kill the physics engine So you need to make something simpler And then in blunder you just make the the base material since blunder doesn't really support the sun kind of Well, it does it will now a new blunder But it's easier to just make something very simple in blunder as reference for the materials When imported to the game engine you set the actual materials and finish with the textures and everything and always use very Very variable's name. So when going to the game engine you find the materials Otherwise, if you have like blunder material dot zero zero one, you're not going to find it The same goes for lights. You just can put like lights everywhere when imported to the engine the lights will be in the engine Uh, I would keep this you can use like one thing to notice that is important is that most 3d application Usually in the industry everyone uses the fbx format for exporting 3d We can't use this in godot because uh, this has a very very restricting Restricting license. It's not compatible with open source So the only open formats we can use are die, which is colada, which is old and gltf2 Which is newer both work really well for exporting the game engines So there's no one afford for reverse engineering the fbx format. It's like a very close format There's no specification just as close library to open it But it's being reverse engineer So I hope we can still support it soon because people really requested the ones that use maya or similar So this is the last part engine integration. Uh, so it's everything making everything pretty In godot you just export to the project and it will open it I wish you with this later better on the running on the engine So the ds I will explain quickly you just import it then you just the materials you just put all the textures This is just just when you port it. It doesn't have any material. It's flat Here the materials were added, but there's no no lighting Uh Finally, uh, we are we start like modifying the lights and everything in godot You have some called instantiate like the scene that was imported You can't touch it because it can't edit like the colada or the gltf file So what we do is just instantiate that scene into another one, which is very common in godot You said that's editable and you can make local changes in the new one This way you can edit your original At the original scene that was exported from PD without like changing it. Why is this important because The artist might go and and keep changing the the scene in blender And then we'll re export it and if you made local changes directly on that sun in the engine They will be lost so in godot you instantiate the the scene From the artist and make local changes in the instance So the artist will just save the scene again It will be imported automatically and now all the all the changes are are kept Well, finally the same the lighting you can just set like lights and shadows and everything Then you have the final step, which is like global illumination, which is the light bounces Usually you set up the direct lights when you set that lights It's like the right lighting which means that this is just where the light affects Global illumination is what adds the bounce like if I like throw a very very strong Light to the floor it will bounce and spread across all the room So global illumination is pretty much that You can see the godot has something called ga pro We set use of an area and all lighting inside it will just bounce around it looks pretty pretty you can see the comparison above and below And then what you cannot like pretty effects like ambient occlusion screen space reflection depth of field blue You cannot fog Anti-aliasing and bloom and everything So in the end it ended up looking like this. You can see it looks pretty nice I mean it's like kind of what games know what I look like Has all the detail and it's and it's very nice Since we have still a bit more I will show you this Working and running on the engine. I will show you first the demo if you've never seen it before How it finished Give it a second Okay, this follows the the planning you can just walk around the stage You can see that the the character moves around and all the lighting from the environment affects it This is the real time if I get close to this you can see the this emission material is affecting the character There's there's the enemy. So yeah, that's how we we ended up looking So thanks I'll show you a bit how it is done in the engine So you can see a bit more detail about the process I will open the player scene This is the Player You can see here. This is something that god does what it says scene root You can see here that this is actually a colada file which was exported directly From from blender. This was instantiated in this current scene, which is the player scene The player scene like has a node a base node, which is like a a kinematic body Which allows for moving with with physics and everything Uh It has a lot of animations and everything you you may expect This is everything imported from blender or the animations in blender. This is the animation tree Like for example, you can see that there is a blend filter and like the eyes are a An animation that's running in parallel that makes it blind no matter what is going on. This is called animation tree Uh, you can for example, uh Where is this this is sorted for this is a blend added for aiming up and down A blend node for example this one shot node you can turn on and it's going to just jump Doesn't look interesting now. No, actually that's for landing not jumping. This is mostly machine. You can change like the animations When we will probably notice that when you put walk the guy is like totally stunning. This is because there is a blend spacing here So depending on where the blend space goes Actually, you need to activate the animation This is this one See this is walking with gun walking without gun. I can't change the blending and in this axis is switching between gun No gun gun no gun and this is just the animation speed if I change this like You can see it just changes the animation speed therefore according on where I am I can just Start walking then I shoot when I shoot it's it just like takes out the weapon and stores it back Well Now there's a lot of interesting things you can do with the animation tree. So let me show you the scene It's pretty big will take just a bit longer Okay This is the actual level seen imported from thunder You can see this huge green thing is the gi probe. This is what gives like all the light bounces You can set it up around anything and it will give light bounces. It's really quick to set up Here you can see just Everything like the lights on the enemies and everything You can see that this is what I mentioned. This is actually the the scene as imported from from from blender It's like instantiated here. It's great because it's like children notes. You can still modify any of the properties So when you import the original file, they will like keep the changes This is for the enemy scenes Here's the enemies. You have different like robots You have like areas for the sound you can for example Here you can see we have a mix of some mixer in the dot This means that I can for example like set up an area Around where this is I can give it any shape And I say that any area any sound that plays on any area is going to like the bass Which is outside In the outside I set an area say any sound here goes to the side bass and then here As you can see we can add a lot of effects audio effects like amplify delay everything just a lot of audio effects You cannot so we can for example have different reverbs the smaller area You can use a smaller reverb the big area you can use a bigger reverb And they are sent there The music is just a note you just can You turn it down and it plays the music pretty much You have reflection probes. There's a lot of things you can you can use here Particle systems and different types of notes so You can see here that it's It's very interesting if you had it out like this is the original designs pixel arts price made like 10 years ago for this demo This is a 3d the same artist actually made the pixel art 10 years ago under 3d 10 years later He tried to keep the designs as much as possible But it shows like how much this technology has improved over the years, I guess So well this concludes the presentation. So if there are any questions, we still have 10 minutes, I think So are there any questions? Hi, so during your talk you mentioned that the poly count doesn't matter So what I'm wondering is if you profiled this How can you speak louder because I can't So during the talk you mentioned that you said the poly count doesn't matter while you're making the models I'm wondering if you've profiled this on iGPUs and if you compared that to a high low detail pass with normal baking In general, um, how can I explain? GPUs keep improving. Maybe the artists like 15 years ago were very careful. I was not mean not adding to polygons I mean when I say it doesn't matter is that in general artists like still too used to using as least vertices as possible But as technology keeps improving you can still use more and more and more and it really is not that of course You kind of always make too many vertices or too many faces But for a while an artist needs to make it look nice It really doesn't matter so much like to know what it is if you make this main character and if you made it like 40,000 polygons, it's fine. It's going to run everywhere. It's not going to be any problem In Godot, it's sort of like compressed so when you open it, it's it will load fast and it won't run fast Uh, you can also see that the in the in the level the artist is He just didn't like model everything you see from scratch here. We used a lot of objects. So there's probably like 30 base objects that were already used like a section was put inside So like in a cylinder So there are not actually not that many Not that many pieces that make this level that you have just seen there's a lot of reuse for that So as most pieces are reusable, um, there are not that many pieces being round in general You just can't go wild with geometry in that. It's fine. It's not going to matter much It's not like you're making like something completely Everything unique professional 3d artists in general. They know That the more they can reuse what they do the faster they will make it They will be more efficient because just doing more and more and more is going to take longer for them Uh, so in general for a level like this normally you don't have that many pieces or anything like that So it's normal that that you just can use higher geometry and be fine with it If you're making something like I don't know like Assassin's Creed where you can have a 10 kilometers distance, of course, you probably need to use l o d's just to To make like less geometry used on the things that are far away and occlusion and different things But in general for what you see close nowadays on a game, uh, it really doesn't matter that much How many polygons it has because you have like mesh streaming for l o d's and everything No, it doesn't really matter that much. No way We still have plenty more time for question out there Yeah, it was about the use kit that you mentioned about Assassin's Creed if you have to see an object like 10 kilometers away How do you deal with it in Godot like I know that there are some techniques like desolation or a lot of detail Is the how does Godot deal with it? Uh version 3.1 which is coming now, uh Still doesn't handle l o d very well Because as I told you it has just one year. We have made a new 3d engine We're going to port the engine to vulcan next year and add all the missing options but the general idea that with l o d is that You make models with high geometry If you're going to make a game that has a very long, uh, the drawing distance Usually what you do is just you make version half that have less this geometry and are much simpler Uh, and when you import you set them as l o d So there are two two ways of doing either you just make two versions yourself Or when you import you set it like just decimate the model and make it useless geometry automatically like automatic loads This is also very common so one of the nice things from automatic loads is that When the game loads at first it's just those all the low detail versions of the polygons And only whatever is close gets loaded like gets streamed as uh as high detail So as you you leave the game a fixed amount of memory it can use for models So when it runs out pretty much because you're moving and it needs to load a new high detail one You use an earlier you Approach and it's going to like free the high detail version of the older one So you just move around the world and it's going to when what is closed It will load the high version high detail versions and what is Far away it will just free the high detail versions. That's how you actually move around Usually games like in the case of the Essence and screed the latest one the latest two ones They use a really complex cooling technique for like just showing very So in in cases of games that complex I mean you probably need like a few dose and million dollars to make a game like that You probably may want to write a custom rendering pipeline that that's better like hardware cooling or something like that But for something a regular team that is not one of the dose and big studios that can make a game like that It's just using streaming is going to be far far, you know, any more questions You mentioned in the title about you alluded to making the next blockbuster game using open source tools Do you have any major projects or game developments that are under development using your engine? If you check Or we have a reel of games that are being made we are going to make a new one in a few weeks There are many interesting projects made it's mostly indie projects Like you go to this like still pretty small in community compared to the the very known engines It's the fastest growing engine. If you check the global game champ numbers, it's like duplicating every year We are not like on the level of game maker or construct like it's still small compared like to unity Not that small compared to unreal But it's growing much faster than any of the others. I think Games that are like being made. I'm not really sure. There are many nice things being made if you check what the community makes Game published. I don't know. I don't think so because the the new 3d engine is like really new and making a game That is very complex with 3d takes like a long time So until we see that kind of games made with the engine probably a few years will have to happen But people is making my things and it's growing very fast. So I hope it's going to change in the in the coming years Hi, um, I'm not a 3d modeler, but um, I know a modeler in the industry and He doesn't like to recommend a blender to new people that he's training up because the workflow is completely different to Other modelers that are typically used in the industry. Do you feel that's improving at all? Uh, you mean that the problem is that they don't like to recommend blender Sorry, sorry, I didn't catch it. I didn't quite understand the question. Just the way in which you use it like even down to the Keyboard shortcuts and just the way that you use it is completely different. I don't use it myself. So I'm not familiar, but I thought it was an interesting point I can't you speak louder because the speaker doesn't reach so much here. Sorry. Sorry, um Um When he's training new people, he doesn't like to recommend blender because the workflow is so different down to Keyboard shortcuts and just the way in which you use it compared to the commercial modelers Ah, yeah In general, the thing is, uh, I think these kind of things are in large part generational We can you can check it very well in the like the dot community Like most load users are young people, uh, or people that has more, uh, will to try something different Older people who has been working on the industry for longer time Usually will not want to switch technologies. It's the same with linux. It started like being kids making our brain Our brain systems and 30 years later is like widespread and used by everywhere I think this kind of things are generational mostly at some point when it grows so much Others will have to like give it a try and they will have to adapt or die. I guess That at the beginning it's always generational in my opinion So, uh, I think blender is perfectly capable for this. Uh, I think in europe is used quite a lot Probably in in the states not so much because they have this Idea that they need to hire a company that sets up the computer with maya So they hire autodesk and autodesk will set all their computers for them with the rendering farm or everything Just for what they need. This is a very more more like an american big company mentality But as soon as uh time passes, I think it's going to change because this is more generational that people really think that is good I in my opinion Yeah, I just wanted to bring another point of view to this remark I wanted to bring another point of view to this remark because I really think the country Industry should not dictate this standards or a way of working and one of the reasons That we are also happy to and that's the way I use godot is trying to think If we can find other workflows many artists use it precisely because many artists use free software Graphics and free software imagery Precisely because you can intervene on the workflow eventually rethink The way you organize things eventually Do visual transformation of the norm? So I wish that I I agree the generational. I think is really good answer. That's that's a way of saying it But we can change our workflow. It doesn't have to be us adapting to the industry workflow And this is what is killing a graphic industry Yes, I completely agree One thing I know is that I have seen that uh impresses me so much about open source is the way it works Generally, it's like it may I will explain it sure because I know we have very little time But maybe on for this work is really amazing Usually when you have an open source project, it's the contributors are mostly separated into those who like create something which are Small and those who add something to it and make it good, you know, so For godot what happens the most is that we have a really big community of contributors And every feature that is added is tested a lot and it's criticized a lot and it's changed a lot We break compatibility because someone comes up and says we can this make much much better If you true it to the trash and make it again And it happens a lot and what ends up happening is that if you check the engine, there are a lot of workflows That are really amazing really well thought If you compare it to the commercial engines, they are like much worse than what godot is doing mainly because there is this kind of Internal competition the which is very healthy about how who makes the best version of every workflow or feature Or a lot of community complaints about something But maybe differently than if it maybe you're using I don't know you need your own real community will complain They don't like something and that's it In godot they will complain and they will make a pull request and then others will criticize the pull request And hey, why do you also make it like this way and it keeps changing and improving and we have some discussions That may take months to to to just decide how to make something and in the end Everyone agrees everyone always agrees in the end after months of like arguing And the best way of doing it that we have found out is implemented that is really amazing So when people trace out godot, usually what happens is that they are very surprised about many of the workflows because they They are very polished and very well designed Maybe they need like to click for you once you learn them But one you do is once you do it like wow, this is like very well thought out And it's not like there's someone who is a genius behind that It's more like there's a very well made community effort to discuss everything and make it good And make sure you work the business as possible So I think that I hope that kind of answers or complements what you said With a godot engine do you have to do a lot of Testing for the multiple so you want to it's a Multi-platform engine you have to do a lot of testing with different drivers different Vendors and hardware and everything or is it pretty much if you design it? It'll run on windows on linux on a amd or nvidia or intel For desktop drivers, usually it's fine. Nowadays the drivers are good both on everywhere The problem we have now is that we also open gl and open gl is getting kind of Deplicated by the industry and the drivers are withdrawing and they are very complex drivers which can be trotting. So we're going to be Moving to bullcam for the next version Because open gl is kind of no longer viable as it's very broken on mobile It's kind of unusable. So we have to go back to open gl is to from a while because open gl 3 is just broken But in general most testing is done by the community I have like I work on rendering. I have a lot of hardware But until the community tests and reports about it's difficult to have it like perfect But usually this is pretty efficient It just works quickly that they report and we fix even they submit the pull request with the fix Uh, hi, I was wondering if you do any sort of uh texture packing for your pbr resources For example, you can have a normal map, which is just two channels and resolve the third and Pack the roughness and mountainous into Textures as well. Uh, I'm wondering if you do this And if you could give some insight into what pbr equations that you use in go dot Uh, you have a you can you have right shaders as in goal You can use visual shader with nodes and you have a very very complete default shader Material that has a lot of parameters It lets you assign like every channel to everything of the texture if you want So it's quite easy to to to use if you want just to use different channels in the material You can use that you can use a you can do it in many ways if you want it's very flexible I was uh wondering how much time and with how many people How much time did you invest and with how many people into making that demo? I got here. Sorry He asked how much time, uh, the people Needed to to to to create the demo Uh, this demo was made in three weeks kind of if you put all the time together Yeah, if you're like very professionalize you can make this really quickly. Uh, so So, thank you very much for your talk. Thanks everyone


Partner nations involved in Cutlass Express have come together aboard the USS Simpson for a reception. Growing a global force of navies to increase maritime security is at the core of Cutlass Express, and that comes through partnerships. Rear Admiral Thomas Reck, Vice Commander of US Sixth Fleet, tells us more of what it means to bring nations together. It's all about relationships. Bringing 12 partner nations together in over 250 personnel together. These are the people in the future that they'll be fighting next to and fighting with. So it's important that we establish these relationships early in one's career and then we revisit it often. The President of Mauritius was one of the partners aboard the Simpson and he reinforced the importance of having a global force of navies. This type of force is being demonstrated by those participating in Cutlass Express. We always believe in regional cooperation and what is more important is that one or two years ago we had a huge threat of piracy in this part of the world. And that was impacting on the life of our people because the cost of living was going up with the help of the United States. Another friend of the country, we have been able to bring down the frequency of piracy in this part of the world and today we feel safe and that is very important for us. History has shown the value of working together towards a common goal and that's what Cutlass Express intends as it moves from the tactical level to the operational and strategic levels. Rear Admiral Rec says it was an honor to make partnerships in Mauritius this year. I mean it couldn't have been a greater honor to have the exercise culminate in this way. Have the President of Mauritius see a U.S. Navy ship and get it toward the U.S. Navy ship. So it was really wonderful having him. Cutlass is one of four Express series exercises in Africa facilitated by U.S. Naval Forces Europe Africa, U.S. Sixth Fleet. From Port Louise Mauritius, I'm Senior Airman Levi Rouse.


Hi everyone, Joe for jazzy's case breaks.com with 2019-2020 Panini mosaic basketball Hoppy pack number 365 the last one we got to do to unlock that one box break of prism basketball that random team break I think that random team break just has two or three more full spots left and then we're in breaks fall on that so let's get that add to the schedule if you can all right big thanks to this group for making it happen there are the teams right there let's roll it let's randomize names and teams two out of five seven times and a different dice roll for the giveaway part one two three seven two out of five seven times of the teams two seven all right there's the first half of the list right here and the second half of the list right over there no trade windows let's just print and rip different dice roll for the giveaway part and the hobby pack is from a uh fresh box so yeah I guess there is an autograph possibility here all right it's random enough so thanks for spending a bit of your sunday with us appreciate it let's see if we have any surprises in here andry shammett bobby portis there's all right nothing too crazy in here but there are five nice hits here which are those spots in that prism break so new dice new list top five after 11 five into six one two three four five six seven eight nine 10 and 11th final time so from six on down sad times very close but just not quite we'll get them next time six through 30 thanks for taking the risk top five congrats you're in the next break nico you're in so is tristan nico nico and nico nico did have the odds on his side four of the five spots tristan sneaking in there as well after 11 thanks gang we'll see you and uh we'll see you a little bit later tonight for that prison basketball rake jaspyscasebreaks.com


Hi there and welcome to another edition of Tuesdays with Corey. I am in my special, my special place, my special MSP series. And I'm talking with a set of MSPs, very exciting to hear some of the awesome work that they are doing to help customers move and modernize to the cloud. So please tell us a little bit about who you are and tell us a little bit about who you work for and what you do. Sure. I'm Greg Davidson. I'm from Auckland in New Zealand. Okay. And I work for Datacom. We're an IT company based in New Zealand in Australia, about 5,000 people. We're actually doing quite a wide spectrum of different things, including software development application management, managed services, network management, I can keep going. Yeah, yeah, long list. Got it. Okay, great. And now for Datacom, do you guys specifically focus on Australia and New Zealand or is it a broader reach? Well, we started in New Zealand, we now got a really good presence in Australia. Sure, a great place to sit. And then we got a small presence up in Asia. Up in Asia as well. Okay, great. Got it. Okay, cool. Southeast Asia. Southeast Asia. Okay, got it. So people in the US wouldn't buy from you today? Yeah, actually we work with some organizations up here. Fantastic. We do quite a bit of work for Dell helping them in the Office 365 space. Oh, okay, great. Okay, so this is interesting. So you support customers both when they're modernizing both on the Office 365 site and on the Azure site. Yes. Cool. So they can basically come to you for all of their needs, which is great. So on the Azure side, when you're helping customers move into the cloud, you're helping them sort of consider what to do, right? What are some of the things that you guys look at particularly to help customers make this transition, right? It's a tough transition for a lot of customers. All customers are different, but I think there are sort of three key parts to it. There's an assessment, which is looking at what they've got. Got it. What's going to move easily? Right. The biggest benefit, and then the things that they've perhaps got that are going to be harder to manage or move to the cloud. The second bit would be how to migrate, but the important bit and the bit that I think has probably got not enough attention is what it's like in run state. To operate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's to operate. And so what you don't want to do, you want to keep efficient operation, which is something that, of course- Or even improve their operations if you can. Yeah, yeah. So the cloud enables you to, probably the most significant of this is more dramatically automate operations. Fantastic. So when you migrate, what you want to be doing is transforming it to a really efficient run state. Excellent, excellent. So when you say automate, this is the full range of scripting and even changing applications, or is it mostly keeping applications unchanged? It can be anything, I mean obviously a genuine born in the cloud application is a completely different- Different beast. Architecture. Totally, yeah. And so if they've got things that, you know, if you're doing it as part of them targeting, delivering new services, or as part of a digital transformation, you might build something completely new. Got it. So if you look into the spectrum, if you consider the traditional role of a managed services provider, it's going to be about cost-efficient operation to high service levels and get it removing risk. Yes. And so you have the opportunity to automate many of the traditional tasks I see. Rather than have people sort of deliver them through process. Got it. So something very important then that I think you guys, that you look at and focus on one, you obviously take the whole spectrum, right? Whether it be born in the cloud applications and sort of building fresh. But also then this lift and shift. And your key point here is that, hey, your classic service provider in a lift and shift type of environment, it would be, we ran it here, now we're just going to run it here. And you're saying, whoa, hold on, that's actually maybe not the right approach. We probably won't get an efficient run. You're going to go change your operations, you're going to go and we're going to help you get there, even though we're the service provider that's helping you. So one of the biggest things to think about is the change in discipline when you go from managing capacity to managing consumption. Yeah, I got it. You know, the number one thing that happens to customers when they go from capacity to consumption. I like that. It's consumption explosion. I like that. I like that. Because if you take all the traditional barriers to provision new capacity away, or what do people do? That's right. The physical barriers are gone. They just consume heaps of it. The physical barriers are gone. So now they do whatever they want, which is then a different set of problems. So the first thing you're doing is you're heavily helping them manage consumption. Yes. Now, it is possible through automation to do a whole lot of things that ensure that applications run more efficiently. What you want to do is have transparency, help people understand where they're creating cost and give them the ability to make choices about switching things off. Switching things off and controlling this. Automating. Yeah. Understanding what's being heavily used, what's not. That's awesome. Okay. Very cool. So that's awesome. It sounds like that's a big focal point for you guys. It sounds like something you do very well here. So if you had one sentence here to say, hey, this is, or a couple of words, whatever, that this is what is great about Datacom. What would you say? Oh. I'm sorry. I didn't prepare you for this. I should have. No, no, no. I know. I should have prepared. It's terrible. Yeah.  I know. I'm sorry. You definitely sprang me up on that one. A single word what makes this difficult. Or you can make it a sentence. Make it a sentence. How about a sentence? I don't need a word because I couldn't describe a word for Azure that makes it awesome. Sure. Awesome. Maybe. Perhaps if I talk about what I hope our people will bring to customers. Perfect. That's great. Okay. I hope they bring expertise. Mm-hmm. I hope they bring some insight. Yes. And I hope they bring some imagination about what's possible. Okay. That's great for feeling like I sprung it. I think you landed a really good answer. Okay. Great. So with that, thank you so much. It was really great talking with you. And thank you guys so much for joining in. We will take questions if you've got them on Twitter with hashtag Azure TWC so we will look for questions and we'll make sure that if people have questions for you or want to get in touch with you, we can make that connection on Twitter. So thank you so much for your time and thank you guys and have a wonderful Tuesday. No problem. Thank you so much. Of course. You'll see me start off that way so we'll be fine. Okay. Yeah, yeah. That's fine. There is no four. There is no walls here, Rick. Freedom. All right, are you ready? Yes. Okay. All right. It was a clap. All right. Oh, I didn't do it on the last one. All right, fine. I always do. Okay. He's so proud. All right. You ready? You good? Yeah. I hope so. All right.


What do you think prepared you to become the leader of 1J&J? Why IWAH and why not an extant from within the J&J network? Well, I think one is I am one person who is quite fearless by nature. I raise my hand for things that never been done before. The second part of it is I think J&J has also prepared me a few other opportunities, maybe smaller ones. I led a urology business that J&J newly acquired and they were looking for a leader who is willing to lead a business that is totally unknown to acquired and not sure whether how it would succeed. I have colleagues who say that it's not going to be secure because this thing may seize it off and turn out to be something that J&J may not want to continue. Why would you want to take on something like that? I look at it as a great experience for me to lead a new business that has no charter path. And I don't see risks, I see more opportunities. So I think from that angle, the company has got to know more about what IWAH can offer. I also got to know the company as in when they put someone in a uncharted opportunity, how does the company give you the support and truly behind you, even things don't work out.


Thank you for inviting me to present my work on Senegalese. I will present here my work on savings and sharing pleasure in the extended family. So, let's start with quotes that I collected in the field, which says that if you have the money, you have to give it, but if you don't, you don't need to. In Senegal, you don't have the possibility to save because the family is here, there is the pleasure, there is the electricity bill of your brother that you need to pay, there are your parents to help, but the moment you start to do something, then they will let you in peace. That's why I started to build my house in Haiti. So, that was a teacher in the Prudnet board of Dakar and he stressed the mechanism I want to highlight here is that the larger the pleasure you feel from your family, the lower you may be able to save. I will give some elements of context about Senegal and more generally, sub-Saharan Africa. So, it's a context where there is limited access to financial markets, low welfare provision, and structural vulnerability of also two shocks. This may induce two well-documented observations. First, that Kinship and Social Network are really preponderant and there are many news as informal insurance providers. As referred to in the literature as risk-sharing. And this has become to be especially efficient for idiosyncratic shocks. Another point is that low savings rates are achieved, sorry for the typo, and while savings are meant to protect against more obligated shocks. So, there is few evidence on the effect of social network on resource allocation, and I will try here to investigate the role of the extended family in these decisions. So, what do I call extended families? The set of relationships that are acquired by blood, marriage or adoption by someone. And as for blood types, this is typically quite exogenous because it's not a matter of choice. And Kinship entails informal redistribution with its members, at-risk members. And more specifically for Senegal, it's a lineage-based society with polynuclear household, meaning that there are some subunits that are rather autonomous within the same household. And each household or individual is connected with other members of the Kinship network outside of the household. And we found during fieldwork that there is a really important of the household origin, meaning the household in which you grown up, where with your parents, siblings, cousins, etc. 70% of in- and out-transferring value take place within the Kinship network according to our data. So, let me briefly start with a brief literature review. And I will start by saying that there is a recent interest in the economic literature on savings. And one of the main questions that people want to try to answer is how to increase savings in developing countries. And one answer that came out was that people really need commitment device in order to increase demands for savings. And what does, what underlying costs for saving does its need for commitment reveal? Many three arguments have been put forward. First, that people are forgetting about saving. So, it's an argument of limited attention. Or people just value too much their present. So, they prefer to consume now than consume later. And so, more procrastination behaviors. And finally, that people face financial pressure from the Kinship or social network for distribution leaving nothing left to save. So, this third argument is the one I will focus here today. All the three can be complements or substitutes. I'm not tackling this issue right here. So, another part of the literature, economic literature, is looking at the role of social networks. And traditionally, it has been more focused on positive aspects of social networks, meaning more risk sharing, social learning, etc. Recent works, however, are showing more balanced evidence. Well, these, for example, DiFalco and Dante in last year, they published a paper in South Africa, where he shows that households are more exposed to social pressure. They proxy social pressure, probably the number of members that were invited in the household in the past year. Spend more on non-scharable goods that they characterize as investment in the house. Rather than shareable goods in order to escape the family. Jacquela and other in a lab experiment in Kenya show that there is a distortion towards less visible and less lucrative investment due to sharing norms in order to escape sharing norms in Kenya. And Ballon and his co-authors show in a paper entitled Pretending to be poor, pouring to escape forced solidarity in Camus based on the qualitative evidence and on a theoretical signaling model. They show that people in order to be able to refuse a demand for transfer rather prefer to pay interest on a loan so as to signal the fact that they are scarce resources. So what I will do today, I will try to understand the mechanism that are observed on the field concerning the role of the family, what I call family tax on saving decisions. And more specifically, there's the size and the position in the extended family influence both saving and transfer decisions. So to start with, I conducted with a colleague a qualitative survey in Senegal where we traced 35 individuals from different families. So several members of the same extended family in different locations in order to better understand the mechanism that are played between transfers and savings. So we could interview both a saver and a sender of transfer and a receiver for example. So two main points were raised that first redistribution to the network is found as a duty even as a pride but as soon as you are discussing a bit more with most of the people they will acknowledge that it's also a burden. A burden because lower revenue is left for savings so they said that as the court were mentioning that there is really an incapacity to save and that in order to be able to save they have to commit themselves ex-sante into costly strategies of savings in order to be able to say no once they receive a demand for transfer. So this means that there will be an increase in non-sharable or non-observable savings. So Rosca for example can be a tool where it's a public commitment towards the community to participate every week into the Rosca. So Rosca Rotative Saving and Credit Association which is called Tortine, it's illegal. So it's a public commitment to save and so if someone is asking you a transfer and if the only money you have is for this participation you are allowed to say no because it's something that people respect. So people are also investing into Rosca in order to be able to say no or non-sharable can be assets that are non-divisible for example. So in my data what I will consider as non-sharable according to what's said also in our qualitative survey will be money left at the bank even if it's at 300 metres because the moment people are asking you you don't have the money on yourself directly available so they will say that they don't have the money even if it's really at the shopkeeper next door. So bank shopkeeper, Rosca and divisible goods are what I call non-sharable savings. So if you look at... So it enables people to have more control on the demand for transfer on these assets. For the agreement of preference for presence it's also a commitment not to consume right now but in case of need it's true that it's not directly available. There are some entry costs to open a bank account especially in this country. There are some transportation costs if you are not directly next door. It requires all the types of savings to put... to entrust the third party and generally returns are low or no interest even for the bank account since people usually don't use a saving account but just a check account with no interest and I'm speaking about also a country with 95% of the population which is Muslim who is Muslim and who follows the Islamic rule for many of them. I said that Rosca is... since there is many Rosca that end up where people don't receive the money they put into the Rosca and still people continue to use it. Sharable savings for me is the money that it's kept at all so it's directly available in case of need but it will be easily captured by peers and easily consumed by oneself and there are no returns. So what are the expected effects we may have from having a larger extended family according to your situation within your family network? So I differentiate within... if you are... it brings some difficulties you may expect just to have lower savings but to benefit from the network by receiving net altitude. Whereas if you are successful and if it's observable you may expect your savings to decrease as well because of the transfers and to send a lot of transfers to being net received, net sender. Whereas if you have an economic success that you are able to commit yourself into some coping strategy you're saving Michael up and you may have a better control of your transfer by seeing that your net transfer has decreased. So what are the data I'm using for this study? I'm using a poverty and family structure from Senegal which is a nationally representative survey conducted in 2006 and 2007 by Deville, Amber, Stathier and Sylla. It's a sample of 1,750 households for 14,000 individuals spread over all the country. As I said it's a largely messling country with also the size of 8 individuals. Also they are extanty both vertically and horizontally. So to go briefly we observe that women are the ones who save more more women are savings but in value terms there is no strong difference between men and women. Women are more saving into rescues while men are more saving into banks. And we observe that savers are richer are more saving servants and slightly more boys and sisters. Transfer so as I said already before a large majority of transfer is transferred within the family, 72. At least 80% of the sample at least receive or send a transfer to a family member. Let's go to the... My empirical strategy is really straightforward. I'm looking at the effect of having many siblings and having a specific position and the interaction of the two on savings and transfers decision. So I'm considering the siblings because it's an exogenous proxy of the social, the kinship network since it's not a matter of choice by the individual. I reproxy the position in the network by considering social mobility relative to the father meaning whether I'm working in the formal sector while my father was an agricultural farmer and whether I attended at least secondary education while my father did not. So I'm using a bench of control meaning of... like age, education, marital status being the head of the household or as a staff. Revenues, employment sector, occupational status and at the household level the household side, the relative cell side cell is the subunit of the household I'm studying I can have in the data the share of inactive cell background. I'm putting a neighbor to fix the bed to be able to control for any enumerator bias time to correct for any seasonal bias as well since as I said the survey was taken place during two years over one year and cluster standard there was at the household level. So here it's a regression where I look at the direct effect of CPSHIP on savings so the first column is total savings in CFA francs the second is the log the second is the ratio of non-chairable savings over total savings I put one CFA franc to everyone at home and the second is the log of old transfer, the log of old transfer made on a regular basis and finally the log of old transfer to see the effect in net so what we can see here is that when we look at the average effect of the number of savings on savings one more savings is increasing savings and increasing the probability amount that is old transfer that was for male, here for female we see no effect on savings but we see that a balanced effect for transfer however we see that in net women are more net receivers so when we look at the interaction between the number of savings so the size of the network and the position within the network we see that having a high economic status without social mobility meaning that I'm working in a formal job but my father was not a farmer increased the level of savings so by 40,000 francs while working in the formal sector while my father was a farmer meaning having a high economic status with social mobility decreases my savings by 10,000 francs and by 29% meaning 29% decrease in savings for savings while we see on the transfer side that both cases when you have high status you transfer more so for women what we see is that here I'm looking at the high economic status is for the husband meaning when the husband is working in the formal sector while her father was a farmer or not and we see that just having a husband working in the formal sector whatever was the background of the father decreases your level of savings but has no effect on transfer why we observe no effect on transfer one explanation may be that the husband is directly sending the transfer to the in-law family result transferring through the spouse so it's not registered under the spouse that the more the husband is transferring yes the more the husband is in-law family the lower the spouse will save so if I wrap up the result what we found is that on average when we are semi meaning whatever the position you are among your seed chip the more savings you have the more you are saving the more you are transferring but no in that you don't find anything because on average all the transfer that are sent out should also be received by someone but whereas when you look at high economy status without mobility you see that it decreases your savings and your transfer while when it's salience, social mobility you have a decrease in savings associated with transfers for women you see that any high economy status will decrease your savings so I also tried with an alternative measure as I said of position where I looked at attending at least secondary education while your father did or did not attend school and I found the same results so far this is suggestive evidence of course not causal relationship pressure as proxy by the number of savings reduces savings for individuals what a social mobility episode is relative to their father one question you may ask is what alternative competing channel other than redistribution through transfer could explain the effect of savings on savings for this particular position in the family I don't see consistent story that could explain but if you have any I would be really happy to learn about it so to wrap up this is a study that is on the role of informal redistribution and save in decision and we showed that a lower capacity to save and distorted preference for some type of savings and since savings are important because they enable people to face risk and to invest in poverty trap I think it's an important part of the research and more focus should be on the cost and benefits of such informal redistribution within the family network thank you


Remember in the middle school dance example, we started out with just randomly placing the location of our clusters, the centroids, and then we move them around trying to find a better location. The idea is that as we move the locations around and we start calculating the Euclidean or crowfly distances from the individuals to the centroids, we want to minimize those differences, those distances, until we come up with the optimum location for the centroids which minimizes the total distance from all of the individuals in that cluster to that centroid. And that's what we're going to do now using Solver. We've got our dance hall here, our space, these are our clusters, and for each dimension we will have a location for that cluster and also the location of the customers being either zero or one if they are participating in that particular space, that particular dimension. And because we're using zero and ones, we want to control the locations for the clusters to be greater than zero and less than one. And if you remember, we use Solver in an earlier problem to help us come up with an optimum solution of either maximizing an objective function or minimizing one or hitting some value. Here we're going to use this total distance which is the sum of the minimum distance to a cluster for each of the customers and use that as our objective function. Go to the data tab, click on Solver, open up the Solver dialog box. The first thing we want to do is set our objective, we click on that empty cell there to make sure it's blinking and then go down and click on our total distance and then we want to minimize it and we're going to change the locations of the clusters and we click in that box and start with cluster one and we go all the way down to K33, which gets all of the clusters for all of the offers. Now we need to add constraints. I mentioned we need to keep the variables here between zero and one. So let's add a constraint and our cell references again from one to K33 and we want them to be less than one and I'm going to click OK. If you notice in the Solver if we've got make unconstrained variables non-negative that means that these variables cannot go below zero. Now we need to change the solving method to something called evolutionary. We need to set the options for evolutionary so we open up Solver's options box and find it there, click on evolutionary tab, make sure we've got required bounds on variables. We want the convergence to be .0001 for zeros, mutation rate we want to be 0.015, population size 100, random seeded default zero and change the maximum time that improvement to 600 and again require bounds. So we click OK and then we click solve. Now this is going to take a while and I'm not going to wait the whole time. Depending upon how fast your computer is, how many programs you have running, how much RAM you have, it could take 20 or 30 minutes. If you think about it we have an awful lot of things that Solver has to check in order to try to minimize this distance. So it's going to take a while. It goes through and tries solution, moves around these values and the locations and then solves all those equations simultaneously trying to figure out how to minimize this total distance. So I'm going to pause the video here and come back once we get a solution. I might mention if you look down at the very bottom of your worksheet you can see that Solver is working there. Right now it's found an incumbent. It calls it 162.79 and it's on subproblem 1200 and I don't know how many different solutions has tried. So it's cranking away. Look down there to make sure it is moving just to give you some reassurance that you're not wasting your time on the solution. So again I want to pause. Okay it took about 30 minutes of my machine. I had some other programs running I've forgotten about but it got a minimum total distance of 140.54 and of course whatever you're doing would probably have a different objective but that would give you an idea. Here are the cluster locations and that's kind of cluttered. I want to change the formatting there to make it a little bit more understandable home and let's reduce the number of decimal places down so we can get something a little more intelligent. Whoops, meeting before. Okay and now if we scroll down to the bottom we'll see that we have an assigned cluster for each one of our customers. Two for Adams, four for Allen, one for Anderson, two for Bailey. Eric begs the question why did Solver assign them to those clusters? And we'll take a look at that next.