Blender for AI Developers
Want a Career in AI? 3D Tools Might Become Essential.
I’ve spoken to a lot of engineers in the AI industry and do you know what they all seem to have in common? A strong interest in 3D simulations and 3D rendered synthetic data. Why? Well, AI computer vision is extremely powerful, but only if trained with tens of thousands of annotated images. The biggest bottleneck for custom AI tasks, therefore, is building large, accurate, image datasets.
Sure, if you want to detect cars, people, and dogs, there are already free research datasets available, but think about it. What if your company is going to manufacture a completely new product and you need an AI powered robot to work on it? You may not even have a single photo of it yet! How can you possibly train an AI without training photos? Or what if you and your small team of engineers just don’t have the time or patience to create a dataset by hand? Spend a day manually annotating instance masks and I promise you’ll never want to do it again.
I’ll get to the point. The solution is synthetic data. 3D rendered datasets (created with Blender or other tools like Unity or Unreal Engine) are a great way to quickly generate synthetic image datasets with tons of variation and a high level of photorealism.
What Should You Learn?
Here are a few of the high level skills I think are particularly valuable.
3D Modeling (using a tool like Blender)
3D Rendering (using tools like Blender, Unity3D, or Unreal Engine)
Python Scripting (for procedural Blender work and AI development)
How Can You Learn It?
In the following videos, I teach the fundamentals of Blender so that you have a foundation to build on top of.
Once you have a good base, you can check out our course on 3D Rendered Datasets in Blender for Beginners and by the end, you’ll be far ahead of almost every other AI developer out there!
Why Blender is So Great for Synthetics
Before we created this free video series and course, we put out a shorter series on why Blender is so great for Synthetic Data. I highly recommend you check that out!
Free Video Series
Now, we hope you enjoy our series on Blender for AI Developers! Keep in mind that if you would rather learn from a fully self contained, more concise course, you can scroll down to the bottom of the page and check that out.
This is part one of an informal Blender tutorial series targeted specifically at AI developers. Over the course of the series, we'll introduce the core concepts of Blender that are useful for AI developers, whether they are using a simulator, or Blender itself.
In part two of our informal Blender tutorial series targeted specifically at AI developers, Adam breaks down the move, rotate, and scale functions.
In this video, Adam will show some of the differences between object mode and edit mode.
In part four of our series on Blender for AI Devs, Adam teaches some of the fundamentals of creating 3D models in Blender. We'll cover most of the primitive shapes you can start a model with as well as introduce the extrude and inset tools.
In part five of the Blender for AI Developers series, Adam will show some of the basics of the bevel and loop cut tools.
In the sixth video in our series, Adam walks through creating an object with the goal of setting things up for our next video where we will discuss materials and UV mapping. In this video, Adam teaches a few more modeling techniques and demonstrates how you can use primitive shapes to create more complex shapes.
In part seven of our series on Blender for AI Devs, Adam teaches some of the fundamentals of UV mapping and materials in Blender. This is a continuation with the pillow object created in part 6 of the series.
In part eight of our series on Blender for AI Devs, Adam walks through how to use compositing to create a depth map. This method can also be used for segmentation.
In part nine of the Blender for AI Developers series, Adam will show some of the basics of scripting within Blender.
This is the last installment (for now) of the Blender for AI Developers series. In this video, Adam shares why we think this is still a place to watch in the industry.
And this is just the main series, check out the Immersive Limit YouTube channel for more Blender and Synthetic Data videos!
Complete Course
If you liked the series, please consider taking our complete beginners course on the subject! Every purchase is a vote for more content like this and allows us to keep creating more great learning content for you and for others!
Here’s a direct link to the course sales page: 3D Rendered Datasets in Blender for Beginners
Thanks for watching!