 Hello, hello everybody So as I remember when I was a small kid, I started to use blender. It's where I discovered 3d actually and now it's crazy for me to be here in Amsterdam presenting a talk for Ubisoft with Blender So yes, the title of my talk is like Blender at the Ubisoft strategy innovation lab. So I'm pretty sure some of you know what Ubisoft is We are one of the biggest company a game company in the world We are working on licenses such as Assassin's Creed, Tom Clancy, etc And I am working in a department called the Ubisoft strategy innovation lab And I'm going to explain a little bit what we are doing and what's our role inside Ubisoft and Here is the the three points I'm going to to to see that we are going to see in this presentation So the first one is like I'm going to present the the strat lab the strategic innovation lab Then we are going to see some use cases of Blender in the prototypes that we do I'm actually going to show you two of the prototypes that we have done and then we are going to see a Little bit the story of Blender at Ubisoft how it started and how we ended up funding Blender in the Blender fan so the mission the mission of the strategic innovation lab is to Anticipate the future. So we are a team. We are now 25 people and we are exploring different texts different business models social changes and We have a team of a researcher that are doing prospective research So we have four main activities the first one being so prospective research we are dealing with subjects such as blockchain such as 5g such as AI and Those teams are doing presentation and are trying to to communicate to to the other people at Ubisoft Around those subjects then we have open innovation. The idea is that we are We are dealing with different companies to to co-create to co innovate together and for instance We have a program at station F station that is actually one of the biggest incubator startup incubator of the world and We have a we are teaming up with different startups in order to to see what they are doing It's it's basically a win-win situation because we learn and we share and they share with us ideas and and things and then we have a Communication team and this communication communication team is in charge of sharing what we are doing at the lab internally but also externally and the idea is that they are also sometimes create big events and And we are going to see one event at the end of the presentation It's the Ubisoft blender jam that we organized like two weeks ago And I'm going to show you some pictures of it and finally the team. I'm working in the prototyping team We are called the makers and we are there for making prototypes and to Making things more tangible. So we are showing internally and sometimes external externally like here prototypes in order to convince in the More concrete way the things that we are exploring at the lab So here is the the team part of the team. So we have caroline junter. She is actually directing the lab. She is the chief strategic innovation officer at Ubisoft and On the right side, you have the makers team. So we have Natalie back. She is the producer of the maker And she's also a project director We have an old inch. She is a UX strategist When we are prototyping we always start with a UX question We are like trying to find what are the needs of our users and that's where everything starts in our process Then we have Robert. He is a senior R&D Programmer we have mark. He is a senior programmer. We have Jana. She is a R&D Programmer programming assistants. We have François junior game for programmer and then we have Nikola our game designer and finally myself I'm Pierre Armand. I'm a technical artist and a developer. I'm doing 2d sketching I'm doing 3d assets and but I'm mainly programming in fact because we are a small team and we need to To create prototype fast and we need to to code a lot. So So now what I propose to you is to see Blender use cases in two or four prototypes and the first one is a prototype that we've made by on the blockchain by Creating a wall on the blockchain. So the idea of this prototype is I'm going to show you a small teaser and I'm going to talk on over it and the idea is that as a player you can pick an island that corresponds to a number and this number is what we call the seed and it represents a Specific island that will be generated procedurally and then after this you This island is stamped on the blockchain. So it is actually the own property of the player and Except from them from the terrain in terms of art Because the terrain is generated procedurally except from the terrain the all the props and the character were made in blender So as you can see as a player you can hide treasures you can collect different seeds and the seeds gives you access to The possibility of creating a new island you need to to put a seed in order to generate a new one and As you can see as you will see you can also plant a flag that Represents the fact that you are the pioneer of this island you first discovered it and then you can also Create challenges for the other players. So when they they are visiting your island They will have to reproduce different paths and figures in the in the air So so this is a challenge for instance. So this prototype was made in about five months and it's we were really a really small team back in the in that time and Yes, so we usually in the team. We are we have different We have different we need to do to do different things. So we are a very multitask team in fact So before diving into blender I'm going to show you early sketches that I've done while brainstorming with the team So I'm mainly doing sketches in Krita and the lower open source software and at the beginning I was like trying to find what is going to be the character of this prototype and I knew I wanted to go in a more locally style because With procedural generation content and with the time that we had We it was something that could make us save more time because no texturing no UV unwrap and everything could Read well in terms of shapes So I tried to design different style of characters But at the beginning of the of the prototyping session We needed to go fast and to test the controls of the characters So I quickly went into blender doing this early early version of a character with simple animations in order to Go in unity the engine that we are actually used for prototyping in order to test the three C's so the controls I also did some tests with props as you can see exploring a more locally style And then I also used cycles for creating like Small scene in order to see how it could look like and again This was done really quickly because of course the main goal is to show To focus to toward what we want to to to present in the prototypes in terms of mechanics and in terms of of design and Finally I did this character called gas bar. We don't know if it's a rabbit or forks it's in between and It was a so the final character that was used in the prototype and I've done some animations and I have a very iterative process I always have unity and blender and Pita opened and I'm always going back and forth like The cool thing is that I don't know if you know, but you can drag and drop a blend file in unity And it actually reads so that's a pretty cool workflow for a small team. So Yes, this was done pretty quickly and one thing that I absolutely love and blender is vertex painting In games we use vertex painting a lot and the tools are so simple to use in blender And it it was a huge time saver for me because we are in the in this local style And we wanted to have like the props that were placed dynamically on the terrain that was generated and we wanted to have different types of Colors for the different parts of the model. So in blender If you select faces and you press shift K in vertex color It will feel the faces that you selected and as you can see on the right picture I've created a gradient of different red tints and those tints correspond to different materials that will be picked in a lookup texture in the in the shader and The the x-axis of the of the texture represents the height of the props So if the props is on top of a montane, it will like pick a lighter color And if it's in more toward the ground it will pick a more like darker color and Another cool thing in blender is the decimation modifier Usually in bigger games We do LODs by hand because we want to control a bit more the shapes But in this context because it was a locally a locally style I Just put a decimation modifier on top of the every props and everything was working pretty fine in terms of like Seeing trees from far away and the shapes could read and the vertex color was was kept So it was a really huge time-saver for me and it actually worked well in the workflow So now I want to show you another project It's called project Eucos and in this case this prototype was a Necosystemic prototype where we wanted to show to the to our player how Necosystem works in terms of interaction between different species. So it's a split-screen co-op game where I'm going to show you a demo where you you can possess a character And so you can select a bird you can select a fish you can select a warm and you can select a leave I Also, I had the opportunity to record this music for the prototype during the play time and As you can see so it's a it's a split-screen screen game where you need to balance the ecosystem. So you need to be You meet you need to to to speak a lot with your with your your friend in order to understand the different Goals of the character to see to understand their needs to understand how they interact With the the different systems that are in the game So you are playing as one character, but you have also a eyes and we're going to see Some technical details about how an AI is navigates especially the worms But you have a eyes that are working alone and that are living their life in the ecosystem And when you possess a character, you just switch this character from an AI to a player You you're becoming a player controller basically and at any time you can switch and Yes, the poem can go can go very green in terms of the water color can be dirty and you need to To to basically save the ecosystem in the time that you have So same process when we start we brainstorm a lot We and we have a lot of ideas and at the beginning I'm doing to these sketches while brainstorming in order to like try to find a visual identity of the game But as you can see at the beginning it didn't end up in the same style of what you saw in the trailer so Exploring different things on Krita. I also explored to the animation if Back in the time Gris pencil was not what it is today So today I probably will animate in the Gris pencil rather than Krita But I've done some quick animation for testing like more humoristic stuff Like for me like a rock with eyes is like so cute. So I tried and tried to do this and I've also tested how a Style like this could look in in 3d So I think those those gifts where we were Shot in the a very early version of blender like alpha version of blender 2.8 and I tried to hand-paid a lot The textures, but again it ended up to be a lot of time while Tutu to to spend and I still need to code so it's a it's a bit of time wasted and we decided at the end to go with a more Cartooning style, but before I also did a very small test of what could look what could the slice of a wall look like and Playing with different scales and things like this So and finally those other characters that We decided to create so those are the sketches with big eyes And this was the first render that I've done in cycles Using the the noising I think back in the time. No, maybe not But it was like just to see how those creators could look like in terms of like cartoon style and as you can see in in engine so the three characters the the four characters story of big eyes and the eyes were like a way to communicate their emotions and So for instance you can see the warms really angry right now and we played with this in the game And in the middle you can see that that's the first gym of the characters So Jim is like a way to test the controls of the character and to see how the camera will be positioned And this was the first gym that we created and For the eyes the I tested two methods the first one was using bones that were like Rotated for each loop of the the eyelids and finally at the end it was to It was costing too much in terms of performances So I went using two shape keys one for closing the eye and one for correcting the shape of the eye in the middle because shape keys are linear and it ended up really To be really really cool for us because I could join both eyes In the mesh and the shape key the shape keys will still be there So I had a file with one eye and I just had to merge them into the characters and in the engine We only had one mesh for with the both eyelid closing and opening so that that was a huge performance save for us and finally the not finally, but actually one thing that was Important for us was the fact that the warm could navigate on every surfaces of the wall of the terrain So what I've done is I've experimented a lot With generating nav mesh in the engine, but it was like too much Too much time to spend so I went into blender using Boolean modifier I just combined the big rocks together and it ended up to being the nav mesh so the surface where the the creature could walk on and Final thing creating a skybox in blender was a really cool experience In fact, you just have to take a camera with a 90 degree field of view and you you shoot in the different directions of the sort of top bottom, etc And then you just render this and you have a cube map And so I've done this with cycles because I really like the bouncing light below the clouds and There are some other stuff that we explored, but I don't have time to show you everything But I explored things with curves in blender and yes So finally, I wanted to show you things that we've done in order to to promote blender at Ubisoft So in fact, I had the really I had the honor to to to have trust from my managers in order to Go in front of the top management of Ubisoft and to to show them what was blender and what was open source in the context of blender and I had a really good response and a Few months later they agreed on like funding blender. So for me that was like Amazing and I was like so But but this is like a work of a lot of people so behind the scenes we created an internal community We are a lot of people at Ubisoft For for personal projects like using blender and we started to discuss a lot sharing star sharing add-ons sharing Technics so at the beginning we were a few like we were maybe five at the just beginning But after we changed the tools that we use internally to chat and then it grew up really fast And now we are more than 350 people chatting about blender at Ubisoft. So it's pretty cool And I had the opportunity to do many presentations workshops organized training inside At Ubisoft like showing simple stuff that are so easy to do in blender And that are a huge time saver for modeling for animation reading and stuff like this we have a Book at the strategic innovation lab that we do internally and that we share with all the studios and I had a chance to write an article about blender in it and We also did internals video for just more You know more top-down videos where we explain without going into technical details What blender is and I also teamed up with the Ubisoft animation studios They are probably in the room somewhere here and We we we did a lot of exchange about like they did a lot of work about how a pipeline could work And they finally decided to use blender in their production So and they are also thinking to like push codes back to the community. So that's something really cool for for for me and we And Finally we organize the jam so I'm going to show you that but just before I want to show you really quickly a Small demo a tech demo that I've done. I remember I was walking to the office and in my head I was like, oh, I need to show what EVE is and at the beginning it was like I think it was an alpha version that this test and I started to try to create a bust In a more realistic way. It was crashing a lot But it was also a video for me that they could push internally and say, oh, look This is cool. You can groom in real-time hair You can like create procedural brush to like add scars blood scars in the in the head You can sculpt you can retopologize you can basically Stay in blender doing like things like that. Of course, it's not perfect But for me it was also a way to to say you can do this kind of stuff in a very short amount of time so This video was shared internally and so yes, I said it but we joined the corporate gold membership of blender and We also had the chance to have a training with see run and your room Yeah Thanks to Ubisoft animation studio They invited me to to be part of this training and we actually Were in the lab so you can see the face of different people. I'm working with here from the animation studio and The blender jam was the event that we organized so Robert the senior Programmer that I'm working with told me one day Well, it could be nice if we invite some students from the best animation school and game game school from Paris or from France to Team up with Ubisoft people so they can so the student can teach blender stuff at the To the Ubisoft people that don't know blender and the Ubisoft people could teach them. What is like the real work? What what what is actual real production ease and so they can exchange it? It ended up being like us so amazing for us and here are some photos of the of the jam it was at the strategy innovation lab and Was such a great moment. We also had the chance to have Pablo in the jury in the jury So it was like such a great moment meeting those amazing people and Here is the the communication team that organized the event. It was such a great work and it was over a weekend and I have a really short video that sums up It's in French. Sorry, but that sums up like the event in terms of What we've what we've done So you are visiting our office at the strategy innovation lab I did a master class at some point showing stuff like bendy bones lattices and the idea was that the students and the mentors The idea was to create projects around different teams. So we had themes like stylized we had things like from micro to micro and The idea was to combine this with Ubisoft licenses and it was a video that was shown before the jury and Finally Here is the final picture with the jury the students and the Ubisoft people It was such an honor to have this great jury in fact We had the chance to have as the president of the jury the chief creative officer of Ubisoft and This was like such an honor and we had like so many cool people in the team and in the middle We have we have Pablo so I was like a little kid, you know, like wow, that's so cool So I would like to thank Like so many people I cannot say the names because it will Take an hour, but like At Ubisoft there are so many people that are involved in the learning blender like trying to see how we can like Put this tool as another tool for our artists to use in production. So it's in fact It's just the beginning for us. So we are working on it and I would like to thanks all the Blender community Tone for creating Blender. It's such a great tool and all the people that worked at the Blender Foundation It was like amazing to meet you this week this this Blender conference. So thanks a lot