 Hello, first of all, I'm going to introduce you to talk to you about free and open source software in the animation industry. Things evolved pretty quickly since a few years, so when Christophe proposed me to make a talk at the Open Media Dev Room, I thought that it would be a good idea to speak about how things are evolving in the animation industry. So before going further, I'm going to introduce myself. I'm Frank Rousseau. I'm a first entrepreneur. I did the first company which was doing open source personal clouds. After that, I created a new company, which is a CGWire, a very big company of three people, including me. At CGWire, we work for the animation industry. We do production tracking software, but everything as free and open source software. Aside from that, I did some side projects, contributed to some others, and I worked since now 15 years. So I had the opportunity to see many things and many software projects. Now let's go to the animation. Before talking about the software that are used now, I'm going to explain you very quickly how to make an animation production. So here I'm going to talk mainly about 3D, because when it's about 2D animation, everything is proprietary, so it's not so interesting for this talk. So there are three big steps to make a movie. There is a pre-production, mainly it's about writing the story and looking for funding. There is the production step, which is the one we will interest us is the production step. I will go back very soon to it. And there is the post-production step where it's mostly fine tuning and refining of the movies. So in the production step, we have many departments, many things to do. The first thing is the layout. It's like the directing of the movie. We create shots and we put everything in place, but we only allow polygons, assets, and just to make sure that every shot is good in directing point of view and that they match properly the storyboard. There is some R&D to make sure that the artistic direction is doable and that some effects are possible. Then starts the real creation of the movies. There is the modeling phase. It's about sculpting the 3D elements. After that there is the texturing. Every elements are painted and some settings are done to manage the reflection of the light on the elements. Then there is the rigging step, which means that we add bones to every assets that are going to be animated. Then we do the animations. Mainly it's about taking the elements of the layouts, including the high-polygon stuff to animate them to make sure that at the end we have a nice shot. This is the most time-consuming part of the movie. Then we add some VFX, some lighting to make things a little bit more artistic. Finally, we finish with the rendering, which can be very long because one frame can take hours or days to render. For a feature film, for instance, you have an average of 130,000 frames. All of that requires a lot of different skill sets, people with different expertise, and many software. What we have to understand is that the animation industry has really a proprietary mindset. For them, pictures must not leak. Pictures belong to the producer. There is this notion of not really sharing the IP. There is a strong notion of IP. When it's about software, we can see that it's something similar. Most of the big software are proprietary. They come from Autodesk, the Foundry, Adobe, or Toon Boom. There is a challenger, which is SideFX. They do really interesting software, but only proprietary. But reality doesn't really fit with the proprietary mindset. What is happening is that in every industry, they need to reduce costs. They need for more automations, and there is a lack of developers. Now every developer works for startups, GAFA, and everything like that. So there is not so much people to do software in the animation industry. Before that, they thought that they could make a difference with their technology, that the studio could be more competitive because of its technology. But now they are figuring out that it's mostly the artistic specificities that help them to stand out from the others. So they decided to go up and through. For that, many of the big players decided to work on more interoperability between software. They decided to stick to proprietary digital creation content tools. And for that, they decided to work on more standardizations of file exchange. Because when you do a production, a few years ago when you did a production, you could use only one software. Now you have many software involved. You have Maya, software like Maya, like Substance, Mari, ZBrush. You have to use many tools to make a very beautiful picture. It's a choice, but now really big productions use many, many tools. And so they need some standardizations. And for that, they created several file formats and associated libraries to manage them. So there are formats like Alambic, ABC, which is one of the most used, I think, where here it's used to store the coordinates of the animation. So it's the first step towards more interoperability. There is a USD. This probably is the most exciting format because it's really aimed at enabling collaborative work. And there is some kind of layering in any, with every change. So it really helps to work from different tools and with different people on it. And there are some others. This is a non-exhaustive list. There are others, but there are other formats that happens on different parts of the production. That are used on different parts of the production. And there is another interesting story. It's the story of OpenQ. It's a render farm manager that was built at Sony, something. And it was kind of acquired by Google. I think the main developer was hired by Google, but it's something like this. But Sony decided to open-source it. It was the first time that the full software was open-sourced by a big company like this. So it's interesting. And then it's now maintained by ASWF, Academic Software Foundation, which is the meeting. Sorry, I forgot. I don't find the right word, but this is the meeting of several big companies, like GARFA, big studios like Quetta, ILM, now Disney, and big companies and with some free software actors like Blenders and explanations. And their goal here is to maintain this library used for these five formats. Another interesting thing is Epic Games. They do Unreal Engine, which is not really used for animation. It's only used for video game cinematics. But what they do is that they give money to some open-source projects, which is still interesting because it brings some fuel to improve some software. So everything we talked about was really interesting, but it's more about big corporations, and that's not really what we like. Now let's talk more about free software. Free software is weird, free software is sometimes ugly, but it's much more exciting and much more fun. So I propose now that we focus more on this and talk less about the big ones. So the first thing to understand is that in animation, Python is king. Before that, many older software had their own scripting language, which are mostly badly designed and not well documented. So quickly, people, CG artists tended to use Python instead of the proprietary scripting language. And now Python is the default language for everything. Every time someone wants to do a script, you use Python, which is interesting because it's not C-sharp, it's not Java, it's really Python, which is, to me, it's really a more community-driven language. So it's interesting. And other tools that are widely used, I think one of the first tools which were widely used is FFMPEG. So it's interesting because a few years ago it was like, wow, it's open-source, so we don't want to use it. And now it's like the default software to process videos, to melt them, et cetera. There is Rez. I don't know if you know this, but it looks widely used outside of animation too. It's a packaging system to deploy easily tools on desktop machines, so when you have, especially on Windows, when you have a lot of machines, you can use Rez to package complex deployment. And there are some image processing libraries that are used. Another interesting thing is that there is a strong culture of self-hosting because they don't want that picture leak and because they always have an overloaded network because all files are really big and they need to watch a lot of video on YouTube for their as-references. So they like to have everything hosted locally because they can have better performance and they have a sense of security. The result is that they deploy a lot of software themselves and so they use C-substooling and communication tools like Matermos, Riot, et cetera. When they can, they prefer to use Linux for their workstation because it's much more pluggable. There is this notion, I forgot to mention it, but there is this notion of pipeline in animation, which means pipeline basically is the glue between every department and every steps of fabrication. So let's go a little bit faster now. Blender, so Python is king, so let's say that Blender is queen. There is since a few years and especially since the latest version arrived as 2.8. So there's really a lot of excitement around Blender. It's really changed. The community is very active, of course, but it comes from the fact that there is a lack of CGRTs like there is a lack of developers. So prior to that, people were kind of scared to use Blender because CGRTs were not trained to this. But now the question is more, how do I find good CGRTs? So when you find a good CGRTs, you find the tooling is not... The priority is to find a good CGRTs, not to find the CGRTs. We know the tools of the studio. So this is one of the... That was one of the main blocks to use Blender, so now it's not anymore there. So the result is that Blender was used on many productions. It really made their users happy. And now we have full productions like this one, MushMush. It will be broadcasted in the next year, I think. But now we have full productions done with Blender, which is really a big change. And there is another big event is that I Lost My Body. It's an animation movie which is nominated to Oscar and which had a price at NC Festival, the equivalent of Cannes Festival. And I Lost My Body was done with Blender too. So I think it's really a big change in the industry. To see that now you can do a full qualitative production with Blender. Plus they added many more features. They had many very cool features, like real-time viewports. So it's really faster to make movies and to have feedback on what you are doing. And there is this grease pencil thing that allows you to basically make 2D animation inside Blender, which is great for many studios. About the other main tools, there is GIMP. GIMP still has a bad reputation because most people don't like the UI. It's a little bit sad, but the result is that it's not used much on productions. There is the case of Netron. Netron is not considered as good in us compared to proprietary software, but it's still the only first alternative. The main issue today is that the maintainer's life didn't follow what happened next, but the maintainer's life, so there is a kind of old there. And it's sad because people really would like to have an alternative to Nuke, which is very expensive and doesn't work that way. I forgot to tell that Netron is mainly for compositing. So what is compositing is just adding some effects on a final video. Not final for this case, but when you have rendered all your pictures, you can add some other effects and it's done at the compositing steps. Most of the time it's considered the steps to fix some bugs in the video. And what is really more interesting I think is Krita. Krita is not widely used today, but it has really good reputation. Every CG artist would try it, love it, and it could replace at some point Photoshop for everything that is background. Because in animation movies, most of the time, even in big VFX movies, the backgrounds are 2D pictures that are done with Photoshop. Or similar. Here are some pictures made with Krita that I took from the Krita Gallery. So you can see that you can do everything you want with it when it's about 2D pictures. Now there is another phenomena which is very interesting too. It's that we have small to mid-sized studios who are now open sourcing some of their software. They are not big software, but it just means that the mindset is changing and it creates excitement in the community of developers in animation, which is good and which will probably lead to more interesting software in the future. There is another good case, Lefe Special. It's a studio which uses only free software. In the open source everything is white, which is very nice to see. And there is my company, CGWire. What makes it a little bit special is that we are the first company in the animation field to propose free software, which is we basically propose a project management tool named Production Tracker. And what makes it really great is that for us it was the opportunity to create more collaborations between studios. So for that we organize some meetups where people can share best practice on the same model as here. It didn't exist really for the animation, so we organized them and we created some online chat group and I published content on our blog. So that's important because the fact to publish an open source software allowed us really to create more collaborations between studios. And yes, I think that a first project is not only code and it can really benefit a side of the future. It can really benefit to the world industry, towards the mindset it brings. To conclude, things were pretty bad a few years ago. Now they are getting better. We have more and more software, more and more first softwares that are used. We have big players, are mainly interested in interoperability. Small and mid-sized studios are going further and try to use open source everywhere. Free software brings more collaborations and Blender is life. It's good and it's beautiful and we are happy to see that it's successful today after such a long time. Thank you for your attention. And if you have any questions, you can clap. Do you think that someday we will have an alternative to Nuke if open source and open source if nature disappears? I'm not sure it's related to nature. What surprised me is that no one tried to do it. It would really be a good idea to make an alternative to Nuke. Starting from nature sounds to me more like natural. So I'm not sure it's a good idea to kill nature and to have an alternative. What is in your opinion the largest slash most important component in these workflows that is mainly supported by open source communities as opposed to the tools coming from or funded by studios? I don't really get the question, but I think the largest component today that is emerging is really Blender because you can use it on every step of the production. So you can imagine now to have a production pipeline based on Blender, which is quite audacious, but it's possible. So the fact that it makes it probably the main component of a pipeline, it's hard to compare with Python because Python is everywhere. Of course it's the biggest, but it's more like a low-level thing when Blender could be the central software of a production. What we see too is that Blender is more appreciated by some modellers or some animators. So sometimes they do their work in Blender and then they import it in Maya to be compatible with the rest of the production, but it can be really adapted to any situation. So yeah, I would say that it's Blender. Last question, what is the scenario for video editing that I checked KDNR was having instability issues? I don't know well video editing. I don't know really well the software. I'm mostly focused on 3D and 2D creations because editing is almost another subject. When in animation production, when they have the storyboards, they really have to stick to it. Sometimes they can work with a dedicated video editor, but I'm not used in us to this problematic to talk about it. One question from the floor, is there anything? What is your take on that and how can we change that? What about the Blender certification? I don't really know about education. What I can tell is that now, this is what I told before, studios understand that they have to train people to Blender. So studios which decide to go with Blender know that they will have to train people that come to their studio. Of course certifications are interesting because for some others it's always easier if you have someone who is already trained to Blender. Now there is another phenomena because there is a lack of CG artists, there is something like every month a new CG school that is popping. So probably at some point they will include more Blender training. But currently in education I don't see much Blender. That's why the certifications of Blender Institute is probably interesting for the moment because there is not much alternative to this.