So welcome to Music City. Hope you're enjoying the first day at Drupalcon. Just wanted to call out some famous musicians that are from Nashville and the surrounding areas. We have some of the Three Six Mafia. Miley Cyrus. There's also, has anyone heard of Lucky Number 7 band? Anyone? They're a lesser known band from the Nashville area. With lead guitarist Hanson Ben. You got the nickname Hanson because of how modest he was. And backup vocals was Chris Blueey's title. Which I have to admit I'm the better looking one of the two. But I'm better at Photoshop. So they experienced some great success early on in their careers. So they sold out the Grand Old Opry. Awesome music hall in the city. Seats thousands of people. However they also had small venues sometimes. So they had to play as small a venue as conference room 205C of the Music City Center. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But it just doesn't bring as much revenue into this band. And some weeks Chris couldn't even get paid by Ben because the overhead cost was the same. But they weren't bringing in as much money from some of these smaller shows. Some of that overhead I mentioned was a nightly whiskey bath. So this kept Hanson Ben's skin nice and rejuvenated. But he had an idea one night. Which was instead of emptying the whiskey bath and then drawing a new one every single night. He could bottle up said whiskey and sell it at the shows. A little this is lucky number seven bands whiskey that they sold at their concerts. And this created great success for them because they were able to provide a better experience for fans. They found that the more whiskey the fans drank the more they enjoyed the shows. And thus they were more likely to buy tickets to future concerts. So it actually made the fans happier and it also accelerated lead retention from their audience members. So you get where we're going with this. We're talking about productizing your agency. How many of you work at an agency. Nice. And how many of you are product owners or project managers. Few. How many of your agencies have products already. And how many of you are looking to create your first product or push something out. Awesome. Sweet. That is what I like to see. So I'm Ben. You can contact me at Pantheon. Just Ben at Pantheon. Tweet at me at the Ben SR. I worked there about three years. And I'm Chris Taitzel. CEO founder of Cellar Door Media and Locker. And yeah, you can reach me at Techner Taitzel and see how many times you can make my wrist vibrate during this session. So I've been at Pantheon three years and my first two years there I was a partner manager. So my job was to go across the nation and talk to developers and agency owners about their business. And so I'll be walking through some case studies of really successful products that I've seen in the WordPress and Drupal community from that experience.  I have an agency, Cellar Door Media, that we started in 2009. And we just released a product about two years ago called Locker. So for those of you that have products, we can commiserate. And those of you about to embark on that journey I can give you some tips and tricks on how to avoid some of the pitfalls. So Pantheon is a WordPress and Drupal platform for developers. So I have experience in both of those worlds. I've found that there's the adage that you're not to sell Drupal but sell to Drupal or sell from Drupal. And I totally understand that. But there's also something to be said of building an economy around Drupal. And I think that those who are more totalitarian about not selling Drupal are actually limiting the growth of Drupal and thus hurting Drupal. And my point here is that you shouldn't feel bad about making money off the hard work that you do. And some of the most successful agencies I've seen over the years, the ones who have doubled their team in size, are ones that have found creative ways to package up what they're doing in terms of either process or people and repeat that at scale. So one great way to do that is with a custom upstream, or custom distribution or custom theme. For example, a lot of agencies that work with universities have found great ways to use one single repository for code and use that for all of the university sites. So ASU has a custom distribution called WebSpark that they use for 2,000 sites. And it empowers the central IT managers to push out code and innovation to all of these projects really efficiently, but they can also customize on a per-site basis. In the Drupal community, Level 10 is an agency in Dallas, Texas. Tom McCracken is floating around the conference here. You can find him, but he created a custom distribution called Open Enterprise. And this is a free distribution, as it should be, but there were services added onto that that allowed him to really grow his business from the last three years to double in size by using the same set of marketing functionality in Open Enterprise for all of his clients. And one of the things to note on this is that there is a giant graveyard of companies who have tried to come in and just throw money and sales at Drupal and trying to commoditize Drupal itself. There have been floated ideas of app stores and all sorts of stuff, and that all just got very, very, very strong backlash from the community. Other communities such as WordPress and others have a very strong and robust ecosystem around them for paid themes, paid modules. Drupal doesn't. So if your agency is looking to build a paid module or a paid theme where somebody has to pay you money just in order to install it, you've got a rough road ahead and we'll want to talk through some of the ideas that you have. But one way that you can use this to your advantage and actually do make a product off of it is by creating something like a distro or a theme. I myself got my start in Drupal with the Omega theme. I helped out early on with the Omega theme and though I wasn't one of the core maintainers of it and though I wasn't one of, obviously Omega was free and everybody got to use it and a lot of people did on Drupal 7, the start of my agency came from being a service provider with primarily two people implementing that theme or that distribution. And so if you're looking at building an open theme or an open distribution, it is a way that you can create a product like revenue inside your agency because you can then sell the services and the add-ons to that product while the core of it still remains free and open source which the Drupal community appreciates. And this is actually another, it's a good segue to another type of product that I've seen really successful both in the Drupal and WordPress communities but the best example I could think of is an agency called Valet that does mostly WordPress but a bit of Drupal. They've created Valet Matrix is basically just a free plugin that you can add to any of your sites and it creates useful information about how you could optimize speed and performance and usability of your website and then of course if you would like a Valet to improve that site in specified ways then they of course will bill you for that work and so I've seen this method super successful in both Drupal and WordPress. And then the last one, there's a lot of these is like internal or productivity sort of products. In fact the last speaker Chris was mentioning that they have some internal legal sort of tool that they've built but a lot of agencies are doing things for local development or for internal communication and processing and two examples are OutRigger is Phase 2's local development solution so that they can build the same way for all of their projects and then deploy to the end host wherever that may be and then a similar set of local development tooling by FourKitchens is called Aquifer but there's a lot of these out there. Local development solution seems to be something that is a bit amiss in the development communities and so there's been a need to build internal tooling that helps them standardize their processes and this is still a great use of productizing in an agency because it allows them to be more efficient and scale up their client base by developing the same way each time. So what's the secret sauce? What do many of these products and tools have in common? A few of them, I think at the core of it all of these agencies were trying to think about specialization. What are you good at? What are your clients consistently asking for? And acknowledging, like trying to think of what your agency is better at than anyone else will lead you to creating some sort of product that well serves your clients. All of these also solve a problem so obviously agencies were trying to think of better ways to do things for their clients and also like offloading menial chores so Chris will talk a bit more about this like scratching your own itch but if there's something that's taking up a lot of time in project cycles then trying to find a creative way to offload that is another way that agencies have thought about productizing. Yeah, so when I look at the special sauce and how do you specialize in something as an agency like Chris was talking about before you do kind of find that market fit of what you do best, right?  I don't cut hair, I'm not really good at it and so when I go to my hairstylist I sit down and they say what do you want? I go I don't care, you're the expert you do what you do best, I do what I do best and I think that as agencies if we can do that in our products and we come out with products that we know best and scratch our own itch it allows us to look at it from a product our product from a different light as well because we are also the consumers of our product and if you don't need your own product why would somebody else need it, right? And like I said you're benefiting your agency you're making yourself more productive you're standardizing your tool set a bit but then you also get to grow those internal skills and you might actually be finding yourself getting more work more sustainable work on your agency on your services side rather not just from the product sales for implementing and supporting your product so it can actually add additional revenue there as we mentioned earlier sell to Drupal? Don't, don't sell to Drupal instead sell from Drupal and I've walked a couple of companies through this not my own as they've come to me and asked like how do I get my product into Drupal and how do I get Drupal to consume my product and the first thing I tell them is don't sell to Drupal Drupal developers in the community in general are typically more advanced developers and they're more technology savvy they can sniff out BS really really fast and they'll call you on it and so unless you're good at talking tech with folks you're going to cut yourself flat footed but they value the tech and the code like I mentioned earlier with the app store idea and all that open source values are very very strong in the Drupal community and so if you try to somehow get creative and say I'm going to go around that a little bit or I'm going to try to do this or that you'll get called out on it, you'll get called out really hard and because of this and because of our closeness but also the way that we develop our technology we have a certain level of trust of the community and so if you want to gain that trust of a consumer the best way to do it is to be standing alongside them not in front of them or projecting yourself and saying you should use my product but I don't even use it and I don't even know how you would use it so how do you do this? Participate in the community, sponsor events, go to camps, talk be involved not just from a sales perspective most of the time that I talk at camps I'll be like yeah I have locker and then I'll go into something else because I don't want to make the talk about me or my company or my product I want to make it about how we as a community can get better and you can start building that trust amongst the community and then the other thing that we found and we've seen repeated over and over again is build your product to be extensible because again, Drupal are technical folks they're going to take your product, they're going to hack it and they're going to build on it FYI, it's open source, they can do that and so enable that, don't try to quash that or say I don't want you moving my product or anything like that and a great example of this is and this will be a very full group of hands here how many people have used backup and migrate? Everybody and did you know that there was also a product next to it called NodeSquirrel? Yes, and how did we know that product? Because we all loved the backup and migrate module and oh by the way, if you wanted this nice little add-on where you didn't know where to put your backup NodeSquirrel would keep that backup for you that's a great example of creating a product from the community and then having a way to monetize it with a separate product or a separate service we've used that and modeled that and how we did locker we've contributed a couple of modules that have absolutely nothing to do with locker but they provide some of the underpinnings but they also allow people to go use a competitor if they want because I want to be able to give them that extensibility and the other thing that's been really beneficial for us is learning from others, getting off the island one of the more impactful things I would say that we've done for our product in the last couple of years is that we've actually gone into the WordPress world and we've launched a WordPress version coding for WordPress completely different than coding for Drupal it's a completely different framework completely different set of skills and so it makes you look at your product in different ways and then also just the communities in general like I said, Drupal is a very technical very enterprise level and typically more advanced developers and more advanced users WordPress, everything they want is click click to install, click to configure, click to this everything's driven in the UI and that's not a bad thing at all and you can actually learn from other communities and learn from other products outside of our island and bring that into Drupal and we saw that today at the Dries note where more drag and drop and everything's starting to get more layout buildery that's great because that's expanding our island and allowing us to do more and by doing that you're taking your product and you're moving it just outside of the Drupal bubble exposing you to new markets, new opportunities that can then have a lot of cross sales because, believe it or not and most of you are agency owners so you know this not everyone does Drupal anymore, just Drupal people are doing Drupal and and if you can make your product for Drupal and then you can start capturing more of the business of the people that you're working with this is just kind of a tip from internally and I've heard this said over and over again by my board and my current investors is agency financing is the cheapest financing you'll ever find you're not deleting your company and you're able to bootstrap everything internally so my biggest recommendation is as you're building this product and you're trying to figure out how do I how do I start it, how do I bootstrap it how do I get the funds in order to make this happen I have to take a developer off of paid projects and turn them into just developing product well that's going to cost you money how do you do that you use the income that's coming in from your agency and you don't have to seek out external funds and that's going to be much much better down the road once you've built up the product you're going to be in a position for when you do have to go get financing or you do have to split off or you know lucky you you're starting to get acquired or somebody wants to merge you in you haven't diluted yourself along the way just trying to get the money to start the business up but hindsight is always 2020 and so these are some of the the things that I learned and I want to pass along as part of what I learned in creating locker first thing is code for scale but plan for realistic growth you may hit the home run and you may not but I will tell you and this has actually come up in the last week decisions that we made eight months ago a year ago and in the way that we were going to architect things and scale are helping us now and so even though you may want to get the MVP out I encourage that out as fast as you can plan for scale because at some point you're going to have that scale and you don't want to get caught flat footed a year from now and saying oh crap I got to go rebuild the entire underpinnings of my product because it doesn't scale in this fashion at the same time you know if people aren't dialing you the day one that you launch the product don't freak out it happens it's a slow growth and you'll get there the next one is document your docs to document to document document document your agency you're implementing it right you're building it and you are the expert on it not everyone else is right and so I'll get questions and be like oh yeah that's this crap it's not in the docs like I'm always having to go back and figure out like why isn't this in the docs or where is this in the docs and I wish I would have been more proactive early on in my product in building out those documentations to avoid some of the easy mistakes that folks were using when they're implementing it and this is the last one and this is the most important and I wish I could tell you the silver bullet or the answer I have and I don't I'm still working through it myself but as an agency owner you're kind of in this teeter totter you have your agency and you have your product and your agency will do really well and your product will suffer and your product will do really well and your agency will suffer and if you're the owner of the agency like I am you're having to split your time amongst both don't lose focus just because your agency is screaming for your help don't forget your product and vice versa our agency was lucky enough to see a 3x growth last year which is awesome but in doing that it took away from my ability to focus on the product because I had to then scale and grow a company that was just going crazy right and so that's a thing that I just want to highlight that this is going to be necessary for you to take a look at and so you know as you're going through this as you're looking at it you know keep your focus make sure that you take your mental breaks that's another thing that I would highly recommend but make sure you at least visualize that teeter totter and every time you're spending time with your agency you're not spending on your product and vice versa and at some point those two are going to hit a point where they can no longer exist and that's when you break them apart and you've got two separate companies so with that I believe we've got maybe a couple of minutes for Q&A or Twitter as well or just find us around the conference we'd be happy to answer any questions there's a microphone up here if you want to use it this is being recorded if you don't want to use the microphone I can repeat as well Hey Chris, how's it going man? Good, good So I was really interested to hear about your experience working with Omega and how business developed from there was it organic or did you kind of push for it? No it was very organic and it was very long long story of how that all went about but basically I started I started my agency and like Chris said earlier it was very slow at the beginning if you will as most agency owners know so I had a lot of time on my hands I got involved in the documentation and support around Omega and then one day they said hey we're going to put your name on the project page because you've contributed so much thank you, awesome now you're on the project page of the number one theme in Drupal email started coming in people were like oh my gosh I need Omega help and we went from working with small startups and universities to Fortune 50 sites in like a couple of weeks because people were all of a sudden needing a lot of help so again that's where contributing to Drupal for not the sake of your product or whatever you want to do can reap tons of rewards in the future and you're kind of you're betting on yourself in that sense That's awesome, thank you I know like Chapter 3-2 experienced a surge of business after they contributed so much to D8 they were then referred to for any big D8 projects they were kind of the go-to shop for that so I think investing in the open source community is likely to pay off yeah, yeah I don't know about this what about building a product that doesn't cater to development for the Drupal community or building a product in Drupal but not for the community so Drupal is a service so the question is how do you build something that isn't necessarily for Drupal but it's built on Drupal, right? that's a great question that comes up a lot of the times there are a lot of great SaaS companies that you may not know running Drupal underneath and there are a lot of Drupal companies that are actually using things like Drupal commerce to run all of the e-commerce stuff behind them you can sit there and like read the error messages coming out and you're like, I know where that error message comes from totally fine, totally legal do it, because you're building it on a product that you know you can extend and you can work with so the licensing and everything behind Drupal allows you to build a product off of it you don't necessarily have to if you're selling it as a service to somebody somebody is using that, you don't have to obviously give them the code for it but if you are wrapping it up into a product and selling it then under the open source agreement you would have to give them the source code for it that being said there's a great example of like roomify in the rooms module to manage hotels and kind of like an Airbnb if you wanted to run your own little Airbnb off of a property they've done that, they've basically taken Drupal and they can host your Airbnb site for you vacation rental for you so yeah, I would say go for it, do it but at the same time one of my other cautions is go test other technologies because when you have a hammer everything's a nail and so just because you know Drupal doesn't mean Drupal's the best solution for it and so that's one thing I would caution is again like I said build for scale you may find yourself 10 months from now cursing the decision to use Drupal even though it's called Drupal and your smile actually feel like I'm hitting a heart string here you're just so hitting the nail on it yeah correct yeah and I'm a big fan of WordPress now after the last couple of years being in there and I'll be honest there are times when I tell people don't use Drupal just don't and it takes a little you have to kind of swallow your throw up when you say that the first couple of times but yeah no it really is and I think that's part of being on the island of Drupal is that we just think everything can be Drupalized and it's not really that way like we should actually encourage other technologies and encourage other things so if you are building on Drupal and you're building a product on Drupal make sure you don't let Drupal's how do I say it quirks get out to the users at times you're gonna have to do some fine tuning in places but yeah definitely make sure you take a look at the right technology decision not just for what you know but where you're going yeah I believe we're out of time right now but if you guys have any more questions please let us know again hit us up on twitter or come find us at the conference thank you who's this one? it's the AV it's the one? the AV whoever runs it oh it's sweet yeah of course we know Penn State nice to meet you I know that we do a lot of people are working on spacing out but I know that's a plenty on account so are you a developer? yeah gotcha you built yourself out of a business yeah yeah okay um yeah so in that case you're using the module as a lead gen for your services and I would say


Welcome to my Tantric Winter Meditation Journey. After last week's video I've had a lot of people writing in to ask how did I get past my personal obstacle to following Tantra Vidya. You know when I said that if there was a viewpoint that was totally opposite to mine and I found that really hard to accept, how did I get past that? Well, we believe that within us we have 52 Shaktis, 52 energies that we can arouse through different types of meditation to clear our blockages, whether the blockage is mental, or physical, or emotional, but we can find that energy within us, we can find that strength within us to clear away those blockages. I'm very happy to share this meditation with you. It's a great meditation, very powerful because not only does it help you to calm your anger but it actually rebalances your mind. So it's really fantastic but I have to warn you it is an extremely complicated meditation to follow. As a matter of fact I found it so hard that it had to be given to me in a separate version all together and I will share both these versions with you of course but I'm telling you this because I want you to know that Tantra is not easy. A lot of people think that they can just sort of read it once and start on it. It is very complex and it needs a lot of concentration and time but it is so worth it in the end. So the meditation as I said there are two separate versions of it and I'm going to give you both the complex, the traditional one as well as the easier one that was devised for me by Binama. Now this meditation takes place at night so it is the moon's energy that impact this particular meditation. In the first one, the traditional one, you visualize it taking place in your crown chakra.  The lotus flowers are fully bloomed and they have eight petals each. That's an important part to remember. Each lotus has eight petals. They're placed one on top of the other but in such a way that you can see all sixteen petals. Once you've placed your lotus flowers you visualize a circular disc pressing them down. The disc is silver in color and it is slightly convex and you visualize this pressing them down so that it's almost restricting them. Next, you visualize the lotus flowers starting to move. So the lower one will move in a clockwise direction. The upper one in an anti-clockwise direction. They will move quite slowly and with difficulty because the disc on top of them is quite heavy. It's restricting them. The lower lotus flower represents your point of view and the eight petals represent the slightly divergent perspectives around your own point of view. The upper one represents the opposite point of view and again the eight petals represent the slightly divergent perspectives to the opposite point of view. So each petal represents some aspect of that point of view and as they start to move each petal at some point or the other will line up with your third eye which means that that's the perspective that your mind has held at some point or the other that it was part of your thought process. Now as I said this is an extremely powerful meditation because it really brings home to you that your mind is capable of encompassing everything even if consciously you feel you cannot. But it is also an extremely complicated one because each petal represents a slightly divergent point of view. Just slightly different to the previous one and you have to be able to remember which petal represents what which one is coming in because they're moving the lotus flowers are moving in different directions so which one is coming into the third eye at what time and at what base and so on. So it's just really really difficult. And so as I said Binama gave me a slightly simpler version of this one. Now it's simpler because basically we draw it out and the visuals just make it easier to follow. Normally this one is drawn in the soil. It's made in a very large circle. I'm just going to show you on a piece of paper. So first you draw a large circle. Then you draw a line across it. This point on the line represents your point of view. This one represents the directly opposite point of view. Then we draw another line across. Now this point is the halfway point between what you believe and what is the opposite point of view to yours. And this point is the halfway point between the opposite person's idea coming up to yours. Now you might think that the two halfway points are exactly the same but it's not. There's a slight difference because of the thinking patterns. Think of it like the phases of the moon. So you have the same phase of the moon but it's slightly different when the moon is waxing and it's slightly different when the moon is waning. Next you draw two more lines to dissect the circle. Now this point represents midway between what you originally thought and your halfway point. This one is midway between the halfway point and the extreme opposite and so on. You basically get the idea. So you keep dividing the circle till you have 16 divisions and at each point you write down the slight shift in perspective and you eventually end up with a circle which includes every little aspect of the same thought. And it is so powerful because this is when you realize looking at it that there is no such thing as you and the opposite side. Everything is one. It is all in one space. And once you can realize that you can get past almost any obstacle. As I said before, it is an extremely powerful meditation. Not only will it calm your anger but it rebalances your mind and I think that is far more important because that is the basis of all of your Shakti. Even though it is complicated and time-consuming if you're going to do it, do it for yourself, just for yourself because at the end of the day you are the center of your own universe. Remember to like, comment, subscribe. See you in the next one.


All right. Here we go. Oh, that's very loud. Okay. Amazing Everybody Welcome to the talk about UVs My name is Jonathan Lampell. I work for CG cookie and I'm here representing them as well as orange turbine on the orange turbine side of things we help studios and businesses start to use wonder and that involves often Jason making a bunch of pipeline tools and so we We took the add-ons that we had been working on over on CG cookie and moved them over to that side of the business because it made a lot more sense And so I've been working on a few add-ons recently one of them has to do with UVs And so today I want to talk about the things that I've learned about UVs while I've been making that And how to speed up the workflow So I will be talking about the plugin a little bit But mostly I want to talk about the ideas behind it And so hopefully some of those might even be able to be implemented into blender um But blender does UVs a little bit differently than other software And so I want to talk about the specific workflow that blender has and how to use it as quickly as possible um Who here loves UVs? Okay, like a couple hands shockingly shockingly more than I thought not bad um Most people do not and so I feel like anything that makes the process a little bit easier is definitely worthwhile um Also, it's almost halloween halloween weekend. Uh, so I figured a very spooky topic would be an order um I was going to wear a halloween costume Put it in my suitcase, but then uh, I realized it was missing and uh, I think I forgot to pack it so eh all right So the reason I'm talking about UVs is because um, I worked on a project a little while ago that involved um Some hard surface game assets packed a bunch of them together, but this was back in blender um Let's see three points no 2.6 and So I ended up doing all of these by hand, which um Was very painful and so since then I kind of had a notebook of like all the things that I wish UVs might be able to do and then just slowly add into those over the years And then eventually was able to finally do something about it earlier this year Um, but it's been it's been years of just collecting little things that I wish um, I could tweak The first thing that made this so much easier than having to do all of this Back in 2.6 is multi-object editing not a UV specific feature, but this actually Makes it possible to do a whole lot of things. Um specifically packing multiple objects together Which is something that you couldn't really do before there was an add-on for it But it was very it was a weird workflow and sometimes broke Um, so being able to just select multiple objects go into edit mode Uh, it makes things Much easier and it's crucial for the material based texture set based workflow, which we'll talk about Also improved packing in 3.6 by developer chris blackburn Is just phenomenal. It's so much better. Um It's very very good. It's not quite as good as some of the alternative packers out there UV pack master is still king of all of them But it's very very good and you can get a good pack just by default in blender now So these two things made it so much easier and instead of spending days on UVs like I was doing before I think I spent a total of like three days unwrapping and packing that thing Previously now you can do that much more quickly But first why do we even need UVs in The year of our lord 2023 like it seems like a very old technology Why do we still need to to use these things? Um, but it's incredibly simple and that's exactly why it works So first of all procedural textures. This is an example from my co-worker kent tremel This is a fully procedural wood shader. So it's like you can make some pretty cool things with procedurals But a long list of instructions for the computer is always going to be slower to compute than a pixel telling it Exactly what color it should be like it's just always going to be very resource intensive It can't really do that in a lot of real-time applications Also a lot of uh procedural textures still need UVs for their coordinates and things like that So you can't really get away from UVs even when working with procedurals a lot of the time Sometimes you can but not always Also p-tex is another alternative people always ask about like oh, what about p-tex? And a picture of bolt because that was the first movie that disney used it mostly on quite a while ago now And p-tex down stands for per face texturing, which means that every single Face of your object has its own texture. So they might not be big textures. They might be very small even one pixel But every single face has its own texture and its own, you know little unwrap And so you can paint like that. So in that case it abstracts away the UVs, but they're still there But the reason it's not used as much for a lot of things besides, you know Heavy film production is because again, it's very resource intensive It's you can imagine having a image for every single face of your object Is pretty heavy So we were actually going to get this In blender potentially back in 2015 developer I believe Nicholas Bishop was working on implementing it, but there wasn't enough Need from it from the community and also there was a couple roadblocks and so it never got finished but The industry kind of moved on from that a little bit and it's More about like udems and stuff now. So it's not as relevant as it was Decals other great option It works you can you can get away with not using UVs for some objects But it's really limited to very simple like your your larger areas have to be very simple And like very low amount of procedural stuff In order for that to work you can't you can't decal your way around a rounded brick wall or something like that You have to use UVs at some point For most objects Okay, so UVs aren't going away. What about AI? Can we just have AI do it for us? Which would be extremely nice That's something that if anybody has experience with I'd love to talk to you about but The number one reason that we don't have it yet is because it's a little more niche than what people are researching right now But also because you just need a lot of high quality models and high quality examples of UV unwraps in order for this to actually be useful And that's something that's very difficult to get like we at orange turbine Like we're not just just going to scrape a bunch of games or you know models off of sketchbab in order to make this work Like that's not a good idea So there's just not that many Ways to get all of that data that's actually needed. So eventually it'll get there but Likely not for a bit, but even if it does right the automatic one-click type of things probably need to be fixed a little bit After the fact so you might have to tweak it and it might only be you know Five to ten minutes of tweaking versus an hour or so, but even so you want a robust set of tools to do that easily Um when you have to So even so you editing tools not going away as far as I know we'll find out um in the soccer we'll Look at blender's UV tools how to use them as effectively as possible We'll talk about the custom workflow that I was working on As well as possible improvements either to the tool itself or to blunder so first The easiest way to get UVs is just through projection. So this is like the simplest method All you're doing is you're taking An angle or multiple angles and just flattening the model Looking at it from that direction And just projecting it outwards. So blunder has a couple types of projection cube cylinder sphere protecting from the view and smart UV projection Which isn't like super smart, but it just bases it on the angle And you end up getting a decent unwrap with minimal stretching Often looks quite good, but it's you know, very messy in the seams Can cause some problems. So it's mostly for really dense objects that you don't really care exactly what the UVs look like But in general blender relies much on much less on projection than other applications do and so I don't end up using them all that often So making seams, I'm sure if you've used UVs, you're very familiar. Just go into edit mode here Select some seams Let's go to box select. You select some seams Some edges here right click mark seam pretty quick not too bad But there's an even faster way to do it. So that's just based on the edge menu also control E You can pick the shortest path, which is the fastest way to do it in vanilla blender You just select an edge hold down control select another edge and it'll tag everything in between If you go down to pick shortest path set that to tag seam. You can very quickly just boom, boom, boom, you're done So that's pretty nice works quite well You can't do that on a single edge, but as long as you have multiple edges all connected that you need to unwrap then there you go You can also select by attribute. So half of the battle is selecting the right edges to mark as seams in the first place And you can select things based on a variety of different attributes in the select menu I'm often going to select similar And using select by similar sharpness or select by beveled edges or whatever and that way I can just select a Sharp sharp edge and then place the seam there for everything But you can also, you know, select sharp edges like so find an angle and mark seams that way. So That's definitely helpful Um, and we'll talk about that a little bit later From islands you can mark seams from your existing uv islands So for example, if you have a default unwrap or let's say you used one of the projection methods If you go and unwrap your model again, since you don't have seams all of that information will be lost and you'll have to start over So what you generally want to do is after you've done something like that Or you have a primitive that you want to keep the uvs for You just go to the uv editor select everything uv and Seams from islands And there you go So that's also very helpful Yeah All right, so speeding up seams So they're not very slow. We saw those tools very quick Um, however, if you're making hundreds of cuts thousands of cuts if you're spending all day working on uvs going Three clicks per operation. It is not super ideal Um, so what we did and this is myself. Um, but the the bulk of this was JF Matthew who we hired to work on this is we built a tool for placing seams just as an active tool So once you install the add-on you just go to cut uv in the edit mode toolbar And all you do is just click and make a seam so very easy. Um, but Double click mark the loop Just like so You can draw seams Like that In case you have like an arbitrary path that you need to follow There's the pick shortest path by holding control all of that But the most the thing that I'm most excited about here is that when you double click To mark seam it stops at the other seams So this seems like a very minor feature and it's in a lot of other uv tools If you're used to working in rhizome or whatever But the reason this is helpful even though it might seem small at first is that let's say you have a character You want to split it into sections? You can split the neck the arms the legs Um the torso And then if you want to split the sides you just double click like you're just double clicking all these things You're done very quickly. Whereas if you're just selecting by loop, you know That's going to run all the way down the legs up the arms around the head Cross the fingers all of that. So it's just a very easy way to split things up into sections And if you hold like shift and double click then it just goes all the way through if you want to but again It's very very quick But just marking by seam and then stopping at the seam very important What else uh seam layers So this is something that I have wanted for a while and that's where In blunder you have your seams. You have one set of seams, but you can also have multiple uv maps Um and the seams don't really correspond to the uv maps at all. They're not associated whatsoever. So if you have multiple Uh unwraps then you work on one You have your seams But then in order to work on a different unwrap that you want to maybe place a decal or something you have to Uh get rid of all your current seams make your new ones and then wrap that way and if you go back to the first one You're like you just have to remake your seams or go seams from islands again So that takes a while. Uh, so what we did um specifically jf did this one Which is incredibly helpful is we associated seams with uv maps. So All we need to do is just mark some seams Just like so. Um, and if you switch your uv maps This seems are saved on the map. Um, so that just makes a lot of sense And uh is is much faster to work with. Um, especially Not every project needs multiple uv's on a on an object, but a lot of Game assets that I've worked on have definitely needed that. So that's been helpful uv flow It's currently in beta. So it's not actually fully out yet But you can find it online or um, I'll show you a link at the end and then you can just get it I'll I'll give it to you for free to try out um Okay, so this is how the tool works for anybody who's interested in the technical details Most of what I'm going to talk about is stuff that you can do at home Like if you know a little bit of python, you can replicate A lot of the functions of the add-on however for the active tool in the toolbar that is not quite the case uh because Use the active tool api not the most documented area of blender, but it's it works pretty well However, it doesn't have a on start or on exit function that you can use So what we had to do in order to make this work As you can see we have pre-selection highlighting and you know a bunch of Context sensitive stuff in order to make this work So what we had to do is run this run a state machine inside of a timer inside of the tool And that creates a whole lot of uh extra little hurdles that we had to work around. Um, so it's Yeah, I wouldn't say it's um ideal But it's it's the only way that it can really work. And so it was worth the extra effort, but it did take Um, I would say a good a good few months. Um in order to actually figure out how to make this work reliably Um, let's see. It's using raycasting or using pre-selection highlighting And it saves and loads attributes. So when you mark a seam or do anything related to uvs It saves all that information as attributes on the mesh And that's how we're able to do the uv layers and a couple other functions that you'll see later So it's all thanks to the generic custom attributes One weird thing about that is that you can only set and load them in object mode So we're working in edit mode, but we have to switch over to object mode in the script and then switch back to edit mode In order to make that work, but it it does do the trick All right, can it be added to blender? This is something that I definitely want to think about as if you have a tool That's very useful. Why not just implement it? Um, first we're breaking all sorts of design uh design conventions of blender in order to make this work because we're doing several things we're doing them at once and So As a whole no, but the idea of having an active tool that sets attributes that makes a lot of sense So maybe that could be added or some of the other like specific functions, which we'll talk about later Hopefully could inspire features or things. Maybe that we could add ourselves if if we could Um, so some specific parts might be able to be added But not everything as a whole it actually works better as an add-on because Again, we're we're breaking the rules in order to make it easier for the user and in this specific case That works great. So that's the beauty of add-ons. You can break the rules. It's definitely punk rock that way. It's nice uh unwrapping So unwrapping has several options in blender versus angle base versus conformal Actually had to work pretty hard to find an example where conformal was better You're pretty much always going to want angle based But if you have a very flat area that's rounded on the outsides, then angle base doesn't work quite as well But for the majority of cases Angle based is almost always better and gives a more uniform unwrapped and conformal Which can lead to a lot of stretching. So the manual says conformal is better for simple objects But that's not quite accurate I would stick with angle based most of the time Fill holes is another option It just pretends that there are polygons where there are holes and so you get a more accurate More accurate unwrap around any holes correct aspect Let's see. I don't have an example of this one, but it's where you have a non-square texture It'll stretch the UVs to match that. You can turn that off if you want to but it's very helpful for um making sure that it if you have like perfect squares in the texture that it looks like perfect squares on your model And not be stretched use sub div is also very helpful I don't use it all the time because it is a little bit slow because I have to take all the extra Polygons from the subdivision surface modifier into account as it's unwrapping But in some cases you'll get some extreme stretching Here's the case where I just took a plane and subdivided it And what happens is as you subdivide it, of course that distorts the UVs and so you can correct for that when unwrapping Um issue with that is then if you switch sub div levels, right? It's going to change um Your the result of your UV so you want to do that at the sub div level that you're rendering at Which sometimes is a little bit of a hassle, but it does it does work quite well Okay, live unwrap. So this is one way of unwrapping very quickly and all it does is that anytime you place a seam it unwraps the entire object So if we have an object here, you have to turn it on in two places you go to options in the 3d viewport live unwrap UV editor UV Live unwrap and then anytime you place a seam I'll just Do that go to edge select Let's see mark seam It'll should unwrap everything for you. Is that on for both? Let's see Oh Has to uh, make a change. Let's see mark seam. There we go. Um And mark seam. All right, so you can see it just updates the UVs as you go So this is extremely fast. It's very helpful But there is one issue with it, which I want to talk about Uh, I think next let's see Okay, so the way we're doing it is slightly different. We're using blunders regular unwrap But we're just using a generic attributes as the seams and there's no reason that you can't use other attributes as seams as well So in the tool as you're unwrapping Um, not only can you have the you know different UV layers You can also use any other attribute As a seam so you can use a specific angle a bevel a crease or a sharp or a freestyle mark Whatever you want, um, potentially custom attributes like it doesn't like anything could be a seam It doesn't necessarily have to mark these as seams. They just act as seams So if you have a hard surface object for example, um, and you're going to bake the normals It's really important that anything that's marked as sharp has to be a seam like that's just if you want a good rounded normal map um Otherwise you're going to get glitches if that's not, you know on the edge of your island because you need a little bit of Uh overshoot of the texture there Um, so to avoid glitches in cases like that, you know every every sharp edge has to be a seam Um, and so here you can just turn that on and you're good to go So you can unwrap an entire object without using seams at all in some cases Um apply scale is something that I've also wanted for a bit and that's where you know in blender if you scale your object Something ridiculous and you go into edit mode and you and unwrap It's going to be very stretched. Actually, let me do seams from islands first You and unwrap all right. It's very stretched But if you use apply scale here Unwrap, uh, it'll Figure it out and try to make it as square as possible So the way we're doing that is incredibly simple. All we're doing is we're just stretching the object in the opposite direction Unwrapping and then undoing that stretching so very basic But it does work and that way you don't actually have to worry about your scale as you're working Auto unwrap so this is Exactly like bundles live unwrap, but with one key difference Let me go ahead and make sure that's turned off Uh, let's see live unwrap off Like so, uh, it only affects the area That the seam is on so on either side of the seam It'll unwrap those two parts and not unwrap the rest of the object So if we have this on just a little like live button, um, and I mark a seam Like so you can see that the the face of the monkey jumped a little bit But the ears in the other areas did not If I place the seam here, you know, that area will be unwrapped but not the rest The reason this is really important is because if you have live unwrapped turned on all of the time, you know, it's very quick It's very fast to work with but let's say you do some manual work on your UVs. You Straighten them out. You do some relaxing.  You put them in exactly the right place If you mark a seam anywhere on the rest of your object All that work is just reset. It's gone. Um, so I've definitely spent time Redoing things because I didn't realize that that was happening on the other side of my object didn't think about it and just had to redo it So it's a very simple change. It's literally just one one difference But that will definitely save some work. So Let's see Some tips for unwrapping subdivision surfaces. So we talked about the use sub div. Of course, there is that Which can help but if you have let's say something like a cylinder You add a subdivision surface you're going to get some stretching So the way that you fix that and the reason it's happening Is actually because there's a big difference in the scale of the face on one side versus a the scale of the face on the other side So up here, you know, we have these very small Small faces and here we have some very big ones and the difference between the two is causing that stretching So in general if you're using sub div what you need to do is add Some seams like that Or add some like holding edges In order to fix that and that'll that'll fix it The problem is with blender the subdivision surface is set to keep boundaries And so you're going to get this kind of stretching and it can be very confusing if you don't know exactly what's what's happening there And this is from the subdivision surface modifier Um, I just put the setting up here because that's more convenient than digging through the properties editor But all you need to do is just switch that in the advanced tab of the modifier Over to keep corners and junctions That'll solve it. Um, I had one project earlier where which is like a hard surface character But it all used sub div and so I was doing that for every single object of every single part of this robot And it got a little bit old So just switching that over to keep corners and junctions when you're working on something like that can be very helpful All right, improving visibility sometimes UVs are a little bit hard to see So there's a couple things that you can do to improve this First of all is just use a check checker texture. That's covered by many videos online I'm sure you know how to do it and if not you can you can look it up pretty easily You just add the texture in the shader editor make sure that's selected set your viewport to textured Um and go from there But I didn't really want to think about it every single time So what we did is just implement it as a actually like zero click thing where you have your Checker and your overlays as a preference and anytime you use the tool it just switches into it So on any objects as long as you have that set and saved in your preferences You just switch to the tool. You're ready to unwrap never have to think about it Um, and I've just I've enjoyed not having to go into the shader editor But again like pretty much every UV editing add-on has that So that's something that's that's pretty easy. Um But it's fun to do Or this is a little like context sensitive So it won't change the other objects if you're in solid mode It won't like put your normal map on the other object. So it keeps it nice and clean, but face opacity Is something that's very helpful. So let's say in your image editor You have your checker texture like that um, and then Let's see. You've got it. I don't know where my image selector went up there. That's just gone Um, let's say you have your checker texture and you're working with UVs It can be a little noisy and hard to see so what you want to do is go to edit and preferences And I'm using a custom theme, but the default blender theme If we go to UV editor right there the face is set to like Something like around here. Um, and sometimes that's just very Challenging to work with so go to face crank this up. Uh, it's much much easier to see Also, you can clear and pin your image. So a lot of times I don't really want to see the image, especially this checker texture While i'm working with UVs. I don't really care about that I want to see it on the model, but I don't want to see it here So what you can do is just in the image editor, uh, you can Go ahead and clear that out and then just make sure you hit this pin button And that keeps it from changing as you switch objects and switch Um between like which material is selected and all that stuff So pin that cleared out. Um, and then as you're working with your Your UVs you get this incredibly clean Just workspace. Um, and it's it's much easier to work with So there is that Um, and then also three overlays is something that was pretty fun to try out So here's an example. Um, actually used some geometry nodes in this one in order to In order to work with this. Uh, let's see if we go to camera view Where'd my object go? It was just there It's gone That's okay. Um, we can make a new object Let's use susan Oh now it's back. I have no idea what that was. Um, but so we have these geometry node overlays That you can apply. Um, and I'll show you how they work if we have the time But first just making seems more visible Sometimes the the default like dark red was hard to see And so just making them absolutely Blinding was kind of fun. Um But also just looks cool. I don't know But some other like actually helpful ones are being able to see the angle stretch In 3d space instead of just in the uv editor And so, um with the stretch information with the grid information oftentimes You don't even need to open the uv editor. You can just do your uv's in the 3d view And as long as you can tell there's no stretching as long as you can tell they're aligned correctly You don't really need anything else. Um, there's also angle or uh area stretching As well as, you know, which udim it's a part of So, uh, the way that that works is just in geometry nodes. Um, what I'm doing is just taking the uv's Looking at the angle of the face corner And then comparing that to the angle of the face corner in 3d space Finding the difference and coloring it like it's it's pretty straightforward But it's pretty helpful to be able to just drag and drop that and apply it if you need to Um, let's see. I wanted to include that with the add-on But there is an issue with enabling the geometry viewers node So I haven't figured that out quite yet, but uh, that will that will be there Okay Next up is straightening Which is something that let's see it takes a it takes a few steps, but blunder is actually It's pretty powerful. Um, what you do to straighten something and the reason this is helpful by the way is you often want to make straight lines and Uh, as you're drawing like if you were drawing a straight line across this pot here Uh, it would just be very pixelated because it's you know shifted in uv space Um, and so it makes text harder to read it makes, um clean lines not look very good So if you have properly straightened uv's you can get away with a much lower texture resolution and have it look just as good so, um, it's actually very Very space saving as well. So a straight Uh uv is just much easier to pack and so you end up getting a lot more out of your textures if you straighten your uv's So the way that you do that in blunder, let's just focus on one section at a time Let's look at this area here Um, and actually let's just look at a single Row first the way that you do this in blunder Is you have a couple different options first you can align. So if you have an edge Just like so, uh, let's Right-click and you can align this edge Frequently horizontally or auto, which is whatever is closest And so you can easily You know, right-click align auto That works pretty well. You can also straighten things. So if you have your uv's A little bit out of whack You can take this whole loop here and then do a straighten And then that'll make it into a vertical line um Which is often helpful, but What we really want to do is make this more grid-like and just straighten it out So the way we do that with is with follow active quads And I'll do that before align rotation What you do is you need to straighten each edge of something that's already fairly, uh, straight So align auto align auto Align auto and align auto select that face and make it the active one Just like so and then select the entire section uv and follow active quads Wherever that is Also in the right-click context menu and there we go now it's straight. Uh, now you can Do whatever you need to do And if this is tilted, um as you unwrap it you can also do an align rotation Which I think is fairly new But it's incredibly helpful. You can just select an edge go to uv align rotation And as long as it's set to edge it lines it straight away You can also align it to the geometry which takes the local object coordinates and uses one of those axes to Sort of try to project the the rotation And that's pretty helpful and then auto. I don't know why it's called auto, but it's actually just straightening the bounding box um Which is works most of the time, but edges like It's very solid. It's very reliable. So I often use that Uh, but the way to work with this on more complex objects because follow active quads is great But you can't do it on things that are not quads Or things that aren't perfect grids So the way that you do that is first you select an island Which is control l in the 3d viewport by the way, and you set your uh select linked to the delimit seam You can select an island like that or if you're using the cut uv tool just double click Somewhere. Whoa Accidentally hit the space bar Okay, let's just go there. Um if you See double click select an island Um, all right. So what you want to do is first align all of the things that are already grid like So if we take these faces and maybe just box select a whole bunch of them Everything that's basically a grid Just like so actually we are going to do the same follow active quads thing. So I may as well Straighten this first before I do the whole selection just to make this a little bit faster again Wine auto wine auto. This is definitely something that will be Automated because I also don't like doing this every single time. Um, okay, so if you do that and then select everything that's A grid just like so That uh Probably use lasso selection, but well all right Let's say something like that then As long as that is the active quad Follow active quads great. Obviously everything else You know gets Bent out of shape, but this one is now straight what you can do is hit p to pin those vertices That's going to keep them exactly there when you unwrap it won't affect That and then when you select everything and then you and unwrap again It'll unwrap those into place. So the workflow for straightening something is you take everything that can be grids You use follow active quads you pin you select everything else And then you unwrap again So again, that's several steps to do something that's it's fairly basic So something that we will definitely just make a one click thing in a 3d viewport Haven't quite gotten to that yet, but it's very high on the list of things to do because again straightening things is incredibly important Uh, so that's quite fun pinning That's how that goes. Um, all right packing so Packing in blender 3.6 as we looked at before is much better now that you can use holes and concave shapes and all of that It's it's really really good A couple things that are helpful is average islands scale So um as we were working with unwrapping Um With the auto unwrap it's you know, all of your islands are not always going to be the same scale because if you're only unwrapping Some things out of time and not the entire object then some might be, you know, bigger than others and take up the whole uv space or what not So if that happens if we just take one section here And you and unwrap and then okay, it's a different scale than everything else in order to make this Uniform just go to uv average island scale and now they're all relative They're they're the same text to density relative to each other and then you can go ahead and pack So that's something that you want to do most of the time Um, I included it in the normal packing options In the tool if you want you can just automatically average island scale as you go Um, but I do that before packing most of the time Also locking in the new packer is really really great. You can go to uv. Let's go pack islands um, and let's do bounding box just so it's faster but you can set the rotation method to access the lines cardinal or any and uh cardinal is incredibly nice, um Because once you've straightened your uv's obviously you don't want them tilted And if you set it to any sometimes they will tilt and then all of that work is Kind of for nothing So what you want to do is set this to something like axis aligned or cardinal and that way it will Rotate them into the best fit but only in 90 degree increments So that's really really nice and one of the new features that i'm very happy about Again, a bunch of these like very small things just add up to make such a big difference And so that's why i'm excited about the uh uv improvements in in recent versions Um, let's see Also locking pinned islands. You can do that. Uh, what was the other one? Oh merge overlapping So this is one that's also extremely helpful because what you want to do oftentimes, especially for Game assets and things is you want to mirror your uv's from one side to the other But maybe not the entire object is mirrored maybe having a character that is asymmetrical in the face And in the body, but the right arm and the left arm can be the same So what you can do in blender Is you can mirror you the the uv's by just flipping one side Overlapping it on the other one and then as long as you have merge overlapping turned on they'll operate as one unit And so you can use that to pack Very easily so that was something that was not in blender before 3.6 And if you had overlapping uv's they would just get split out And it was um anytime you had to do the workflow of mirroring uv's you had to pack it by hand so Again a small change but incredibly helpful Okay, what is next we got margin Um, that's something where obviously you want a little bit of margin on your uv's The reason for that is that when you zoom out, um, you'll get uh some artifacts right along the edges as the texture is down sampled So let's say if we pack this Let's go bounding box We can switch the margin Oh, we can't do it after the fact. There's no redo editor for that one, but uh, you often want a value of Actually, I don't want to say it because I don't have it written down Uh, but you can go to a thread on poly count that has the exact amount of margin that you're generally going to want to have That's specifically for game assets You can get away with less when you're working on films and things like that that aren't going to be down sampled as heavily but um I believe you divide your texture by 128, but I would look that up before actually doing it But that's my general rule of thumb Uh, and then that gives you just the right amount of margin And that's again something that you don't want to think about every time You just want to have whatever your texture resolution set that and then not think about it Um, so that would be helpful to have Also packing so this is probably the biggest one out of all of this is packing by material because in blender Everything is object based you have your different objects. You unwrap them. Um, you export them over to Whatever else you're you're using But if you're painting in marie substance anything else, uh, everything is based on let's say texture sets in the sense of substance But in blender if you're packing everything as objects These two things don't really work together. I mean you can do it that way, but like You want to share your uv space. You want to share your materials? And so packing by material is incredibly important And something that in blender is a little bit cumbersome because you have to select all of your objects that have the same material generally you're Selecting you can go to object mode Like so shift g to select similar And you can select excuse me objects that have a similar material or It's not in there. Then it's in the properties editor But you can select everything that has the same material as whatever the active material is you can go into all of those objects Tab to go into edit mode deselect everything go to the materials tab in the properties editor drop down to select material Then unwrap or then pack all of those things together. So it is a little bit cumbersome, but it is the way you have to do things if you're working in in those applications um, and so I again found that slightly cumbersome. So what we did with packing is if we are using multiple objects that all have different materials Just like so um, and so you can see how these are packed. Let's go and just enable the checker texture Okay um as i'm packing these things Instead of thinking about it, uh, if we use the tools packer We can set what to include Um, whether it's all objects or or just the selected faces whatever but grouped by material Anytime you pack uvs it automatically just groups all materials together And this is something that you can do in object mode as well if I select all of these objects Objects pack You don't have to think about it. It's just all done by material. So I don't know how that would be implemented in blunder like I'm not sure how that would work as far as um affecting different objects that aren't necessarily selected and all of that But packing by material is something that you definitely want to do if you're working with these other applications Um, let's see any other fun packing things I don't think so Uh, now let's look at some things that blunder might potentially change about uvs. This isn't like 100 for sure, but If you go to blunder projects Let's go to not that not that not that But projects about blunder.org Uh, Daniel Byset has a bunch of notes on here From the modeling module Of what he'd like to see changed and a lot of these Are very well written and make a ton of sense. Um, the number one thing that I was Assuming to be asked about afterwards is uh sink selection because that is one of the weirdest things about blunder and uvs And can be definitely frustrating to work with at times And so he has a proposal for exactly how it would work. Um, it could work in the future And I would recommend giving this a read if you'd like, um, but essentially If you select something in the 3d view it would select Both of the associated vertices in the uv editor, but if you select something in the uv editor, it'll, um Not select other vertices in the uv editor. It'll just select the one on the object So it makes a ton of sense and I really really hope that this gets implemented because it would make everything much easier Um, okay, there's also a potential improvement to Uh, just the unwrapping algorithm in general So here's an example of that uh on I think uv pack master has this already Um, but it's just an iterative approach that reduces stretching And you can see that with a basic object, obviously there's no scenes on here. So it's going to be stretched regardless Um, but as it continues to unwrap it just gets better and better And so instead of the regular blunder result, which would be more like this And you get something that's much less stretched So that's a potential improvement that could be coming. It's on the to-do list, but will it happen? Nobody knows um But something that also would be amazing is this grid unwrap Where instead of having to go through and follow active quads and all of that every time you unwrap You just hit grid unwrap and it does it for you during the unwrap process Which would be significantly better and incredibly cool And it works exactly the same way as I outlined Which would be you know, it straightens the grid areas Pins those unwraps the rest as you go So that's something that could potentially happen automatically without you having to go through and Align a quad and all of that stuff More things straightening an island where you take a selected set of edges and It just straightens that out, but then unwraps everything else around it Again very similar to how we already looked at with follow active quads, but instead as A straightened edge rather than a grid Excuse me. All right shifting things up and down Very helpful when you're working on like low resolution images or you have um, you have a, um Atlas of textures, um What's that called at the moment? Like I forget. Um, when you have a bunch of Textures all in one trim sheet. Thank you Yes, when you have a trim sheet, it's very helpful to just snap things up and down And being able to set that in blender and just hit your arrow keys to move between those would be very cool flying textile density Arranging and aligning selected uv islands Unwrapping to the same bounding box. So as you unwrap, it's not taking over the entire uv space You can actually focus on one area, which is Incredibly nice. One other thing that I definitely want to add in that I I tried to implement Um, manually in the uv flow tool is as you double click an island or as you unwrap something it focuses The uv editor on that area um, had some problems with the Context overrides and it was crashing a bunch. So I took that out Um, but jf said that there's a better low level solution to that which we'll look at but Either way being able to zoom in on something and actually unwrap and have it be right there instead of having to constantly move your viewport around amazing stitching islands and having them um be the right scale also very cool and then um A proposal for an automatic uv seam creation tool where essentially it's just finding tool or finding where seams should go based on a set of rules Similar to what we looked at before but a little bit smarter smarter than uh smart projection. So also very cool and um Back to a particular region Which again would be pretty sweet so they could unwrap, you know All of your uv's in one area leave one area empty and then just pack to pack to just there More packed to empty spaces also very sweet so that is Everything that I was going to talk about um Again, if you want to check this out you can go to orange turbine dot com and there's a contact form There and if you just say hey, I'd like to be a beta tester for this tool again, it's called uv flow Then I'll just send it to you in an email And you can help test it which would be incredibly helpful because there are still a couple bugs It's also on the blender market. If you'd like uh on there It also is you get all of the future updates as well rather than just the uh testing versions and Yeah, so that's all of the thoughts that I had on uv's or at least some of them I did trim the talk down a little bit um Any questions or things that you are curious about? Because I'm almost at time cool Yes 80 percent coverage Like uh just packing tighter or I I mean, I think the The 80 percent is just down to the algorithm and I haven't tried implementing a uh packing algorithm So I couldn't tell what the actual Way to achieve that would be but in general the straighter uv's are the tighter they can pack. I'm sure you've already Done as much as you can there You'll often see in blender with it's like 3.6 packer It has all of the it takes all the small islands and puts them on the outside And you often get a lot of wasted space up there uv pack master does that less But still a little bit. So maybe that's where they're getting it from is just Better utilizing the boundary And then packing that inside the other objects rather than along the edges would be my guess but I don't know for sure Any other questions Okay, then for the rest of the time you can Come up if you'd like to get ready and I'll just unwrap stuff for fun


Highlights the state-of-the-art development in electrochemical H2O2 production via the 2-electron oxygen reduction reaction is reviewed with emphasis on material science, reaction mechanisms, and fundamental factors that govern the reaction route. General principles and strategies for catalyst design are summarized to understand the inherent relationships between the catalyst properties and electrocatalytic performances. Perspectives and challenges are presented to get insights into the large-scale manufacturing of H2O2 via the electrochemical routes. This article was authored by Yu Hui-Tian, Dai Jia-Deng, Li Su, and others.


Hello everyone, Dylan Schumacher, Citadel Defense, and we are back with another addition of a tactical trick. And so this is just a real quick way to secure your helmet to your backpack. You know, if you don't have some kind of holder in here for a helmet or a beaver tail or anything like that, you can work it out pretty easy with just some carabiners or some way to attach it and then a little bit of shock cord. So I just throw my helmet on this way.  If I need to snug it up at all, I can snug it up a little bit. And from there, I'm gonna be able to run my helmet off my backpack. It does work a little bit better when the backpack is full and has stuff in it, but this is a real easy way to be able to attach your helmet to your backpack without the need of a beaver tail or a special pouch or anything like that. Hope that's helpful. Do brave deeds and endure.


Yeah, well, I mean we had a great fall obviously culminating in the Mack tournament But really I mean from our from a Frostberg match on especially ITAs and doubles Warned-and-Lie and Ray McDermott had a great ITA. They made the final of their draw The first time we've ever we've ever done that and actually the first time we've even competed in ITAs in a number of years So, you know being able to do that first time back is pretty nice and it certainly gives us some confidence And then the Mack tournament again as a team. We did definitely the best we've ever done overall We had like seven seven of the 11 brackets. We made the semi-finals We made the finals and three others. So, you know both both feats that we've never even came close to before so You know, I think it reflects in the preseason poll shows we were picked second We had a couple first place votes and Yeah, that matches sort of our own expectations. We expect to be top two We expect to be at a minimum top two and to compete with Messiah Hopefully bring on the the Mack championship this year I mean Warned-and-Lie is definitely, you know as as steady as it goes as far as being a being a good team leader being someone who's involved Nobody nobody cares more than him and this group of guys They all care a lot and everyone everyone is very invested and I know that you know, they're in the winter They're out there. They're training on their own and they're in the shows It showed the first few weeks of practice They wouldn't have came back as strong as they did had they not been not been working And that's just you know, they're to speak to their own work ethic and but yeah Warned-and-Lie someone who we're definitely relying on Sort of as a captain type role also Ray McDermott who came this this fall as a transfer and has been Been huge for us playing at Topper lineup and we expect big things from him same with Drew Ryan Who had a great a great fall great singles run in the Mack tournament But guys like Doug Vaughan and Peter Apia too who are back and we expect more from them than we got last year too so it's And everything that I've seen so far first few weeks of practice indicates we'll get just that so we're really excited for If you happen to be on green spring during a match, you're gonna hear us. You're gonna hear everybody You know just the energy especially in doubles guys just yell and there's happy to compete happy to be out there and But really it's just the intensity is a little bit higher than then it's been in years past And I think that's just that's just a matter of a culture taking shape finally after a few years being here and stuff and Everybody's fully invested and you know outside of their studies. This is what matters Most and it shows on the court and it's really nice to watch and it's actually really nice to coach


Hello. Today we are going to talk about proteins and as macromolecules, proteins have structure of the monomers that are called amino acids. Very important large biological molecules. Now you can see here some of the names of the amino acids like alanine, valine, organine, sustain and so forth. They are different but they all have something is in common which makes them to be monomer. Okay? So as you see here I'm trying to code in different colors to emphasize that those molecules are amphoteric. That means that they're both bases and acids as you can see. There is a carbon molecule which is the same for each and every amino acid that has connection with amino group. This is amino group and this is carboxyl group which when you see something like this that means that it's organic acid. There is hydrogen and something that we label as R which is a side group. Even though it looks small it is actually critically important and you will see in a short while why. So what is happening? Remember what we said about macromolecules that monomers are put together to dehydration reaction and taken apart through hydrolysis. So where is that happening? This is a little bit differently stated the structure of the amino acid and if you take a look here we have OH from one amino acid that will become water and we have H from the amino group. So is it happening just that? No we have to have enzyme that is putting them together like a soldering iron. Okay? And they are so we have one water here one molecule water and the rest of it is forming peptide bond. Okay? Now the next monomer we are going to the next amino acid the same situation is happening these are going to form the molecule of water and the rest will have peptide bond. That peptide bond is why we call the base of the proteins actually polypeptides because each and every protein has to be polypeptide but not all of them are just one polypeptide it could be more than one. So polypeptide that comes from peptide bonds that are built chemical bonds that are built from what is left over of the amino acid after taking the water away. Now what we saw there that is the primary structure. So primary structure of the protein very important is only peptide bonds between them. Now when we have many parts of one polypeptide they can be in the form of beta sheets. Okay? Or they can form alpha helix so there are spiral spirals between them. Which bonds are these? Hydrogen bonds. Hydrogen bonds are strong enough to hold the structure together but they're not chemical bonds that are stable enough if there is something like for instance if there is a heat that can be applied and break them apart. Okay? Now alpha helix are here but the sheets are nails it's all the same. Right? Now proteins are if you take a look here spiderweb is one of the proteins. Silk is the protein but the proteins have a variety of the functions and they are enzymes which we are going to talk a little bit more later which enzymes are mostly in a globular form so those that we mentioned about like hair and nail those are structural proteins and tertiary structure is the one when actually all the fun comes. And where is that fun coming from? You remember from lipids that we may have say like hydrogen hydrophilic and hydrophobic interactions. So if these two amino acid if they're acids if there are group is hydrophobic okay? That means that they're going to get to each other and hold that. That is one of the bonds. The other bond could be that here for instance we can have disulfide bridge where say like this thing and methionine which have sulfur in them they can form the bridge of the two sulfur atoms in their structure. Very important. We may have hydrophilic interactions we have Wanderwald's forces and so forth. So all this gives the globular structure which looks pretty much like egg white so it can be moved around change the shape. Please remember everything that is in biology has to do with shape. So here we can actually see how quaternary structure so this would be additional structure and not every protein actually has this structure. As you can see these here are built from two different polypeptides in the case of hemoglobin we have four of these so this would be another two polypeptides okay? That are bring together and they're forming functional protein. In the case of hemoglobin there are four iron atoms that are embedded in each and every of the polypeptides. Now regarding denaturation you may heard about that denaturation that means breaking down all of these bonds that we mentioned and getting it back to that primary structure. Primary structure bringing back to primary structure that is denaturation. What happens when a boil egg? Can that egg white be runny and jiggly again? No because it was denaturated and that is what is happening usually when we boil something to kill bacteria and so forth. What we actually do we denaturate speaking of the temperature the fever that is above 42 degrees Celsius is very dangerous because of that fever is actually enough to do denaturation of the proteins that are in our brain and basically kill us by disabling function of the brain. That would be short about the proteins. Thank you.


Another point that students find difficult to grasp is that modal auxiliary verbs have no tense. To express tense or time, bearing in mind that they are not the same thing, you have to use or adapt the main verb. Some modals can't be used to talk about the past or the future. Let's have a look at this sentence. You must be in class by 9.30 every day. That's an obligation, an obligation for something that you need to do regularly. If you wanted to talk about the past, students might initially feel that you can write a sentence like this. You must were in class by 9.30 every day to express an obligation in the past. That is not the case. You might think that one way of approaching that could be.  Unfortunately, this is now not an obligation, but a deduction. So the modal auxiliary verb must, in this case, can't be used to talk about an obligation in the past. In this case, you would use a semi-modal. You had to be in class by 9.30 every day, with had to, used to express obligation in the past. Let's have a look at the difficulties with semi-modals using had to as another example. You must be in class. Change the you to he and the must stays the same. You have to be in class. Change to he and have to changes to has to. In this session, we've covered the essential points required for you to teach modal auxiliary verbs, but always consult any materials that are appropriate to your specific teaching point, because as you may well have picked up, what initially appears to be quite a simple structure, using the nine true modal auxiliary verbs, can create difficulties for a lot of students when they first start to learn these. Then once you start to introduce the semi-modal auxiliary verbs, the difficulties can only increase.