 It's either 16 or 16. I think it's 16. So, Petzl. Yeah, kind of like Petzl. Is it? I didn't realize that. Yeah. I'm gonna start when you ready and work the time, okay? Oh, the timer. Should the external display the render? It may need configuring, I'm not sure. Some problems with it. If it's not working, you can run upstairs. Oh, here it is. It is, but this is the next screen. Okay. It might kick in when this comes, when you start the presentation. When you start, it's gonna be probably two screens. Yeah, it'll be like, give me something there. Yeah, and it works right from the couch. Yeah. Hello, good morning. My name's Eddie Burroughs and welcome to this presentation. Currently, I'm actually working with cgmasters.net and creating blended tutorials and stuff for them full time. But for the last five or six years, I've actually been working for TT Fusion, which is part of TT Games, which is part of the Warner Brothers interactive entertainment group, which basically look after a lot of the Lego franchise, you know, the various games that you can see on there, basically. Now, what they use primarily is Maya and Zebrush. So, but I found reason to basically use Blender in my particular workflow. And so I'm gonna basically look at some examples and so on for why that was. Also, by large, I think I would probably encourage all studios, really, to have Blender somewhere in their studios and I'll go into that. So, basically, why? Why when I add Maya and Zebrush would I basically use Blender? So, the evolution of that, in fact, was, you know, I would be using Blender while I was at work and another artist would come over and they would say something like, oh, you're using Blender and kind of sympathetically shake their head as they walked away. And maybe a little bit later on than that, they would be like, oh, this is looking interesting, which is, let's be honest, it's only a slight step up. But then you get like a little bit later on than that, you get more development going on and people are like, oh, what's this? Is this Modo? And then a little bit after that, you would get basically the people would be like, ah, this is Blender, it's looking really cool and I wanna download it. Will you show me how to do that? That's really gonna speed things up and this kind of thing. So it kind of, you know, the question really is, you know, more why not than anything else? So that kind of worked out in the end. So why was I actually using Blender in the first place? Well, back in the day, I was actually starting to think, well, I'll do some freelance stuff. I'll kind of get, you know, I know a few creative types and we can do some cool creative projects and things like that and maybe we'll make a little bit of money out of it. Well, a little bit. So I tried to cost things up. I was thinking, well, okay, if I was setting up my own freelance thing, what is that gonna be? I was a bit green at the time so I didn't really know too much about what my options were software-wise. I kind of knew Maya and all that kind of stuff. So I thought, well, Photoshop is this much? Then you've got things like After Effects is gonna be that much. Then maybe something for audio, maybe Cubase, maybe Reaper, something like that. And I kind of costed it all. I think, okay, this is pretty reasonable. This is getting there. And then it kind of came to look at the price tag of Maya and then it kind of like sort of blew everything else out of the water and it kind of made it a very unrealistic option. And so I kind of thought to myself, oh, but also it was way more money than I really expected to make. So per year anyway. And I thought, well, so it kind of makes it fairly redundant. So I started shopping around for other 3D stuff and I came to a crossblender and that image could actually represent my mind when I came across Blender and it was like, how is this free? And I'm sure a lot of the other artists that I was speaking with in work about it were of a similar sort of mindset. So I took up Blender and started to use it whenever I could really. So back in the day, I wasn't too familiar, I was only just picking up Blender, but the studio at the time was looking at kind of a new workflow as the old workflow was basically you have a designer would basically want it. You want to get to a blockout stage of the game as quick as you can really. And so the designer would be, they'd be looking at, sketching something down on a piece of paper. They would hand that to the artist. The artist would block that out. They would export that into the level editor. They would then kind of get that game running in the engine, whatever the engine may be. And then the design would feed back to the artist about what they wanted to change and then those changes would go in, then the designer would go in. There's a lot of back and forth basically. This is looping around that it's not very economical or efficient. And so they wanted to change that. So basically what they were really looking for is some sort of new workflow. And so they're much more efficient. So that was going to be more like, the designer should be able to do all that themselves. So they should be able to block stuff out and then get that exported and then be able to make those changes themselves. At the time, that was, as I say, I wasn't really able in a position to really push Blender at that point. But I would obviously push that now. But what they went for at the time was Google Sketchup. And there are issues with that because it was the free version. So that is procedural geometry. Now that is a good choice to make actually because it's very, very easy to use. It's very sort of, you know, Booleans and so on for procedural geometry. So that's kind of fairly straightforward. You can do that kind of stuff. But when you're trying to export out, you're basically using Collada in the free version. So it ends up being access issues with the information that you get out. You can then sort of switch it. But still you get these weird issues. And the other part of that is that actually the license has now changed. So we're now basically, you know, you're going to be stuck with an old version now. So the Google sold it on a while back to another company. So it would be recommended to use Blender in their particular instance anyway. Because Blender obviously is polygonal geometry, so even if you are using Maya or Max for that matter, you're at least getting something which is on a par. You know, also the designers are kind of learning transferable skills as well. And also they can kind of ask, you know, from one software package to another, it's kind of a lot of the same modeling principles apply. So, you know, this is something that can be done fairly easily. That's a worthwhile thing to look into really. Also, you could obviously code your own exporter for it. So you could basically export into their particular game engine or whatever the game engine might end up being. Or you could, of course, just use the game engine for that prototype. You can set up a little Lego minifig, which is running around with the camera. And then you can kind of get the perspective. Soon as you're just pressing P, basically, and then before you know it, you kind of go, ah, okay, that actually is not going to work like that. Or, you know, we just get the units right. You know, the jump distances, this kind of thing. They're going to climb the walls that way. You know, you can prototype that stuff out. And the designer can get pretty far before then the artist is actually able to really get in and start doing it. Or, of course, you've got the FPS mode, which is just a kind of, you know, again, another key press, and you've then got another key for gravity, and then everything's been given instant collision. So that's pretty straightforward. So, you know, you can see the benefits there. But obviously I'm not a designer, but I was still using Blender. So let's take a look at some more instances of that. So back in the day, one of the first times I started to use it was in Lego City for that Wii U game. And basically this is, it's, you know, because a large city type open world type kind of a game. And the, you know, one of the, a few of the areas I worked on, one of them in particular was this sort of farm area. And one of the first things, that's just an example just to set that up, by the way. But the, we did all these interior levels as well. So this is kind of later on in the game where there's a much more of a sort of high tech kind of laboratory type of an area. And in this particular example, you can see these hazard stripes. You always get hazard stripes in games. So you get these things with these sort of beveled sort of edges on the side. You can see the sort of green frame. Now, basically that green frame thought, oh, this would look cool if it had something like that in it. But Maya, you might, you know, I don't know whether you're going to be that familiar with all the 3D packages. But Maya at the time, we were using 2011 and Maya didn't have an inset. So, you know, you don't know how lucky you are sometimes. But the, so basically it was very, very quick. OBJ into, into Blender just grabbed the faces and needed inset. Did a little bit of the shrink fan tool. Take that back out again. About 30 seconds later, you know, it's, it's in and I can carry on with the workflow. And then another instance is Solidify. You know, you don't have Solidify modifiers in Maya. And this instance here, you can see this tunnel on the left. That's just geometry. Obviously the faces that you can see in the tunnel are just sort of facing that way. So when you've got the sun lamp from the game engine sort of bearing down, you're going to need to block that light, otherwise the interior of the tunnel is going to be all brightly illuminated. So you're going to need to have something. But if you flip, just take that geometry and flip the faces. You might get this weird mooring effect where you get this weird sort of filtered black and white effect as the engine doesn't quite know what to render. That should all that light in here because it's taking the same Z space. So you have, you want to be able to take that Solidify modifier basically. And you know, this is just a brief example of that. That's the geometry for the same tunnel. And then you just apply the Solidify modifier to it. And if you don't know exactly what that distance should be, that's the beauty of a modifier. You can then just sort of, you know, kind of get it just right and then kind of delete the faces you don't need and then export out and then you're right. And now it's working and then you carry on. So that's a point that I'm sort of driving home really is the fact that, you know, from Maya isn't a modifier base and Blender is. So you can get all these various different ways of going about it. So looking at the far right that you've got there, that's the basic input mesh if you like. You know, so in a game, you know, in an open world game type, you've got a lot of thing assets that are going to need to be created because it's absolutely huge. And so rocks are going to be everywhere. So it's kind of nice to think of it like a little bit of a pipeline where you can generate a lot of rocks and stuff like that. So this is kind of a standard technique really but you can't really do it properly in Maya without buying external things and plugging all those things in. But it's so straightforward in Blender as it is anyway, you know, so you just get your geometry, you know, you kind of smooth it a little bit, maybe subdivisions, surface modifier on there and then you've got various different displacement and noise modifiers, you know, that you basically put in on there, different types of noise to generate the cracks, different levels of detail. And then at the end of it, you can then use that to bake onto the first mesh and then it's that kind of exact, I mean, I don't think that's exactly the same thing that I'm using there but another example then you just want to paint it and by the way, Blender has some awesome 3D painting tools which, you know, is really, really incredible. And so another example would be the Lego Hobbit. This is not meant to be blown up that big, this is a 3DS screenshot, so please don't judge me too harshly on this one. But basically that alpha texture that you can see, which is basically like a railing, that is essentially just using it. That's all done in Blender, so you've got like, that was a last minute decision. This is the handheld version, so the console version was already written and made and at that point it was like, okay, so we have this level where, I think it's Bjorn is his name and he's like turns into a wolfman type thing in the Hobbit and so he's barreling in through the doors and you've kind of got to get to safety as quickly as possible. But they wanted to some gameplay on the roof of his house which he doesn't feature in the console version, so there was no real proper geometry to use up there for that kind of stuff, so we needed to kind of come up with something pretty sharpish and we didn't really know what they were going to do with it, so were they going to have a cut scene where the cameras would suddenly zoom right into those things? You know, you don't know really at that point, so I wanted to do some sort of fool proof kind of thing that I could do, so with that you can take, again, arrays, displacement modifiers, subdivision modifiers, bit of noise, render that out as an alpha, have that all set up, Z depth, normal bakeouts, lighting, change the light from there, get a little bit of shadow if you're going to bake that in and all that kind of thing, and if at that point you realize it is going to get kind of far away, then you can kind of tone down those details, that's no big deal because there's no extra time in doing that, it's all very, very easily set up. So another example from Lego Marvel, an incredible amount of, can you see this okay? Is that okay? It seems bright from my point of view. Okay, anyway, yeah, so a lot of this level, this is from the console version, which you've got like the next generation stuff now, so this is working into physically based shading now, so you have, which is what the, TT have their own in-house engine by the way, so they've been doing the physically based rendering is quite a popular thing right now, but they've been doing it for years anyway, but what I was doing was I was taking my geometry is done in Blender, so you've got the girders, the treadplating on the floors, the actual exterior, the blast hole that you can see in the back there, there's actually gunshots that go through there, that's absolutely very simple, but I had a very elaborate version at one point, which you can't see, it's just right down now, and then basically this is the interior of the Statue of Liberty, so you start very, very low down and then you enter through the foot and then you go higher, and then this is kind of like midway, and as I say, most of that is done. Another cool thing in Blender is you've got renderable wires, so it's so simple to just add some thickness to a wire and a curve I should say, and then you've got wires in a flash, and it's very, very easy to move, it kind of curves in Maya a little bit cumbersome, to say the least, you have to rebuild the curve, and again it's very, very satisfying, I find to work with curves in Maya, so I do a lot of that, sorry, curves in Blender, excuse me, I find that very satisfying. So a lot of that, the good is down the side, the wood planks are done in Blender, sculpted, modeled, UV'd, everything is done at that point. This is like a top down shot, so looking right down from the top of the level, right down, so I was to say all that wood there. That is an alpha grating there, similar to the previous slide in the Hobbit, same sort of process. So that's kind of cool, sort of looking inside like a typical blend scene, you can see there's the girders that I'm talking about, really simple. Now the cool, again Blender modifiers, really, really cool, you have the Bevel modifier, so as you're baking out into normals, you don't necessarily know how actually detailed you're going to be able to see this stuff, so you don't know how much to make that bevel, not a big deal, you can switch that kind of on the fly in a modifier, that's kind of really easy, so you just kind of bake that out. Also there's really nice baking in Blender anyway, and this is before you could do the cycles baking. So that's really, really easy and pretty straightforward. You've got things like the treadplating, so I use arrays in that instance. I mock this up, this isn't the version that's in the game, that's on the left, that's just the viewport, so you can see in the middle of there you've got like a little triple diamond type thing, and this is just using tupley faces instead, so you've got the array, so you could just use that, so you could just change one thing, and by the way, that's like an alpha bit, so you can treat different aspects of the texture differently, so you can really get complicated or as simple as you want, and in this sort of age now, this next generation where you're getting into the Xbox One and the PS4 and that sort of stuff, and you want to be able to really go to town on your textures and things like that, and the materials and the physically-based shading and stuff like that, having that level of control, that's fairly beautiful things to be able to manage. Now another cool thing about Blender is it can handle this kind of geometry pretty easily, but that's not a wireframe, that is just the, all that geometry has is edges, it doesn't have any faces, now this is the exterior shell of that Liberty, the Statue of Liberty, and that was because we had the skin modifier, and I was wondering whether I could use that for kind of, you know, those sort of riveted, sort of structure, support structures around the sides of the building. It didn't quite work out that well, so I didn't actually end up going that method, but you can see the bit that's highlighted, that's what I did end up using, and that's the curved deform modifier, so I just had a small piece, and that's again very, very fluid, and if the geometry changes, and as it almost always does, somebody says, oh, pull that in a bit there, that's not a big deal, because that's kind of coming with it, as you just put that bit, obviously the piece that is being deformed is coming with it, so that's no big deal. Again, you have those blast holes, those have them here, use the solidify modifier again for that, before the other sides, because as the bits have been curled in, and by the way, when they've been curled in, this is something that this would pretty much make Maya crash if you tried this. See how you have that top edge selected at the top of that, I guess that's like a six, and then you have, I've set the pivot point to that sort of twist to the 3D cursor, which is in the center there, and then it's just set to rotate and it's on proportional editing, with a really high threshold, and that's you can just bend that right round, so that's kind of, I say that to sort of indicate you have those things that you're kind of rotating around, the blast that's coming through, you're kind of rotating that around, so you don't necessarily want to rotate it at the top, you want to rotate it at the point where it meets the blast hole, and you kind of bring that in kind of action, but try that a few times in Maya Crash, it's not long till you basically think let's get Blender open, fix this. So that's me, I'm using Blender a lot for a lot of those different things, so as you can see in that level, I was particularly using Blender quite a lot, so why don't studios use Blender more? Well, there's two very, very good reasons, and this is just historical and this is just history at play really, you have already integrated in-house tools, which closely work, you've got shaders and things like that that are all sort of embedded heavily into the code, and it's basically just not worth it to re-jig all that kind of stuff. So the other side of it is there's not really enough downtime when you're a big studio and you get big budget, big production, big turnaround times, hopefully big reward, and stuff, you tend to end up trying to squeeze as much as you can out of that, so there's not really as much downtime as you would hope, so you kind of have to have a bunch of designers, for example, want to do it in their own time if they want to try and start incorporating Blender into it. Besides that, there is a couple of other reasons that people might not use Blender, one of them might be to do with integration with stuff like, you have the substance designer now, you have things like ZBrush, which is people like to kind of go between those applications quite quickly sometimes, but these are kind of all work aroundable issues and it's still very fixable. As I say, I was working in a physically base shaded environment and I was still going back into Blender all the time anyway, and you have that and you have a texturing tool, you've got everything you need, really. Depending on the particular case, a lot of students are different, so you have to bend the rules a little. So, as I say, they've got real-time physically based rendering and speaking to a few of the Blender guys, the developers, that is in the future. So, again, that's probably not an issue which is going to come soon. This is a guy, I don't really know how you say his name. Arioccini, I believe. I think he was doing the, I think it was a Mario 3D world kind of conversion kind of thing into the Blender game engine. Anyway, he was doing some sort of using the game engine as a PBR viewer, so that was kind of intriguing. So, you know, it's not far from doing that and it's probably not that far in Blender's distance at future anyway because of the Viewport project which I'm really excited about. So, on top of that, you have the growth. You have a lot of really good things happening in Blender. We've got the fact that you have different kinds of different sorts of levels of reputation. So, you have digital tutors bringing it on board. I don't think they've necessarily done that much on Blender yet but by them at least approaching that that endorsed is the idea that they recognize that professional studios need training, you know, that kind of thing. So, also there's things like BlendSwap which is, you know, if you're interested in how a model is put together you can obviously rip it apart, take it apart that way, understand how to use that as a building point. If you're a designer, for example, you want ready-made assets, that's an excellent place to start. You have pretty much a new version every day which is not something you're going to get from other mainstream commercial softwares with updated bugs and so on, obviously a little bit stable, even the official releases are rapidly turned around. So, you have things like a really active forums like Blender Artist Forum an anecdote for that would be when I was using the Enhanced 3D cursor, I think it's I don't know how you say the developer's name for that. It was Dayarin 0D or something like that. Anyway, thank you Dayarin 0D basically I reported an issue with that and within about three hours you'd fixed it, sort it here's the link and then it was going, you know, that really puts a smile on your face when you kind of need to get a job done and you're still waiting for my bugs to be fixed months after. So, then you have things like a stack exchange for all sorts actually, you know, modeling, you can ask a question on there, there seems to be some pretty good active and also coding level queries and conclusions and answers on that as well. You have the Blender Network, of course so if you're a new studio and you're thinking is this for me, you know, you can't really have the excuse of, oh, I don't know I don't know really what it's capable of, what can it do? Is it good for us? You know, obviously you can start making calls on people in the network to basically fix that. Obviously you have the Blender Support Crew as well which is the kind of, if you need somebody on the end of the line, you know you're going to be able to call somebody and actually say, look, we've got these issues can you help us? That's from Sebastian. So, that's you know, you're going to get some good stuff there and then you have the Blender Market, of course which is adding a potential for commercial applications maybe that gives them an avenue in or some kind of road in for that and also the level of interest in building even more professional tools obviously gets increased as well, the emerging options and abilities that you can do already on the Blending Market in addition to what Blender is is obviously, you know, for that cost, even if you bought them all you're still a fraction of you know, whatever it might be for, well, three and a half grand. So, on top of that you have, you know, that's kind of making the assumption in a way that, oh, nobody's using Blender to make games and obviously people are, you know, making very good games and making very successful games so I think it's often forgotten that obviously CG cooking, not only do they do incredible training, they've got, you know, amazing, they're actually a great production house. So they've created their Eat Sheep game, you have Monument Valley who was an incredibly successful game with their main tool I believe was Blender for the art creation and, you know, that's I think Blender can very easily cope with that style as well, you know, this kind of illustrative style. On the other hand, you have more sort of physically based styles. Now, this is something that I'm working on at the moment which is just kind of where I wanted to do a project where it was like basically all the art was done in Blender and yet it still went to like a physically based engine at the end of it and was a decent little game, you know, just a very short sort of arcade styled game so I really wanted to sort of see what I could potentially do with that and by the way, you can follow along with the progress on that on cgmasters.net so I'll sort of keep updating how that's getting on and really that almost sums it up but really just if little studios turn into big studios and it's only a matter of time until it's clear that there's a lot of people out there using Blender obviously the question does come up who's using Blender, you know, what's the visibility you know, so that endorsement and that kind of level of sort of just the reputation in general really, you know that's kind of what we're looking at doing and if a large studio maybe that's off as a small studio grows into a large studio if only a fraction of their budget which was spent on something else went into like the Blender fund that would obviously fast track a lot of features anyway so thanks a lot for listening that's basically going to sum it up for me oh, super