 Well g'day, how you doing? I'm from Australia. My name is Chris. I'm talking today about something called Uncanny Nature Which is a I think what hybrid stop motion sounds like a bit of a mouthful, but I'll get into it and so essentially it's sort of the first half the talks about this project that I've been working on and excuse me, sorry And the second part is about blender. Yes, I sort of almost two-thirds about non blender stuff But it all linked together in the end Just in a sec All right, so So this was an exhibition I had earlier this year and all stop motion pure stop motion But also the armatures themselves. These are the physical things that I made for the exhibition They were animated they were projected, but the armatures were sculptures as such and so there's a bunch of Armatures and different bits and pieces. I'll go into that in a second But essentially that was the sort of starting point of the blender phase and the end point of the previous phase So I'll just give you a bit of a background to this previous sort of stop motion bit and then explain So these were the works and so I've promised never to ever put video into PDFs or ever again But I'll try it. Okay, so forgive me if it just Or is it gonna be can we turn up sound at all? I'll just see if it works outside, then I won't use the Because I've got HDMI so it should be HDMI. Yeah, I'll just play a movie and see What was your suggestion again, so play back to us I Didn't prepare for everything else but this The other ideas about this one I'll tell you later on why I had to use this computer, but yeah, we'll see. I'll just try for 30 seconds And then anyone else any experts that can do this Oh, there we go, so cool. Oh, so turn on this That's good enough. That'll be fine. All right, let's try it again. Yeah All right There's a range of these things creatures construction So cool. So here we go. So yeah, that'll make sense for a second But essentially this thing called hybrid stop motion So really I started out as a 3d person I was a 3d animator for 20 years and actually the last time I was in Amsterdam I lived here for a year working at a place called lost boys games Fifteen years ago and so And that was great I was 3d person for a long time then I just went into this stop motion stuff and I'll explain in a second why and But it was very constricting. I think like a 3d person. I think digitally I think that way where stop motion is a physical thing and you touch it and that's it you photograph It's a very very primitive form and it's beautiful because of that But it's it's I felt very restricted. So this thing called hybrid stop motion the most famous people are like a they're the proponents of it And I don't know if you've seen paranormal or the box trolls even Coraline. They started using it. So essentially they have Stop motion puppets on green screens. They then put it into an environment with the 3d characters as Extras so these are the lead animators who animate the master characters and then the digital animators animate the background people So it's sort of using visual effects The best of visual effects and the best of stop motion to get that beautiful stop motion Motion or say our movement, but we can have moving cameras. They have motion control systems They're moving cameras 3d scenes, etc. Just think of hybrid stop motion and So has anyone been to Australia? Cool. Did you go to Queensland? Yeah, you go to Brisbane. Yeah Fraser Island Yeah, yeah, all right. Cool. So this is Australia if you don't know what Australia looks like that's it This is the place we're talking about which is right here. I come from Brisbane And it's a little place just here so in a state called Queensland And so there's noosa if you had it been there on the backpacker trail Noosa is about 200 K's up here bar and bays down here Here's Brisbane, but here's this little tiny weird little island. It used to be called Peel Island and Now it's it's been taken back by the traditional owners It's called Takarua National Park now And so it was actually a lazarette from 9 and 05 to 1961 which essentially is a leper calling now when I was a kid I was terrified of leprosy. I watched Papillon didn't see Papillon, the speed between leprosy and sharing cigars with little lepers and it was just weird and there's Detained commandments. There's always lepers on the outside of the cities And so in Queensland there was such hysteria around leprosy that they used to just pack you up in the middle of the night And send you this little island and you couldn't leave it was stuck there forever and it's only about three kilometers long and so It was a notorious island not many people know about it, but they've heard these rumors about this weird little place It's only that a kilometer off the coast and so Yeah, so most people were sent there and they just lived their days out there and then died and so now it's just a Just a national park. There's not much on there And it's quite a beautiful island, but it's a it's a weird island This is the thing this uncanniness which I want to talk about and so Beautiful tropical island beautiful long beaches But the beaches or a large part of the beaches have these weird upturned tree roots looking to the sky So it's it's a very odd looking thing. There's beauty and then there's this weird stuff And then there's the laser at itself, which is a heritage listed site and so it held about 200 300 people on stage and These are the little quarters that they had little tiny huts This is the superintendent's huts and so I did a bunch of residencies with some other people 2010 2011 we stayed in the huts. We stayed in the old place and there was an old graveyard around there, but there's no Marcus with the gravestones. So wherever you walk, it was just odd. It was a very odd little place and Creepy I'd say it was creepy and so now this is what it looks like now So I think that was in 1949. I think these photos will take so half of the site now is Collapsed and ruined and rotten and and really dangerous and the other half is brand-new Freshly painted little Colovay Cabins. So it's odd. It looks like Someone's taken all the tools that are out and they're just about to come back at any moment But no one comes back. It's just that no one's allowed to go there. So it's just this site that is solved really really strange and so This is the thing called the uncanny and so if anyone see the Polaroid express If you want to know creepy that's the creepiest movie I've ever seen I think And so essentially uncanny is this uncomfortableness where something is at once familiar and unfamiliar. So We know she's a human. We know she's a girl She's not she's a digital weird character that doesn't quite meet up to our expectations. And so she's familiar But yet she's unfamiliar. She's almost zombie like zombies are very uncanny. And so it's not as if they are Familiar or unfamiliar. It's when they happen at the same time. They have to be both at the same time to be uncanny So zombies are uncanny because they're supposed to be dead, but they're alive. They're not really alive So you never really it's a tension and so with The site or do the islands as such it's beautiful, but yet it's really creepy. It's really quite Serene and yet there's a walking on a graveyard. So it's all these tensions that coexist and Same thing with a hybrid stop motion. It's sort of two things coexisting at the same time. I love that thing And so when I was on the island I I'll come back to this in a second but when I was on the island I Went to the beach we're staying these huts in about a two kilometer walk to the beach and On the way back at night time I looked at the water and coming back the torch broke which stopped working So I had about a two-kilometer walk through forest with no one else around and it was just black Inky inky black, and I was really scared I sort of thought okay I'll just follow the path through the forest and when I looked down at the ground to try and trace my tracks The forest was alive. I could see it moving. I could see things moving and when I looked up It was nothing. There was just a branch or little shapes in the darkness But I looked down I could see them moving I swore they were there It was only lasted about five minutes, but it was sensation. It was it was the best experience I had for ages. I was terrified, but I was really I wanted to see them. I really wanted to see these things What did they look like? I wanted to focus on them. I Knew they weren't real, but they you know, they were so in that sense that my dreams at a state had become reality conscious and unconscious worlds were both sort of coexisting as such And so this was the moment this whole project has been about essentially trying to sort of recapture that moment and trying to Bring those creatures to life whatever those creatures are Whatever they're called and so Again, and Kenny also there's a doppelganger, which is an evil twin or something that's It's it's a wrong thing. It's a bad luck an evil twin a hard being a harbinger or bad luck or doom Paranormal and so I sort of started to sort of make some works about this place didn't really know how or why and so We started doing bits of different tests and things with it really early stop motion because I knew I had to do something real Because it was a real place. It was a very physical place And so we sort of made some little things, but then we joined a few together just by an accident and they became This on its own is nothing Because we don't know what it is anymore. We knew it was supposed to seem but all of a sudden it's become Really sure and it probably says a lot about my brain. I guess Yeah, Chris, that's awesome. That's great, man. That's really good So it's it's good. It's sort of rapid uncanny repetition Sorry and so this is what the main influence of all the stop motion move as well This guy again spank my he's my favorite animator and he animates real things and this idea that Objects are more alive than people so I started animating things at the lazarette The old spoons and the old bottles and the old bits and pieces But I thought the forest was the thing that observed the lazarette the events and the forest things is what I wanted to animate But it's hard to animate a stick. It's really difficult so for him objects have things in them and so this is an example of the The sockets so they're metal sort of sockets and The more we sort of got into stop motion We realized that if I have a picture of this and animated that picture it the pixels never change they just You move the pixels around it's great every time I physically move that and I made it There's a bit of my sweat and skin and dirt and that stick the stick changes every single time So it holds the memories of my interaction with it It's a really quite a profound thing but yet a very basic sort of primitive thing So I love this I coerced the inner life out of them So I spent a long time fondling sticks and carrying sticks around and doing lots of things with sticks Which was cool and so for the motion design. I didn't want to just do Disney I didn't want trees to come to life and have a little sidekick character and they got eyes and they talked to me I didn't want that I wanted it to be a bit more serious or creepy or something And so I spent a long time thinking about well, how would these things moved if they moved if they walked What would they do or what is the motion and so there's a Okay, this is going into more disturbing territory now This is a bird which is funny. I think So he's insane he's lost connection with reality he does this over and over again He's a distressed animal and he's he's broken. He's a broken broken animal And so I started animating these things And so this is the exam well, so here's another example It's called stereotopic behavior and every almost every animal that is kept in a zoo demonstrates this behavior they've been constrained and restricted for too long and They do this motion. That's that's all they do all day It's really sad and I thought that that's what the patients would be like because they were on this island They couldn't leave stuck with leopard. Well, they were stuck with lepers because if you went there and you didn't have leprosy You would suspect it and you just shut it off If there was a certain type of leprosy, you would catch it while you were there then you could never leave So it's this horrible horrible place. So this was the motion that I did on the base on the horse This is where Blender first came into the scene. So I just did this I started animating Blender There's lots of these mistakes Of that it's it's hard It's really difficult as a 3d person to give out control to let mistakes happen to to allow them to exist But there's something good about that. So that was the original works and And it was great exhibition it was good really creepy sort of stuff to try to convey this Sense of what this all was I worked that quite a few times to get more information about it and I used to take other hours back and Take into the forest and we turn the torches off and try and look in the forest to try and see these creatures But it never really worked again Obviously and so two things that happened. This was in February this year two things happened. I played with that Oculus Devkit we've got one place I work at and I found a lot of VR was quite average just like a game stuff But when you find one that has that where it works and you experience presence where you believe that your body is in this environment It's a profound experience. I wasn't the same afterwards So I had a really positive VR experience and I thought well if I wanted to communicate that How that on walls or how it felt to me Exhibition isn't the right space for that To clean and cube like But well cool, okay, let's just make it VR. I'd love to do that But I tried modeling some of the sticks and these these bits and pieces And even though that's you know, that's a very simple object. It wouldn't take long Just didn't really look right look like a game object. It looked like a 3d object that I've modeled and so the second thing that occurred Was I saw I think yeah, I saw this video Did everyone see that they're the kite real-time short film at GDC So they did a really long presentation of their photogrammetry 3d scanning process and it just moved my mind away So realistic beautiful high-risk trees. If you haven't seen the kite short film, it's a quite long short film They made kilometers of environment beautiful photo real environment. It's all real-time And so they spent a long time of how to work out this process of getting these assets Scanned apologizing them to make them Really and I thought that's I'm not gonna model these things. I am going to skin So that started next basically the six months of R&D, which I wanted to talk about at the end How to get those sticks to be into the office Well happen and how to use blender is the main tool for that So I'll just go over a few of those things Once again another of the reasons why I went to stop motion I worked with a guy called Matt Spanner He was a very famous animator in in Queensland in the 70s and 80s And he retired when I was starting to work at this University And he had a really huge old animation table from the 70s called a four ox from Germany and it weighed a ton It was probably about 12 foot high that the rostrum camera really big stuff took four of us to lift it And so he's gonna throw it away It was a rusty old thing and I grabbed this top part of it to use for the thought that could be automated Or it could be interesting because it's a beautiful beautiful thing these old dials and counters And so I took that apart and made it to be just a nice sliding animation surface with with wheels and little counters Perfect stop motion and then I got an artist to do some stuff with it and we sort of took it apart and he added some Arduino or add an Arduino some stepper motors With small little Arduino shields, and so we automated that in a very rough way the same time we automated a little camera So use something called dragon frame Which can talk to the Arduino and then talks to the motors and I can set up little sort of system so I'll show you that in a second. So that was good That was the start of this this motion control idea and it's almost there now And he used a 3d printer which I didn't quite understand at the time And so we managed to get hold of a 3d printer for a little while and so then we started to print out stuff we printed out this some The next version of the 3d motion control and this is what I did as well I made a little essentially with photogrammetry you have something an object that you want to scan and You place a camera and you do a turntable You take 30 shots of that object from the bottom, and then you take it from the top and you do 30 times around That's a very tedious thing to have to move that 30 times And so in this way I made a little motor with an Arduino and it's a little turntable and that hooks up to up to Distort motion software so it takes one moves it moves it moves it It's specified how many times and how fast it goes. So this sort of automates the process as such and This was the best setup that I found for because we have a camera looking down at the object So we have to have a green screen underneath it. We also have to have the green screen over the top of it We look up at the object, so that was quite nice and this sort of simple sort of setup of these Sockboxes So cool So that was the start of it But then yeah, the big thing was this idea of scanning was okay But the the meshes that it produces is just it looks like a solid color Yeah, it's just yeah one to two million polygons and it's Sensational resolution, but it's you know useless to work with And so I never really knew how to do this I thought I'm not I could have to do 40 to 50 to 66 to scan these things and it just take forever to do it by hand But I purchased the retopo flow at all Which was awesome mostly awesome almost awesome just about awesome because they're simple cylinders It wasn't really too hard. It's just when you had the big gnarly sort of bits around here that was Quite difficult, but yeah, it worked very well One of the one of the main problem that I had initially was that when you scan something it Collects little bits and pieces of fragments from when it moves around when it takes picture of each section of the object And it just lays out like that, which is terrible And I didn't I didn't even know what for on line for the forums how to solve this Oh, I thought it was gonna be like a photoshop like in action or something to sort of grab the islands and move them together I just didn't quite understand but the Solution was actually really quite simple. It was just once I'd done the low res version I just baked it and then when you bake it Sorry, sorry, I had that high res version. I made the retopologised version and I unwrapped that And then yeah, once I baked the high res to the low res it just joined them together and made these beautiful What is a mistake there, but you made these beautiful textures So I could use the clearly higher res ones get the texture itself and get the normal So that was a really big moment and so essentially the last six months it's been about these little little chicks away at getting this this project happening or project Don't about finished but Moving forward so this was the armatures. So We spent a long time in the studio trying to sort of work out how these trees and sticks move And what do we do and we used to make them out of wire as well to try and get these things sort of working Didn't really know how or why and then we founded ball and socket armatures, which were great And then we cover the ball of socket armatures with bark and paper etc etc. We tried these different things but um Anyway, yeah, we actually put sticks onto the armatures We did all these two different things and so this was um To rig this now in 3d was going to be a lot easier because we knew what the format was We knew what it's going to look like how it's going to work roughly So this was the first 3d or the 3d sort of armature that I made and put a material on Which was great, but I am I couldn't quite finish the material. I made a Rusty one and made a bit of a Version for what I wanted But I didn't know what the environment was going to be like in the end So I couldn't quite finish the material and I was sort of stuck once again. I didn't want to Append this armature or these little bits and pieces to all the files and that update material 20 30 40 50 60 times So I sort of wanted to use the library linking, but I hadn't ever used that in blender before and so I Drove in and try to learn it because I wanted to be able to say well Look, I need you to start to move forward and animate and put these things together I don't have to wait to do the material for the socket. That's a very dull thing to do So yeah, the next thing was this library linking, which was just a disaster absolutely terrible thing I come from Maya. I used to use my I moved across about 80 months ago to blender and So Maya has a thing called a structure the project structure you make a project gives you a bunch of folders and You work in a project at the end of your session You say set your projects to wherever this folder isn't just a portable transportable idea Whereas the blender one is similar But if you move the project to somewhere that's not supposed to be it loses the links and that's it You can't update them again. This is the box. I mean if someone knows how to use it I'll chat to you later But I had a great deal of problem and in the end it was all about this relative Linking relative paths obviously, but even that would get lost sometimes So I had to use this computer today, and I had other ones to show you but they're on another hard drive So I couldn't use them because once I pop it in the links would be disappeared. It's a very odd system So it works at the moment, but it's held together with stick tapes and Just just working just barely working, but you know, it's good, but some So yes, we made the sockets we made the library linking thing which was good. It was enough And then we did the rig and I'll load up the rig to show you and this was actually really successful This was one of the quickest things ironically. I thought the rigging would just take forever and it would be really difficult That was great It's very very simple Simplish yes, that's it. So there's the Stick another solution I'll talk about in a second is to just make real softboxes. I found a thing called light objects online I think it was for another program. It was like fbx or something So essentially it's a softbox with a HDR image on it to give the material So it's just a really nice solution for the lighting. So yeah, so there's the object This actually is the one That's gonna cover the screen and that doesn't work doesn't Cover half of it. So I did half of it It was actually laying on the ground and then I flipped it with this thing called bilateral symmetry to give it This extra in this on its own it wasn't that interesting but using that repetition it became a creature became this Was some sort of thing. There's a face. There's eyes or something in there. So I scanned this stick these three sticks This example And here they are so here is the So they're quite nice nice res now and So therefore I attached the top Once which is simple like a chain so I can move these guys Also, I attached This part of the chain the top part of the chain to this object Now to move that object around as well. So it's just really really nice to move to pose around etc. Move that Yeah, that was Simple and successful and so in the other examples I Attached them at both ends so I could have the top to be moving at the bottom to be moving and then I can move The other stick around so quite easy to pose And this was it so in the end I sort of used a HDR a simple single HDR with just one sort of studio light Which was okay. It was very it was quite annoying to have to rotate the environment around it wasn't very controllable So this was the solution for me to I'm going to replicate the studio lighting system I'll just actually use the objects that were in the studio. It was very nice. This is a very nice kit. It was free fluorescence Umbrella's soft boxes, etc. Very very very nice I was going to show you something else. I don't want to use the s IVL system in blender. It's really really nice system I'm not sure if it's It's a really simple sort of system for using Using HDRs should So we download these sets If we want to say use this one let's say this one send us off where and I think now in blender Of course So now we've got that beautiful HDR system They're all free to download the free system to say. Oh, I'd like this one. I found a new beach scene send to the software Update blender to be this scene now. Just beautiful and we have full control over All the settings within this as well Strengths, etc. That was a nice thing But it was sort of difficult like that's nice for a daytime scene or an outdoor scene or a typical HDR scene So sorry about but I mean, yes, it's a that was a very nice system and so at the current state of the project where Doing depth of field tests, which has been really great. We used to do them in after effects, but That was a little bit limited with using just 2d images. We didn't have any depth in the objects That's been very good. We're doing tests with the motion finally getting to the motion. We've just started motion But these are the scans and then Sockets, etc. And so now we've got this hybrid thing happening where I made this thing physically I've got the sticks. I've also scanned all the sticks So now I've put that object into 3d and I can pose it and light it and play around with it and do different things with it But then and play with that and then go back to the real one and change that one around perhaps So I'm sort of working between those two things because it's really nice to grab something and move it But it's yeah, both systems have their awkward And so I think that's it. So essentially in February there's the next exhibition of this uncanny nature And so I'll have the first Oculus demo ready for them with projections with armatures and then a short film as well around Yeah, and so therefore and I work at a place called Queensland University of Technology And we're doing an open-source pipeline. We changed the blender We went away from all of this which changed to blender 80 months ago, and it's been sensational a really really positive thing So far really enthusiastic So yeah, any VR people around who are into art-based projects, please