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I’ve recently moved back into academia. Inspired by 3b1b and horrified by the awful state of the (PowerPoint) notes that were given to the students of the modul
by knolan 8y ago
I’ve recently moved back into academia. Inspired by 3b1b and horrified by the awful state of the (PowerPoint) notes that were given to the students of the modules I now coordinate, I’ve taken to rewriting them using Jupyter and copious amounts of Blender animations.
I don’t see myself using these tools as I know blender very well and I’ve got a workflow. Equations can be exported from LaTeXit as SVG and imported into blender for manipulation and animation. The new eevee real time renderer in 2.8 makes rendering high quality graphics really fast. Then, when appropriate, I try to recreate the concept in simple Python and animate it so the students can play with it.
- wodenokoto 8y agoSounds awesome, can you show off some examples?
- knolan 8y agoI will once I have a few complete sections. I plan on putting them on GitHub so you can run them via Google Colab. The topic is introductory fluid mechanics BTW.
- osrec 8y agoWould you mind explaining how you work with SVGs in blender? Genuinely interested, as I've been using blender for years, but have not had much success manipulating 2d graphics in there. I'm hoping your workflow can expand my knowledge! Thanks!
- knolan 8y agoFirst you need to install pdf2svg for LaTeXit to export SVG. Now, once you’re in blender if you import SVG art it’ll typically come in at a very small scale and each object will be separate, but it’ll also be selected. I usually scale it up shift select the first character of my equation and then ctrl j to join it. Then it’ll just be a regular curve object in blender. You can add modifiers like solidify, bevel objects, convert to mesh etc. There’s also a 2D/3D toggle in the curve properties.
- O_H_E 8y agoI have a passion of explaining concepts to younger humans. Combining programming, animation, and teaching: this kinda hits home.
- knolan 8y agoI learned blender out of a necessity to explain concepts to older executive humans (and blender is awesome!). During my undergrad we learned Matlab in year one and subsequent modules in core subjects like solid mechanics, fluid mechanics etc ignored anything to do with code. This was mainly because (as I learned later) the lecturers frequently couldn’t code themselves. This was frustrating because coding is essential to engineering and efficient problem solving. Fast forward to today and I see the same problems. Students are terrified of coding. It’s complicated enough to have to learn all this new maths but also all this computer science stuff?! So the notebooks often deal with fundamental stuff that don’t really need need code but then the code can be super simple and intuitive and hopefully inviting.
- bsenftner 8y agoCheckout mathbox. Mathbox is pure and simply genius. https://github.com/unconed/mathbox https://github.com/unconed/mathbox
- knolan 8y agoYes please!
- mitrettavrednik 8y agoJust recently I've been fiddling around with Blender in the hopes of creating some scientific animations with it. I've gotten the hang of the basics, but I'm struggling a bit with moving beyond toy examples. Would you mind sharing your workflow? It might help me to have a mental model of the full process of a typical animation.
- knolan 8y agoWhat type of stuff? I could record a video of a specific example for you.
- mitrettavrednik 8y agoIf you have the time, I'd appreciate that a lot! I'm an EE with a focus in electromagnetics, so I'd be most interested in animating time-varying vector fields, and also wave phenomena. I saw in one of your other comments that you plan to put some of your other work on GitHub at some point. I'll make sure to check that out too.
- knolan 8y agoHere are two quick and dirty videos. Apologies for the mumbling and the fan noise. https://youtu.be/uISK1RTTj84 https://youtu.be/uISK1RTTj84 https://youtu.be/ICLtxpTJBKg https://youtu.be/ICLtxpTJBKg There's a lot more you can do with Python scripting and addons. You can plot math functions as surfaces etc. There are probably a lot of possibilities with procedural textures and displacement maps.
- mitrettavrednik 8y agoThanks a bunch, those were helpful. You're clearly pretty fluent with Blender, how long ago did you start learning? Were there any resources you found helpful, especially for scientific applications? Most tutorials I've found are aimed more at artists, video game/movie animators, etc. I've been looking into the Python API and the animation nodes addon too, both seem pretty powerful.