The Perfect Weapon, released in 1991 and starring Jeff Speigman, is perhaps a staple movie in most martial arts movie collection. Now you'd be hard-pressed to find a Kempo today who does not have this movie in their collection, or has at least seen it or known about it. And at face value, it might just seem like your standard 90s action film, but if you look closer we can clearly see that this is the ultimate Kempo movie. So The Perfect Weapon is definitely a film I grew up with. You know I discovered it in 1992, which maybe I found on cable, which is about a year before I started American Kempo. And the funny thing is I started American Kempo without really knowing what it was, and I didn't make the connection right away until Jeff Speigman came down for a seminar. And that's when I realized, oh wait, that's the guy from Perfect Weapon. It made me fall in love with the art even more. So I want to talk about that today, but before we get into the details of the movie, let's talk very, very briefly about the background of the film. Now we've covered the history of American Kempo before, and I'm going to put those links in the description below. But just a very quick recap, the art American Kempo Karate was formulated by Edmund Parker. And having grown up on the streets of Honolulu, Ed Parker spent his life training in multiple martial arts, and he began to fuse ideas together. And to form his system, he kept what worked for him when he found Six Festival, and he discarded what he felt was unnecessary. In adding a study of anatomy and human motion, Ed Parker put all these concepts together and he devised a system for self-defense American Kempo, which he called the science of motion. Now Kempo honestly is a heavily debated art. There are many people who are for and against it, but that's not what I want to talk about here. And despite how you might feel about Ed Parker and American Kempo as a system in terms of its effectiveness, there's one skill that he undoubtedly had that cannot be denied. And that was publicizing the art and bringing the martial arts into the forefront spotlight of the public eye. His influence spanned decades of growing interest in American martial arts, all the way through the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and his influence and mark is still felt in the martial arts today. Now he had a hand in bringing more sophisticated martial arts into American television, such as getting Bruce Lee the role of Cato and the Green Hornet, as all the way up to having Elvis Presley be an ambassador for the system. Ed Parker knew media and he knew publicity and he was highly effective at spreading Kempo's influence across the country. Now the Perfect Weapon was no exception and I personally fully believe that this movie did a lot to drive public interest towards the art. Unfortunately, Mr. Parker passed away in 1990 before the film's release and I do feel that this would have been the first of many joint ventures with Justin Beekman he would have had to help bring American Kempo to the forefront of American cinema. Now while Justin Beekman did go on to produce a dozen plus other action movies each featuring his Kempo techniques, the Perfect Weapon stands alone and having Ed Parker's Kempo at its core and actually embedded in the story. Now Justin Beekman is a household name in most Kempo circles. Even as a youth he was very athletic in high school he was part of the springboard diving team and he also admits that growing up he watched the show Kung Fu with David Carranine and he loved how the flashback showed him in his training and how it made him grow as a person so that movie inspired him to take up an interest in the martial arts. He began his training in Okinawan Gojiru under master Lou Angel. Pursuing for the studies in the martial arts, Lou Angel recommended to Justin Beekman that he seek out the teaching of Ed Parker and in doing so he became one of Parker's highest profile students definitely earning the place as ambassador of the art. Now I had the honor of meeting Justin Beekman early on in my training at the seminar when I was just yelling about and in a few subsequent times as our school was for a while part of the Justin Beekman Kempo system. Now it is my personal belief that Ed Parker was priming Justin Beekman to carry the art forward as an ambassador for the art and you can see that today in Mr. Beekman's actions. He has gone on to carry forward American Kempo. He's made a lot of evolutionary modifications to the art. He's changed tactics and techniques to focus more on today's fighting trends and he's definitely addressed the popularity of BJJ and he's implemented a heavy ground fighting curriculum into his art of Kempo 5.0. If you want to learn more about Kempo 5.0 please check out our episode The Evolution of American Kempo. Once again it's a link in the description below. So with all of that established, what makes the perfect weapon the definitive Kempo film? Now as a disclaimer I will say that this movie is first and foremost entertainment. Kempo draws a lot of criticism for you know having preconceived and pre-choreographed self-defense techniques that people often criticize as unrealistic saying that no one's just going to stand there as you hit them 20 times. Once again, this is going to be a debate for another time. However, those Kempo techniques are not really meant to be memorized and performed on the street. They're teaching tools, they teach concepts that you take out and you apply to freestyle techniques and freestyle fighting and the thing is most people just see the techniques performed as they are because they're great for demonstration and they look flashing, they look impressive but it takes training in the art to go below that surface and see what they're actually teaching. The perfect weapon definitely uses Kempo in a demonstration fashion but those who train in the art can see a lot of the system mechanics embedded. So the first question that people usually ask me is what kata is just speakman performing in the opening sequence? Everyone remembers this scene he's in his living room and he's performing a very complicated sequence to the upbeat I've got the power song by snap but what kata is he performing? Well the answer is he's not performing one single kata he's actually putting a blend of forms together. Primarily there seem to be big chunks of Kempo forms 4 and 6 mixed together with some freestyle techniques possibly from his gojiro training and even elements from other forms and sets such as finger set. He makes it looking exciting and easy but as far as the story goes his character is either doing a mashup kata or perhaps reviewing a montage of him performing the different forms. Now Kempo form 4 is probably the most definitive Kempo kata there is and it's the most common one performed at tournaments. Kempo form 6 is a higher end form usually for further dan levels and I personally had to learn it in order to achieve my third degree black belt. Kempo principles are also at the root and backbone of the story. Jeff plays a young angry boy grieving the death of his mother and under the constant judgment of his strict father. He acts out and gets in the trouble at school until a family friend Kim played by the legendary Mako suggests enrolling him into a Kempo school. His father asked if this is some sort of hippie school and Kim laughs and informs them that Kempo was a school for self-defense and it would give Jeff an outlet for his anger while building self-confidence and self-discipline. We see a training montage and while there are some subtle differences and variations in the dojo in training it respects and demonstrates some of the traditions in many formal Kempo schools. For example the partner drills and technique flow demonstrations the symbols used in the dojo including the ikka Kempo patch the universal symbol and the tiger and dragon imagery the end of class pass it down tradition used in conditioning and being connected and passing the energy back and forth throughout all the students the formal way to wear belts in the Kempo dojo knots on the left side for males and knots on the right side for females. Now there are two stories going around for this reason and it Parker has been known to say that he wanted to respect the Chinese tradition of energy flow being strong on the left for males and strong on the right for females. There's also a story and he's also been noted for saying that it was the 70s and a lot of people grew their hair out and sometimes you know when he walked around the room he had a hard time telling from the back who was men and who was a woman so that the belts helped him identify it and he could have been joking but again it was the 70s so maybe not both reasons sound viable to me. Also the belt promotion ceremony is very similar in which the student forms the letter L with their old and new belts. The L stands for several things we seek to achieve in the martial arts. Loyalty and love for our friends and family. Longevity you know we want to live longer we want to be stronger and we try to get our strength and health by training in the martial arts. It also stands for a lie that if you do not feel you've earned this belt it would be a lie to put it on and finally and most importantly it stands for lots and lots and lots because regardless of what rank you're at there's always a lot to learn no matter how much you've already achieved. The forehead is then placed on the belts to transfer knowledge from the old belt to the new belt going forward. Now the presentation of the black uniform is also in traditional Kemple schools. In the film he has presented the uniform upon achieving his black belt but in most traditional schools you get your black uniform at the brown belt rank which is now your advanced rank and we kind of start teaching and becoming more of a instructional role in your classes. Although you know in a lot of modern times in a lot of informal schools they just use black as a traditional uniform all around. Now many people have asked me if that tiger dragon ring that Jeff wears is actually real and it's really presented at Kemple ceremonies. As far as I know the ring shown in the movie is not traditional and it was used as a plot device to demonstrate the concept of the dragon and the tiger. Now the dragon and the tiger are very heavy at the root of Kemple in which the tiger is the symbol of physical strength raw energy earthly power. The beginning students learn that you learn power to get stronger but as you go through your training you seek to achieve the dragon. The dragon represents strength mental strength and wisdom and controls the tiger and always has a choice to make and that duality is kind of what we seek to achieve as Kemple was you know we all start off as a tiger but we want to learn how to send to the dragon. In the film Jeff is conflicted he's angry he's emotional he has a hard time controlling himself at even one point he says the tiger is what I know and as a structures trying to teach him that you can't learn the dragon in the dojo you have to figure that out for yourself so as a sort of coming of age that symbolism is embedded in the root of the story you know the perfect weapon Jeff speakman is the tiger trying to learn how to become the dragon. Now talking about some actual fighting scenes there's a few interesting things to look at now one of the first things to point out is that during the time this movie came out you know 1991 we were coming off a period of american martial arts films from the 70s and 80s in which for the most part the action was fairly basic I mean we had bad asses like Van Damme and Chuck Norris but when you really break it down the it was pretty much basic kicks and punches and the 90s kind of started the tradition in american cinema of showing more complex sequences more kung fu films were being embedded into our our mainstream and we're starting to see a lot more sophisticated concepts and I think that the perfect weapon was one of those films that transcended the old action film and started showing newer faster more complex more visually entertaining techniques in the world in which we were used to seeing Van Damme just round kick someone inside of the head we now had Jeff speakman performing this rapid sequence of techniques almost too fast for the camera to see now for anyone who actually trains in campo it's really fun to watch the movie and pick out actual self-defense techniques that we learn and he performed several of them or at least parts of them and if you have a keen eye you can spot them this is a trend that continues in his other movies and even though they aren't specifically campo films you can find a lot of campo techniques in his choreography and in the behind the scenes interview with Ed Parker he said that he liked working with Jeff on this film because Jeff speakman had the control of his power and his techniques now when you make um action movies it's very common to have a lot of space between actors so that you know they don't actually hit each other and usually through camera placements and rapid editing and cutting techniques that you can make it look like shots land what Ed Parker was saying with Jeff speakman was he had such a high level of control that he could throw strikes and stop within one inch of the other person and in doing so it made it look like the strikes were much more solid in their landing it made it a little bit more convincing and he even addressed the the criticism that people say oh well why do you teach your students to pull punches and then Parker said I don't teach them punches I teach them to control punches because there's a belief that if you if you practice by pulling your punch or if you purposely miss your opponent while you're training that you're going to build some bad habits when you actually need it and then Parker was saying that you know when you learn to control a punch and you stop within the inch if you want to go that extra inch there's no problem in doing that and that's all that's the difference of being uh and that's the difference of being in control of your own techniques now Jeff speakman also wanted to highlight the concept of multiple attackers and show how American campo addresses that now of course we do have self defense techniques to teach multiple attackers but of course that is not something you can choreograph because there's just way too many variables but again as you learn the techniques you learn that they are teaching particular concepts specifically in concepts of flow rebounding and as mr speakman says you you move in a gaseous state so that you have this flow in and around your attacker so that you can move around and you can be reactive and not just be tied up with one person or be overwhelmed there's concepts there and you like to show them off in this movie now this movie highlights a few different variations of this scenario sometimes with multiple attackers he takes them on one on one or they're attacking at the same time or in one instance he reacts so fast that the attackers don't even know how to respond mr speakman said that one of his favorite scenes to shoot was utilizing multiple attacker combos under the strobe lights in the scene at the croc pit club additionally there's a few times in the movie where stick fighting comes into play now the colleagues sticks are favorite among campos and they're often embedded into different school curriculums and with mr speakman it's no different he's quite good with them and it's actually really fun seeing the damage he can do with those six in the film now i also want to bring to attention the sound editing especially for the time of its relief this movie's got some great foley and sound effects mixing work i mean the strikes sound deep and painful and the bone crunches are wincing now yes this is a motion picture and sound editing is part of the art but i will say this one of his favorite sequences that he does in the film this favorite combinations i have personally seen him do this in real life in a demonstration and i'll tell you right now he moved just as fast and the contact he made on the person he was demonstrating on it sounded exactly the same it blew me away the first time i saw it and when i saw him perform this this was like oh yeah i'm in the right art so yes it is movie mixing but i assure you it really looked and sounded like that in real life i can also attest to how powerful his strikes are you know we had him at some seminars when we were part of his network that dude can hit so all in all while the perfect weapon might not be a groundbreaking piece of cinema history it definitely has this place as a cult classic of sorts in the martial arts circles it's got a great cast with several actors that've got great martial arts film legacies it's cheesy but in all the fun ways and it definitely stands as a representative and a definitive movie for american compo on film and even just speaking himself said that he was very proud to make this movie and be able to portray compo on screen the way that ed parker himself would have liked to portrayed so i would love to hear about your favorite moments in the perfect weapon or any just speaking movie for that matter please comment below subscribe to the channel join us on patreon for some exclusive content and thank you so much for watching we'll see you all next week


So if enlightenment happens, how do we know it has happened? Suppose we are hallucinating to be enlightened, if such a thing happens it will be clearer than daylight. It's not something that you can miss. It is not that kind of an event that you could miss it, you will not miss it. But when I say this, there is a problem attached to this because these days it is going on in many places. For a certain fee, within a weekend's time you can get enlightened. You'll be declared enlightened by somebody. Really, it's happening everywhere. If you just pay a certain amount of money, one weekend you can get enlightened. I remember in the sixties, in the nineteen sixties, in California people set up certain businesses, enlightenment services. The advertisement I remember very well, if you go to India it will take twelve years of hardship. Fifty dollars, thirty minutes you can get enlightened. They were just using psychedelic machines.    This used to be the advertisement. Fifty dollars, thirty minutes.  Here it's California, quick, new technology. These nineteen-sixty machines, this old technology has now infiltrated into India. Some people have installed these machines and they're claiming within a weekend they can enlighten you. You cannot hallucinate about it. If you're sincere you would know that it is not so. But if it's a part of the race that you want to get enlightened before somebody, of course you can declare enlightened. It is just that these kind of deceptions are not new on the planet. They've been happening for a long time. But now modern technology has come to aid them better to give them an expanded sense of many things. Much experimentation was done during the sixties and seventies about these things. One is with the psychedelic machines, another is with psychedelic drugs. You take an LSD and people claim they're enlightened because they had an expanded sense. Just for a while and then they came back. If they overdid it, then they lost everything. They cracked up in so many ways or even died. Many, many people mentally cracked up because of excessive use of psychedelic drugs. But for those few moments they really felt enlightened or at least they thought so. This is not something that you do. This is not something that you can't do. It is just that if you cultivate the system, your body, mind, emotion and energy to its peak possibility, then an absolutely wonderful flower blossoms within you. Not something that you did, you just waited with the right kind of conditions and it happened. There's a very beautiful story in the yogic lore. On a certain day, four men were walking in the forest. These four men were walking in the forest. One is Agnana yogi, another is a Bhakti yogi, another is a Karma yogi and the last one is a Kriya yogi. These four people can never stay together. They cannot be together because Agnana yogi means yoga of intelligence. He's a man of intellect, great intellect. He has complete disdain for everybody.   He can't stand them. Could that man stand Bhakti yogis? No, he wouldn't stand them. He just can't tolerate them.  Just hold God's hand and walk into heaven. So Bhakti yogis have pity for everybody, for all the foolishness that they're doing.   Because in the world if anything has to happen, you must do it, right? Action. These are yoga of action, Karma. Kriya yogis have utter disdain for everybody because after all the whole existence is energy. Unless you transform the energy, how will anything change? Where is the possibility? So these four people can never be together, but today they were walking together. Suddenly a thunderstorm broke loose, a rainstorm, rain started lashing from every side. They started running, looking for shelter. The Bhakti yogi said, there is an ancient temple in this direction, let's go there for shelter. He always knows the geography of temples. He won't miss a single temple. So they all trusted him and ran in the direction. Then they found an ancient temple where the walls had collapsed long ago. Just a few columns and a roof was there. And in the center there was a deity, God's image. They ran into this place not because they were seeking God, not in any kind of love for God, just to escape the rain. They ran in and then they stood there for a while. Then they found the rain started lashing from every direction. Wherever they stood or sat, the rain was getting at them. So the only place where they could sit was around the deity. So all four of them just hugged the deity and sat, not because they are foreign in love with God, simply to escape the rain. Suddenly God appeared. In all their four minds, the same question, why now? We did so much yoga, we did so much pooja, worship and so many things, you didn't come then. Now when we're just escaping the rain, why now?  Without these four things getting together within you, your head, your heart, your hands and your energy, unless it all falls into place, unless all of it reaches its peak, it will not happen. And if it happens, is there any chance that I may not notice it? There is no such thing. Even if you're blind, you know the sun has come up, isn't it? Yes? Even if you're blind, you still know the sun has come up because nobody can miss it. It is not a small event that anybody can miss. You may not know whether you're born or not born, but if you get enlightened, you will know. It's much bigger than that. Birth will happen many times. This will happen only once.


currently hanging out down under you're in Sydney, Australia, how have you been enjoying it over there? It's been phenomenal considering the circumstances, just getting an opportunity to coach and to be with, you know, around higher level professional athletes and kind of get hands-on experience coaching in a year where, you know, we missed everything. So I think it's been a phenomenal experience and Sydney is not a bad place to be in the wintertime. So all around just a really great time. Currently coaching with the Sydney Blue Sox, how did that whole opportunity come about? Well, I just like many other times in my life, I'm a really curious person. And so I was over the COVID, you know, quarantine time, we were doing a ton of Zooms with the Yankees involving different departments and just being able to learn from each other. And so I was sitting on every single catching Zoom that was going on and just really learning our philosophy inside it out and learning more about that part of the game. And I just heard one day one of the coaches said, hey, do we want to send any players over to Australia to play in the winter league? Because they don't have any COVID going on over there. And I thought, hey, I was like, hey, what about coaches? So that's how it happened. I just kind of overheard by chance that this guy knew one of our coaches was really good friends with the manager here. And we got connected and now I'm in Sydney. Were the Yankees pretty cool with the whole process of you going over there in the off season? Oh, yeah, I think just like the players, like they were happy for me to get an opportunity to get hands on experience, especially given that this was my technically first year in professional baseball as a hitting coach. Although I've been in professional baseball for a long time, but to get that hands on experience, working with guys every day, just like kind of the ins and outs of like what a season would feel like. It's different to exchanging video with our players from the Yankees was fine, but it's really different, of course, as any coach would know to be in the area. When they're struggling, when they're doing well, what should we change kind of working? Like I said, just hands on. I think they were happy for me to go and get that experience wherever I could, especially given the circumstances. What's the biggest thing you've learned so far? I mean, kind of just, what I thought I would learn, which is just when things go wrong, what do I need to work on when I'm not doing well with a certain pitch or in a certain count or situation? Kind of the mental things because it's easy to coach in a bubble. It's easy to set the ball on the tee or do flips and everyone looks good in a cage type of thing. So I think just getting experience with the mental side of I've experienced that myself as a softball player at a high level, but that was a while ago and it's different. And so what do you say to a player? What do you not say to a player? When is the time to not say anything? And so I think just those nuances have been, again, great for me to have an opportunity during this time when there's not a lot of organized professional baseball going on in the entire world. So been extremely valuable. One guy you have been working with, Manny Ramirez, what has that been like? Oh, Manny, he's a unique human being. I think when people say Manny being Manny, I don't know if they understand, when you see the things that he did on the field, the high-fiving of the fan or laying in the outfield doing a snow angel, he's so lighthearted and he takes what he does seriously, but he doesn't take himself seriously.   We could be having a really intense, deep conversation about something and he's, we're debating something and someone stops him and he's just, all of a sudden, he's just, he's Manny, how they think Manny should be. And so I think he's just a really incredible human being and someone that I've learned a lot from more so about life than anything else. And he's just incredibly open-minded. I mean, the amount of things that he's asking me about hitting and I'm thinking, this is the best brand hit of all time. Like, why is he asking me about this? But he just, just like me, I think that's why we've clicked so well. He wants to learn from everyone and he may or may not use it, but he knows that he may use it in five years or he may use it in a certain situation or whatever. And so he's just trying to gather as much as he can and he sifts through that to know what he'll apply to something else. And that's, I think, just lets you know why he was so good.  Of course, COVID had a different idea with everything that happened with the minor leagues. What are your expectations for 2021? My expectations are that we will be on a baseball field with players. Yeah, I think there's been some announcements made and it seems like some things are going ahead on time and that's really exciting. However, I don't think anyone's holding their breath. I think we're waiting to see what happens and just trying to trust that Major League Baseball is doing their best to make sure that everyone's safe and also make sure that we get some baseball in and that's definitely a delicate balance. So just trusting what they say and being patient as we have been. Rachel, thanks for waking up early to join us and enjoy Australia. Thank you. Good to see you.


Let's check this shovel. Kitties and Kitty Cat Ravens something for you! Hey, Princess Pancakes. I did. Are you Princess Pancakes? No. Who are you? Oh, just Aurora today. Okay, sorry. Do you want to come see your shovel? Do you know which one's yours? Yeah. Hey, Kitty Cat Ravenbell. What kind of shovel did you get? Is that the kind you wanted? Cool. What did you get, Aurora? A curved one? Yes. Is that the kind you wanted? Yes. Do you want to test them? The holes. The holes are because I put rivets through it. Well, those are the rivets. The rivets are like donuts. There's a hole through the middle of them. Because I didn't use the plunger machine to pull the rivets. I just hammered them in myself. So it leaves an empty space in the middle. When can we dig? Go dig right over there. Look at all that dirt. Look, right there. Look at all that dirt. Look at all that dirt right over there. Dump it in that big hole way at the other end of the island. And repeat 487 times. Let's get the digging maniac. I don't know. She just wants to dig. I need to take her over to my island. You can't really change your clothes. What? From a princess dress? I don't know. That's that princess. I thought princesses liked to dig. Are you wearing diamonds?


We're here at the offices of the Polish Regulatory Authority in Warsaw, Poland and I'm very pleased to be joined by the President of the Polish Regulatory Authority, Miss Magdalena Gai. Miss Gai, thank you very much indeed for being with us today. Now we're here for the Global Symposium for Regulators 2013. It's an outstanding event in ITU's calendar. I wanted to ask you why did Poland offer to host GSR 13 and why is this event important to you? Global Symposium for Regulators is a significant conference in our telecommunication awards. Governments, regulators, market players can meet during the symposium and this kind of combination give us the opportunity to find a good solution and share our knowledge, our idea which we need to achieve our goals because all of us, regulators, governments, ministers should build digital society and we need more and more and more investment in the next generation networks. So I think that share our ideas, share our knowledge. It is needed for us and I think that symposium give us great opportunity for this. And from another hand, the GSR is a great opportunity to show Poland as ICT center and very dynamic growing telecommunication market in the world. Poland is the leader in launching LTE on 800 MHz bands in mapping infrastructure or in mobile broadband penetration in Europe. So I think that we can share our knowledge, show our experiences and learn from each other. I am very happy that I can host this great symposium. I am very happy to have these noble guests in Poland and welcome everyone in Warsaw. As head of Poland's regulatory authority, what important ICT regulatory developments have been your priority for the Polish market? Investment investment and once again investment. We want to build a knowledge-based economy in Poland which requires modern fiber broadband networks. While in terms of mobile broadband we are among the European leaders, we have still much to do as regards fixed line broadband networks. This impossible without wide scale investment based on the both European funds and the operators' own resources. These are my priorities to support local government authorities and operators in NGN rollout. And next step after the GSR is to prepare auction on 800 MHz. Just few days ago I signed in the decision for 1800 MHz after the last bit and now to the end of this year I have to prepare auction and finalize it. So it is a second my priorities. I think that the spectrum management is the one of most important tools in the hands of regulators and in the same time it is one of the most desired goods by operators. Now we've heard the European Commission's Vice President Nelly Crows advocate for a common EU market for ICT. What's your own feeling about this? Of course it is a great idea especially for end users. Especially once again if we are talking about roaming prices. Now prices are so big, so high that we can advise to our citizens go on holiday, go to work abroad but leave your telephone, your smartphone, tablet at home because when you come back you can be shocked when you will see the bill. So this idea is wonderful and I will always support Ms Commissioner in this respect. For example today we are talking on the first of July we have in European Union the time when the date when always year by year we reduce the prices of roaming but it is only between the European countries. So I think that another countries around the world should follow this idea for their citizens. And finally I'd like to ask you what's the potential for the technology sector in Poland and is it a thriving segment of the Polish economy? The share of the ICT sector in Poland's GDP is estimated at 20 billion euros. It is 5% of GDP. In this respect we are among the European leaders and we rank in the 10th place in the world. A decade ago the amount was barely 10 billion euro. Our forecast showed that within the next 10 years the ICT sectors share in the Polish GDP will increase to 13%. The growth is based on two factors, our location and human potential. Our location is one of these factors. We can be a research and development centre for these investors who would like to go east. And the second reason is the human potential. In Poland we have an amount of people well educated and it is not only my opinion. It is also the opinion of CEOs, these companies from the ICT sectors which decided to build in Poland they research and development centres. So the fact speaks for themselves.


The University of Pikeville will be holding their 10th annual Film and Media Arts Film Festival beginning on Friday, April 5th. We're going to be having a screening of a variety of films starting that Friday with U-Pike student films all afternoon and evening. And then on Saturday all day we've got a variety of really awesome films by mostly regional filmmakers and some international filmmakers. At Audiology Associates of Prestonsburg, you can live your life the way you want and find the freedom of better hearing. With 40 years of being in the hearing care industry, you'll experience patient care that is specific to you with exceptional follow-up care that ensures your hearing and balance needs are being met. Audiology Associates at 1428 Northlake Drive in Prestonsburg. Many filmmakers from around the region including U-Pike students will be showing their films at the Appalachian Center for the Arts to display their talents and tell their stories. One such story will come from Oscar-nominated director Elaine McMillian Sheldon, where her film King Cole will be premiering at the festival following its run at Sundance. King Cole recently screened at Sundance. You can't watch it anywhere. You can't stream it online. But we're showing it here in downtown Pikeville. It's a really unique and I would say experiential documentary about the impact of Cole in the life of an Appalachian told from the perspective of a young girl. For a full schedule of events, you can visit fmafest.org. For Mountain Top News, I'm Kelcey Fidell.


I am the author of Malignant Such Love, Narcissism Revisit. People suffering from avoidant personality disorder feel inadequate, unworthy, inferior. They lack self-confidence. As a result, they are shy and socially inhibited. Aware of their real and often imagined shortcomings, avoidants are constantly on the lookout. They are hyper-vigilant and hypersensitive. Even the slightest, most constructive and well-meant or helpful criticism of disagreement are perceived by avoidants as complete rejection, ridicule and shaming. In this sense, people with avoidant personality disorder are exactly like narcissists. They endure narcissistic injuries continuously. Consequently, avoidants go to break lengths to avoid situations that require interpersonal contact, such as attending school, making new friends, accepting a promotion, or teamwork activities. Inevitably, avoidants find it difficult to establish intimate relationships. They test the potential friend, mate or spouse, to see whether they accept them uncritically and unconditionally. Avoidants continuously demand verbal reassurances that they are really wanted, really desired, loved or cared about. When asked to describe avoidance, people often use terms such as shy, timid, lonely, isolated, invisible, quiet, reticent, unfriendly, tense, asocial, risk averse, resistant to change, reluctant, restricted, hysterical and inhibited. Not a very palatable range of adjectives. Avoidance is a self-perpetuating vicious cycle. The avoidant's stilted mannerisms, fears for her personal safety and security, and stifled conduct, elicit the very ridicule and derision that he or she fears. Even when confronted with incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, avoidants doubt that they are socially competent or personally appealing. Rather than let go of their much cherished self-image, defective self-image, deformed, unrealistic, delusional, instead of letting go of this self-image, they sometimes develop persecutory delusions. For instance, certain avoidants may regard honest praise as flattery and a form of attempted manipulation. People with avoidant personality disorder ceaselessly fantasize about ideal relationships and how they would outshine everyone else in social interactions, but they are unable to do anything to realize their Walter Mitty fantasies. In public settings, avoidants tend to keep themselves to themselves, and they are very reticent. When pressed, they self-deprecate, they act overtly and overly modest. They minimize the value of their skills and contributions, and it borders on the narcissist's false modesty. By doing so, they are trying to preempt what they believe to be inevitable forthcoming criticism by colleagues, spouses, family members, and friends. The disorder affects 0.5 to 1% of the general population. Up to 10% of outpatients seen in mental clinics also suffer from avoidant personality disorder. It is often comorbid, diagnosed together, with certain mood and anxiety disorders, with dependent and borderline personality disorders, and with cluster A personality disorders, paranoid, schizoid, and schizotipo. Now, meet Gladys. Gladys is a woman diagnosed with avoidant personality disorder, and we will go through a simulated therapy session with her. As I said, Gladys is female, she is 26, and she is diagnosed with avoidant personality disorder, and she says, I would like to be normal, says Gladys, and blushes. In which sense is she abnormal, I ask? Well, she says that she prefers reading books and watching movies with her elderly mother to going out with her colleagues to the occasional office party. Maybe she doesn't feel close to them, I suggest. How long has she been working with these people? Well, eight years, says Gladys, the same firm. And she adds, not one raise in salary, she blurts out, evidently hurts. Her boss bullies her publicly, and the searing shame of it all prevents her from socializing with peers, suppliers, and clients. Does she have a boyfriend? I must be mocking her if she responds.  I disagree wholeheartedly and in details with her self-assessment. I think that she is very intelligent. She half rises from her seat, about to go. Then thinks better of it. Please, doctor, there's no need to lie to me just in order to make me feel better. I know my good sides, and they don't amount much. If we disagree on this, crucial point, perhaps I should start looking for another therapist. A glass of water and mounds of tissue paper later, we are back on track. She dreads the idea of group therapy. I'm a social crippled, she says. I can't work with other people, she pretends. I decline the promotion to avoid working with the team. Her boss thought highly of her until she turned his offer down. So in effect, it's all her fault, and she has earned the abuse that she is being subjected to on a daily basis. And anyhow, he overestimated her abilities, capabilities, and skills, she insists. Why can't she interact with her coworkers? Well, she explains that's precisely what we are supposed to find out, isn't it? She retorts. Everyone is too critical and opinionated, and she can't stand it. She accepts people as they are unconditionally, and why can't they treat her the same way? She fantasizes about getting married one day to a soulmate, someone who would love and cherish her regardless of her blemishes. I ask her to describe how she thinks she is being perceived by others. She says, shy, timid, lonely, isolated, invisible, quiet, reticent, untrendly, tense, risk averse, resistant to change, reluctant, restricted, hysterical, and inhibited. That's quite a list, I comment. How does she view herself? The same, she largely agrees with people for sections of her. But he doesn't give them the right to be reflected, just with dick, she says. Gladys, 26 years old, an avoidant.


Building bridge, the biggest thing is you need redundancy. Staff Sergeant Trent Miller, I'm a 12 Charlie Bridge crew member with the South Dakota National Guard. Today I'm operating as the raft commander for this bridge build. My job as a raft commander, calculate how many bays we'll need to cross the gap. Once I get onto the raft, I coordinate which order the boats come in and then position the raft with our near and far shore so we can cross traffic. This site needed a lot of improvement. It has not been rafted with IRB ever before, so we had to coordinate with our horizontal engineers to come in and improve both landings so that A, we can get our vehicles down and B, we can get our traffic needs to cross down. The biggest step is preparation. Our shore crew has to prep each bay correctly so it launches correctly. We don't have issues. Our beach master has to direct them down so that it gets launched correctly. Then our boat operators have to catch each bay. Our build crew has to prep each bay and our raft commander has to make sure it comes together. We do a unique job. We come in, we see a variety of units and they come in and they think it's pretty amazing the capabilities we have to get them across gaps where they would never be able to go before. So, that's the end of our video. Thanks for watching. We'll see you in the next video. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.


Hi, this is Alan from Union Glacier in Antarctica. This was our landing point and now it's going to be our archipelago for our trip to go climb Mt. Vincent. I'm going to swing around here so you can kind of get a panoramic view of the Union Glacier area. As you can see, it's a quite busy place. There's lots of people coming in to ski to the South Pole to go take maybe a penguin trip or go climb the highest continents in Antarctica, Mt. Vincent. But you know, in addition to the summit, which was an incredible experience, there's also a great place where I really appreciate everybody that pledged and donated a penny a foot for every foot that I climbed all the way to the summit. But you know, this is only the first of the seven, so I hope you follow along with all the rest. Okay? Climb Mt. Everybody. This is Alan. And remember, memories are everything.


Welcome, everyone. Thank you for attending. Please make yourself comfortable as we start this session. Today, we have delved into two integral aspects of Blender's arsenal. So driver functions and shader nodes. This style goes over all aspects of my visual workflow. And its main purpose is to be an overview of the key features I've been using for a long time now. With that said, some of those topics are intermediate to advanced level and are already, as soon as you know, you're already around the user interface alongside some vector map operations. That goes for both folks watching online and the live audience here. And I think most of you will be eager to nerd out about some of the process shown. So we can do it for more Q&A by the end of the session and continue later. A little bit of context about myself. My name is Luis Carabini. I'm an artist which has been focusing on real-time rendering and consting for a great part of my career. Having spent four enriching years as part of the Sketchfab team at Epic Games, one of my most fulfilling achievements there was coordinating the Blender Council, which was a short-term initiative to spread Blender awareness and adoption within the company. So with over 12 years of experience in the realm of 3D content creation, I had the privilege of witnessing Blender's remarkable evolution right into a Swiss knife of creative potential. For sure, there are areas that are still very unpolished and requires further development for real-time, especially, such as baking and authoring textures. But with those limitations in mind, I come in harmony with the areas that it really shines, being the offline rendering workflows. Here's an example of some of the same game-ready mesh being converted for product proposals and 3D-printed collectibles. As much of those renders may trick the eyes, they're actually simulating scale and light conditions to really sell the imperfections of an actual desk toy. Everything you see here is mostly EV and cycles. Nowadays, I use Blender all-around from the initial blocking stage to the final piece, and I love that, you know. The thing about the porting and establishing workflows is you're always kind of unintentionally dealing with the biases and quirkiness of various adoption decisions behind it. And sometimes, these visions are not aligned in tandem, even if the original intention is genuine, right? That should be enough to impact there for more statistic-oriented people, especially if you're just entering the market. The job should always have the easiness of use as the main goal, right? So I try to stay as close to my craft in and of the digital realm as possible. Building Gunpla and other model kits is as my main hobby nowadays. I would even dare to say that this is almost a side profession by now. And I recommend every artist to embrace side activities that enrich their understanding of the world and the subject which they specialize upon. If you're an environment artist, go travel, take reference photos, visit your local car shop, ask the mechanics, understand how the engines and models work behind the scenes. Experiences like that really elevates your art to the next level. You know, in talking more about our hobbies, airbrushing is a widely used to, that I used to customize Gunpla model kits. You learn about the different aspects of chemical properties of animal and acrylic paints. Air, atomization, finning, you are to have a very smooth coverage of the plastic surfaces. There's also the work of polishing, sanding, masking. So the possibilities are endless and this contributed a lot to the way I try to represent my concepts in the digital form. All of this led me to create this ever expanding personal collection of surfaces. And I know most of you also have been dabbling with the asset browser for a long time. And well, that improved my output exponentially regardless, you know, I can waste less time thinking about user interface hassles and really focus on ideation. On top of that, every new seed which is generated can be saved for later reusability, right? So here you can see that all those materials are interchangeable, being able to generate like a very big amount of variations in the initial structure. And this is all for a high degree of flexibility. Being that, you know, the good thing is that it doesn't lose a resolution. So it remains sharp and preserve the details. And this factor really helps if you wanna bake them down into a texture and export later. So let's dive into my way of working. Before hand, it's important to disclose all content in this presentation was made in version 3.6 before the AGX filter transfer was introduced on 4.0 and 4.1 in the principle BSDF node. I also got more compact as many of you may know and all inputs and options are still there. However, just organize differently. Well, let's start about lighting. So lighting is almost everything in your work. It defines the mood, right? So to create a full material library, it's very important that you work in huge saturation agnostic environment for look-dev purposes. This essentially kinda like reduces any discrepancies across bounce reflections and ensure like a consistency among our colors. So my red, blues, yellows are indeed pure and not being skewed by ambient sliding. Simple like box, black and white HDRs can be a good starting point for a solid foundation on that end. And another things needs to be addressed, especially for the procedural parametric designs you saw beforehand, that when I was looking at some references and I wanted to replicate some of those ideations, it kinda became evident that I needed to be, for me to achieve the same effects with base polygonal node primitive. Although that's cheaper and less expensive to load, I needed that those roundness properties and well, you can only do that with sine distance fields, right? So I was looking around and I'm a big fan of Celestial Maze as well. Blender has good nodes by default, but they're not moderate enough when committing to more complex setups like that. In comparison, you waste a lot of time creating things from scratch and I recommend everyone going over the basics of vector math and functions before dipping your toes with sine distance fields. Both Celestial Maze and Arringdale have great lessons on that. Celestial Maze toolkit is free. You can find it on the GitHub link both and it contains more like 160 utility nodes with basic primitives. So moreover, I wish they're included by default. You can save all those in your library for quick access. It also includes like some 3D ones but I mostly focus the 2D fields as they're mostly cheaper. And that's essentially how the geometric pattern is done. Examples are the SD box, the SD ennegon with variable sides and the equilateral triangle. Here it showcase how you can use the built-in SD viewer node to preview the fields by creating a compare math node. You can pick each one of the bands you want. As far as alter you go from the center, the rounder the outline will be and you can also use the epsilon value to control like it's thickness. So pay attention to how there's an inverse proportional relation between the scale factor and its band size which you may need to compensate later on. If you tile out that with a module vector node, you're set up for success. And you can achieve a basic procedural pattern like that. Other material setups from my collection, there are supplies more simple than most people would expect in this case. The wave and the noise texture nodes are doing 50% of the heavy lifting. You can tweak the mapping and grunge scales to simulate tribal pants for all types of surfaces you want. For more advanced users here, this tip may not come as a surprise but it's such an overlooked aspect. I think it's worth reiterating. Very commonly you can spot artworks in the wild and you see the colors are not as good as they could be represented. This of course should depend highly on the type of mood you're trying to convey but because RGB linear is the default option for color ramps, I'll tell you it may work for more analogous combinations. You're not getting gradients in its full potential for like complementary and triadic uses. So for a HSL, huge saturation line is you can help achieve more vivid blends on your gradients. And the reason for that is quite obvious, like you're doing the shorter path to reach your outcome in the color wheel. So therefore, if your range is too far away, you would end up with grays and desaturated values in between. Whereas with HSL, you're getting the full strength of your values by going the long distance. This technique is particularly useful for car paint and materials with Fresnel variation, especially on candy looks and complementary color combinations. You can see here. And other, like one of the most questions I get from co-workers and a lot of folks ask me is how to achieve the frosted glass transition looks? You can see some of these works. Where you really want a subtle variation from ultra clear to light flat coat of paint. Well, that's a fairly simple setup as well. Authority has some like caveats here and there to have it like physically accurate. You gotta remember to connect your values not only to the roughness property, which is affecting mostly like no glass surfaces, but also to the respective transmission values, which most people forget. This is why sometimes your glass shader appears broken or doesn't mimic the same desired effect. The purest is your gradient, the harsher the falloff will appear. So another fact is having your bright values always been painted into the middle of the spectrum. Yeah, you can also pay attention how we are using the ease RGB transition type on the color ramp to drive the clear coat roughness input here. This is important to get a very sparse, black and white gradient that can exacerbate this type of transition. Another situation of proper value awareness is when you're using the bevel shader to fake merged topology on areas of like dense intersection, such as the case above. In this material, we have a combination of stacked shader techniques that rely on multiple normal inputs. And you gotta make sure to like plug the bevel shader data, not only to the clear coat normal pass, which acts as an overlay on top of the most common PBR stack, but also the layer weight node, which is driving different effect. This tree may appear simple right now, but sometimes your layer weights can be inside node groups and you may always want to remember to expose those values properly. So with a good base of the library out of the way, how do we proceed into exposing the values and making only the key parameters available in the main properties panel? Most people understand drivers mainly being useful within animation workflows, but that couldn't be far from the truth. If you think about it, drivers allow you to have access to almost 90% of the values anywhere. For an easier approach, I'll be using the urban camouflage material as an example, which can be replicated fairly quickly with only two multiplied Voronoi textures. Here, we'll be identifying its main artistic values that we aim to expose. So totally up to five. The scale for each respective noise and their colors, which totals for three float arrays. First, we need to create five blank values in the custom property spaniel at the bottom of the material tab. You can do it like me and drag and drop that menu to the top of the list, then create a new property. You can tweak the maximum of the float. Like the example here, I set it to 100. Once you're done, left click on it like copy as new driver and left click on the input within the material editor you want to be mapped into. So select the option base driver and you should be ready to go. But then we ask Louis, how do we do it for colors? Well, colors actually fall under a float array type property and the process isn't that much different. You just need to switch the type dropdown and set it to subtype to linear color. Simple as that. And then you can tweak the RGB. Here's the result for all five properties, successfully driving the values in the source shader material. I can control the scale and even switch their colors for the camouflage. Moving on. It's always great to have your source.blends files mimicking its intended purpose. In this case, this is the route for all my entire library so I like keeping the Outliner view set to list all data types. With that, it's easier to mark them as assets and as well as like having a little camera set up to quickly render your thumbnails on the fly when I finish altering each material and each driver for each source and scene. In contrast, the auto-journey thumbnails work well but most of the time you really want to make your content easily readable and shown in its best intended use case. The light set up that I created adds like a bottom ring light to accentuate its present across the plain gray background from the browser. It's a subtle change but it helps a lot. So try to custom thumbnail, select the asset. Remember you need to be on the source.plane in which it's located. Click on the gear icon on the right and then on the folder icon where it says preview, there's a catch for using custom thumbnails however. Depending on the final image size, they can add up to the memory and loading times in which they appear on the startup. So for that, I opted to compress their file size further using this open plugin called Super PNG. It still beats Photoshop's safer web compression method miles away. This one's reduced from 112 to 15. We felt like apparent visible artifacts. So they load quickly and it also impacts your blender startup times in a way. So decals, decals differ from shaders. They are basically a material applied to a transparent plane alongside shrink wrap modifier. So they are saved as an object type acid in the larvae. It's due to that, we're gonna be exposing the drivers to the object panel instead of the material properties for easy accessibility. The advantage of like SDF-based decals is that differently from image-based decals you can have more with less. So each design can be modified according to your needs. See how simple the crosshair decal can be replicated with OP polar node and the SD box nodes. When using the OP polar node, you can avoid weird interpolations on steps like decals by making sure to use a integer as a property type for the count number. So that way in between values will be skipped. And I did this for art direction purposes, maybe you want this. And I also limited the crosshair stripes to you too. Many of you also may be familiar with the decal machine add-on, right? You can replicate some of its techniques with SDF too. To do that, you can like disable, derave this body for glossy surfaces and also their shadows. This helps like to consolidate their appearance when high resolution renders are taken. And especially under like bright lighting conditions, this is a thing. Above all, you always want to use UV mapping for this technique. As the generated object space one doesn't translate well when using shrink wrap modifier, the auto-drain coordinate mapping doesn't account for the offset of the shrink wrap. So by using UVs, you're always enforcing that it will map perfectly into the surface. UVs are also beneficial for situations where you want to duplicate the surface underneath and map into the decal with accurate precision. Just pay attention, the center will be offsetted, always being the 0.0 origin coordinate. Here you can see the end result for all parameters exposed. The target decal is made in the same way as the crosshair, but masking a circle within the box SDF and inverting the alpha to obtain that result. Note mentioning, you can leverage the SDF notes to create procedural bump map decals. This technique is not only like constricted to generic alphas, which can be very useful for composing tertiary and levels of detail where the insets won't have a significant impact on the silhouette of the model. Here's an example of its use on the Evangelion artwork revamp based on an artist named Miratio. I found it to be a great subject of study to test this method as the nature of the design has lots of curved surfaces. So adapting to the concept into 3D is also a form of visual translation. The fundamental goal is to effectively convey an idea from one medium to another while retaining its essence and meaning. It involves considerations of depth, proportions, spatial relationships, and language on the other hand, syntax, grammar, and cultural context. So that's why blocking out your layout is essential. You cannot move onwards without doing so beforehand. A successful translation for all those factors put together is what designers refer as appeal. Appeal unifies the final piece and just like the principles of Gestalt, you can only attain it when all other aspects are working in harmony, just like the proper saying, like the whole is greater than the sum of its parts for sure. Now we finally arrived to Dramatronauts, the part where I believe most people were waiting for. And one of the in-house tools I adapted to my personal workflow is known as the inset maker. I created this group to automate something I did fairly often, which is like creating variable cuts and edents. I use this to create the details in the car, rubber tires as well. Pay attention how the inset scale is variable when I shift the object orange in point. Breaking it down, first, we are using the instance on points nodes to map the source object into every vertex. This is controlled by a vertex group which is being exposed as a selection type. The align iller to vector node is very important on this stage as well. We found it. Our source orientations won't be aligned correctly to every vertex normal. And then we proceed into Boolean then out with a mesh Boolean node. This last step can be very costly on performance depending on the source complexity of the polycount of the Boolean, right? In addition, since I wanted to replicate a parametric effect, I decided to add a RGB curve node to drive the vector scale output of each Boolean mesh. That allows me to have more control on the fall-off of their scale relative to the source origin point. And the result is very cool to play around, as you can see. This slide showcasing how the selection is being exposed as a vertex group. I can handpick which vertices I want to be the Boolean to happen, allowing for a higher degree of customization. Also, make sure to check your source Boolean orientation is relative to the world. Sometimes you may want to apply their scale before proceeding to use as a cutter. Nevertheless, when you have curved source objects or more complex surfaces, normal artifacts will be sure to happen and you need to be prepared to solve those with A data transfer modifier. Hereby, using another selection of vertex groups, we can specify which areas we want the normals of the mesh to be migrated over and you can successfully overwrite their artifacts. Some of the hit-patch parts that I use are also composed by intricate combinations of body fires and shape keys. Just like drivers, shape keys can also be leveraged outside of animation use cases. And it's NBA's strong foundation too for like concepting and detail stacking, right? Next, we have a hands-on example of all those techniques being combined to assist in modeling and concepting. I can control the bevel variation of the tire, its thickness, tread depth, and many other like visual qualities that otherwise would be counterintuitive to model and change every time the client wants. You can see how powerful this is and it's all within Blender already. Please ignore the fact that they're displayed as purple. Those are from circular dependencies as being old file. Here's how everything is set up. We are selecting key values of the bevel modifier, combined with a simple transform geometry notes to tweak its radius. It also has an array modifier to instance and bend the source mesh around. Hopefully, we can have a bevel modifier as a node in the future that way I can convert this entire structure into geometry notes. That's the goal for most of the procedural primitives shown here. Another similar example of a procedural hub cap, kit bash part. This one can achieve equal types of firm variations, you know, you can control the size, the distance and the circular visual elements for bolts and other insets. You can see how I'm using like a simple mesh boolean node again to control how a cylinder primitive is offset it into its main shape. Then I proceed into doing the same combination of array and simple deform modifier to expose and repeat the pattern along. Although we can already port those into GN, it's essential that the bevel modifier becomes a node so we can better make use of its tolerance and angle settings. To sum it up, here are some takeaways. I think it's really important to acknowledge that understanding appeal is one of the most, you know, seeking after qualities on 3D artists nowadays. And the current job market that mixed with other factors unfortunately have been overlooking this aspect. So in a real production environment, the concept art is also responsible for providing its original references, which helps in guiding the translation process. This definition provides like the necessary context that 3D artists then can improve and refine their design, taking the experience to the next level, right? And, you know, learning curves can be intimidating as a beginner and everyone who's been through it for a long time can relate. In fact, some of my 2019 talk was mostly addressing that topic. Here are some other concept art adaptations from rock age, great concept artists, side views, up views. And I would like to first thank everyone working at both Blender Institute, Blender Studio, staff and the opportunity to present this year. It's always really great to be here, connect face to face with everyone and also a big shout out to all those veterans and masters of equal tenor than myself, if not even more.  So, big standing ovation for them. Last but not least, a friendly reminder to donate to the development fund, if you haven't done so. And, Q&A. Yeah. Yes, yes, yes. You can find on CelestialMaze toolkit on his GitHub and it's free. Everyone can download it and start using it for the data transfer modifier. Yeah. Yeah, so that's most of the case. Nowadays I was trying to replicate that setup with geometry nodes, you can already do that. But there are some quirks, you have to pass through the material, pass now to do that because of the attributes. The thing about, I still use the data transfer modifier is because you can preview it on object, solid object mode, instead of the EV and cycles. So it makes more, it's easier that way. But it's always case by case situation, man. Like, sometimes you wanna use the vertex groups to isolate and see which parts you wanna transfer to the normals. Sometimes you also wanna offset, do a little shrink of the mesh to map correctly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so on that there is a dropdown to select the vertex group. So you need to leverage the vertex group to do that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's most like, you would have to show me, show me later the, yeah, yeah, yeah. And we can figure it out together. Yeah, so sometimes you have on the car paint, especially, it's accounting for the bounce reflections for that. It's more of a artistic choice. You can choose to keep it. But I think the shadows are the most important one. Yes, this is a great. This is a great question and I know it. So, yes, you can see the bevel is, it's changing slightly there. And it won't be perfect until we can have it as a note per se. This one? Yes, it's a real bevel. It's a real bevel. You can see it even has some normal artifacts still there, if you pay attention to it. But from a like a tertiary level of, if you're seeing the prop from afar, for concepting it works well. But again, if you're doing production work, then you're gonna retopo after that and you're gonna make sure to fix those. But it's a bevel modifier. It's driving a bevel modifier on the stack here. This is the stack. The way to normal, well it's doing the way to normals. So, you can also do that on the note group itself. You can migrate that. In fact, because the thing is, sometimes you wanna constrain the artifact and you wanna add loops procedurally to shrink that gradient split as he was mentioning. We can't do that procedurally yet. So, the way to normal helps into kinda stay here, stay here, yeah, doing that for the normal averaging. So, yeah, thanks everyone. And I'll be open for questions and catch me on the roof later as well. Thank you.


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YouTube what's up, man? This was a weekend league game.  You can check out the stream live. The link is below twitch.tv slash dub dot Definitely a couple beers on bad things happen got to take a shot at a Hennessy. That's what it's about That's why I always have fun playing weekend league, but this is the game. I'm playing this kid named freshman phenom I don't know who he is at this point. I believe I'm like 22 and one I had lost one game If you haven't watched that game I lost against goal line. It is the last video right before this one So check that out too, man, but I'm playing this kid He has EA jerseys and the first pass play he goes to I picked him off with cam Damn Chancellor loved that 6-3. How you over the middle of the field jump He obviously was doing the ball to the guy further down the field But with that height and that jump from cam Chancellor making a huge play to start the game Dump it off Dallas Clark is my new tight end man. He's had huge games for me I love Dallas Clark because he has crazy route running can get tons of route chemistries and he can spin move really well He has over 90 spin just a complete package at the tight end position Obviously not the best run blocker, but as you guys see I really don't run the ball that often But when I do Ricky Williams will talk to rock for me. I'm a level 58, but I'm not that high My team overall is a 90 right now. You see Ricky jumping for me. That's great. Yeah, my team overall is 91 We hit Ricky out here in the backfield. She's got to make a move fight through that get into the end zone Ricky Williams Seven nothing man looking like after you cut the pick on the second play from from his line of scrimmage Any squirt touchdown feels good. We get a sack right there to Davion clowny the predator bringing the crib at this guy He's in split clothes.  You can't get mad. How can you get frustrated? That's just a flukey game that guy didn't earn his touchdown. He didn't beat my defense I feel fine 7-7 the game is still mine. We take a shot But like I said boom throws it up in the triple coverage knocks the ball up And of course my players aren't there Tyree kill is Catches the ball takes it to the Baja and we take a shot out of Hennessy But like I said, I'm probably 10 plus beers in now This is a late game and after the Hennessy starting to fill it a little bit want to have fun That's pretty much what we can leagues about man So you can't get mad about plays like that You just got to have fun and there's nothing more fun than scramble with Michael Vick as I do right there for a nice little 11-yard pick up Looking for my drag or Dallas Park. He plays pretty good defense right here But I play maker back over Calvin Johnson make a try and holding on to the ball for me Blitzing a lot of people at me here now He actually gets the sack right there with Brian Dawkins my reeds are a little bit slow right now I'm seeing a lot of people open I could hit and we get shetted right there Really try to hold the ball for a long time get to a fourth and 12 go with the hitch route to Dallas Clark I should have left them there, but I play maker them up Why catch it and it looks like Brian Dawkins or somebody hit me just hit Dallas Clark there man Didn't hold on to it But I mean Dallas Clark means a lot of plays can't expect them to hold on to everything He throws a little baby in route over here to Randy Moss So we're feeling all right it goes for the corner route Pat Pete you guys watch you know I love Pat Pete Patrick Peters and Jillian Ramsey pretty much are gonna be my outside corners the rest of the year Hope they keep getting updates Patrick Peterson might be due for one soon Even though he just had that snow card and he's a dog height and obviously plays the ball at goon I love people being over six foot in my secondary. So now like I said, even after the fluke play I still had a ball. I still get the ball at half everything's going fine Moss and then we'll play maker them back to the left Doesn't hold on though tough catch for Randy Moss really playing wild right now Michael Vick Looking to go up top Calvin Johnson. He swats the ball This guy swats a lot of passes you guys will see as the game goes on how many passes he swats Maybe that's his way of not getting high ball not getting aggressive caught on But he definitely swatted some passes that I would have picked off But god bless him underneath the Dallas Clark pick up a couple nothing crazy Just got a score before half here. That's all it's about here. We go with a little Looking up top right here. Michael Vick just honestly didn't had a arm and as I see he went for a swat right there God bless him. I feel like Vick should be able to throw this ball 70 yards Once again, we're going for it again Maybe my receivers are gonna look like swats that could have picked that one off too. I'm again I'm going for all the big plays right now get to a fourth and nine. We're gonna go for a playmaker up He's gonna hesitate a little bit and we hit the cross and route to Randy Moss first down infield will arrange give it off to Ricky here I just want to run a little bit of clock make sure he doesn't get the ball back But Ricky takes a hit there on a pass incomplete gets me to a third and six high ball curl Julio Jones team MVP fully powered up Next play underneath Ricky Williams. Sean Taylor blast me got plenty of time here man The time is pretty much on my side going to curls looking for one playmaker Dallas Clark But he drops it man. I come up with him tough catches man. I swear he has 99 every catch that Next play he blitzes me. I'm just gonna take my fill. Well, no need even call time out I can get this fill off with seven seconds. No problem So I'm gonna do that.  Like I said, it's late in the night We've been drinking a lot that play that he scored had me drinking anyway Hit the crossing around over here randy moss great animation right there to stay up and not get hit and I get the ball stripped out He goes a little man coverage here going for that post route again. Let's see if I can get you one time Julio Jones doesn't come down with the ball. Maybe my Julio Jones has 98 speed I think that should be fast enough. I mean only one that could be faster Tyreek Hill or moss or something like that. You see Calvin Johnson making plays on a little drag route Get the ball underneath to your playmakers help him make plays 30 inches Of course, I can never run the ball in 30 inches get to a fourth and three We're going to go for it plays man coverage. Kind of got everybody bagged up right now Looking for something looking for something scramble scramble back Dallas Clark I'm gonna find you baby makeup for all them drops so far in the game Touchdown first down Dallas Clark So now we go up 10 minute games feeling like it's in the bag. Let's go ahead have some fun That's what it's about man. That's why people watch. I mean obviously you're gonna watch people run the clock out Taking me here and there and of course Tyreek Hill speaking to taking these He made me take a knee with this kick return Just try to tackle him with clowny. That's all don't give up a touchdown It's okay that he got in the field low range. Let's just go ahead and Try to make a stop and the first play those right to can bam chancellor Got to get a better stop and go right here really sloppy I guess cam just doesn't have the agility or whatever it is. That was sloppy stick work Should have been a touchdown high ball Julio doesn't come down with it Okay, that's okay run the ball with ricky break a tackle. Of course only w breaks tackles for a loss of four yards 1314 gotta make a play here corner out Randy Moss high ball by the Bing first down 12 yard line Underneath a little drop over there by Julio man. That's okay Gonna try to score a touchdown here really put the game away high ball to Randy caught it But somehow his feet didn't get in you guys tell me how his feet didn't get in right there I thought they were pretty good Next play we're gonna scramble with vixx spin move double spin move Of course, we're gonna fumble because that's why they watch you gotta keep the games close for the stream Nobody wants to watch it blow out You know, they want to watch somebody fight and if he goes down too many You know your viewers will turn out.  I was it sack not sack but knock the ball away back to back knockaways Next play he's looking I got the curl playmaker Dallas Clark That time he did not get the hits thick animation Boom caught that right in the middle of the field next play We're a little covered to again Dallas Clark is on that hitch We're going to go up top four, of course at reed. I believe at reed comes over and picks that off And I don't know what he stumbled on but thank god he stumbled That's rough, but you know, hey, that's why they watch keep the game close Let's see if this kid can go down and make a touchdown Score a touchdown and keep this game or give himself a chance But you know, he likes throwing the ball to Patrick Peterson Interception now the game is over. I can just run the ball Take my three go up 10 10 points, but you know, I'm going to go ahead and freestyle We're going to try to make something happen, but we'll get down before we get hit right there. Bobby Wagner got the sack Second down Ricky. I just listen when I run. I promise when good players run the ball. They just can't they can't move Corner out Dallas Clark. You gotta see Dallas Clark is dominating this game having a huge game for me always getting open Now we can really just run the clock out Run the ball there. We're going to pass right here. We just screamed that by Bobby Wagner She's big time player by him. I should just run the ball make him use his time out something like that But we're going to scream that again big brace of sack boom So he uses time out so the game's over make this feel a little too possessions But you know what like I said, that's not why they watch we're going for the fake to end the game Gruger hill gets wrapped up so easily by Darryl Slade Geez, that was a crazy rush off the edge had no chance with the fake But you know who had a chance the predator clowny again I love that card getting to michael vic next play again. He has nobody to throw to he's trying to come out in this Tight i'm sending 11 people at him Over high ball right there overthrow fourth in 18 Give this guy so many chances.  I didn't like the way my man kamu gruger hill got hit up I'm gonna try this fake again. Let's see if I can get busy with him We got the out of position kicker so we can have somebody that can tackle on kickoffs And he's faster to run the fake you get out of here, but he's getting hip to it So, you know what, you know what kid you're getting a little too high Let me just go ahead and kick this feel a little I can pop a 58 yarder, right? What I missed it 20 25 seconds first play a high ball shannon sharp Of course, I missed a hit stick and he takes it to the baha and this kid has nuts He's gonna go for two to win the game. Of course, you gotta go over two to win the game You know, that's what's gonna happen. I mean if someone lets you back in the game like this You have to go for two. So this kid comes out freshman phenom. He's gonna cook a died up I don't know what i'm expecting right here. I'm pretty much just gonna play zone Gotta spy michael vic down here in the gold line He goes with a nice little play with a bunch of hitches finds calvin johnson holds on to it I'm down by one. I just donated a game. I'm 22 and one right now Donated a game playing around drinking too much, but you know what like I said a million times youtube This is why they watch regardless of how much I drink how much I mess around I'm still a madden champion and what madden champions do is they convert in this situation And that's what we gotta do. We did not return the kick because that would waste four seconds I need all 17 seconds to get in the field ball range. I have two timeouts. Everything's available to me 17 seconds kind of breaks down to three or four plays. So each play I got to pick up 10 plus yards Like I said, everything's available middle of the field. I can hit anything I'm looking for I'll wrap up the Clark slant or the deep crossing route one or the other He blitzes everybody out me and leaves dows Clark wide open So I'm glad we take my 20 yards and get out of bounds perfect play It took five seconds and we've got 20 yards next play. We hold in the pocket michael vic hit the crossing route Over the row and I can't believe it last play of the game I got a chance. We're gonna high ball dows Clark get down before the clock runs out call timeout because i'm that clutch But my man gruger hill missed that 58 yarder So can I kick I might have to kick it full power this time not go for the line. I'm going for the red I need a full power kick 100 power Well, obviously we need the accuracy because I have a linebacker a kicker Gotta make sure he doesn't block it point that arrow down. We're going full power Bang not a perfect kick so he could block. I gotta hold it. Trust it. Can can gruger hill make this 58 yard field goal for the win after I messed around after I gave this guy the game Can he make the field goal? It is good GG's in the chat man No matter how much you mess around or how drunk you get or how much fun you have on weekend league Always remember we're here to win the games and if you're a champion play like a champion need


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