 Hello And this is what we at pixel federation the Slovak's largest game developer with more than 300 people have been doing for the last 16 years, but first let me introduce myself I'm Martin Coltson. I'm 3D tech artist currently a AI department and been in a blender Since version of 258 because please did that's how you measure time now in wonder versions As an irony member, I participated in almost all live projects we have and During this time I can guarantee you the things I've seen and But first let me ask a question how many of you guys work in game development, please raise your hands up Perfect and how many of you use blender as your main? tool in your pipeline Okay, and please keep your hands up those of you who use also another 3D tool Okay, so you guys you guys exactly know when I'm coming from and for the rest of our audience We are more than happy to share you the story of Making breaking and sharing the story of bringing blender to more than 70 artists of pixel It all started back in 2022 when we wanted to expand our business by opening a studio in Czech Republic This allowed us to explore new collaborations finding new talents and go presence internationally however, the studio itself faced a more significant challenge when Tasked with taking over the whole production of the project itself The project I'm talking about started as a simple risk in of our successful and famous game train station 2 Which started back in 2011? The game I'm going to talk about is the port city game and this game to call it to call ever it took everything It took all technology know-how mechanics with it and one simple thing asset pipeline based on a different DCC so We were in a situation where we have this business opportunity and opportunity to hop on the train with industry pun intended and In order to overcome this we needed some well-motivated team talented art lead and skillful Technician and Let's move our focus now to view the story from the different perspective And I'm more than a glad to pass the floor to Carolina, which is our talented 3d athlete of the port city project Hello everyone So let's see how we actually made our pipeline a blender pipeline and let's look at it from a perspective of a beginner Bender is an obvious choice for beginners, especially nowadays I'd argue is the best software for beginners to get actually into 3d But when you hone your skills you create a great portfolio and then you're ready to find a job in the gaming industry And all you find in the job listings is this There's something missing right So, okay, let's see and Perhaps it's best to wait for an opportunity because all of these tools are a pretty big investment Especially for beginners with no experience. So let's wait for an opportunity and You will learn that indies appreciate us a lot if you have an opportunity to work with indies Even if that doesn't necessarily result in a ship title It's a very valuable experience and more and more in recent years. We finally have an opportunity to see something like this It's there. Yay Maybe not at the forefront. It's still an additional skill, but it's there or more of a footnote and Blender being a footnote actually started our journey at a pixel federation. We knew in When we started that the Mac the pipeline was built on max but the rest of the future was quite uncertain because We were about to become a standalone production team in the following years. So the things were in our hands The pipeline was already established we worked between max and unity and all of the tools Were non-existent in blender. So we were the ones who had to adapt With if we needed some tools, we would simply have to make them or find ways to adjust the tools so they somehow work in blender of Which? Took us a while, but bit by bit. We have managed to slowly convert our pipeline Personally, I would often feel as an outlier after or when you work in a team you want to share your work files and If we all shared our work files in max everyone would be happy If I just follow the standard and learn everything that the thing that everyone used we would all be happy But if you are here, you know the value of Blender You've probably tried different softwares before and if you are here I assume you still prefer Blender over the rest and so we'll be With time our pixel branch in Czechia transitions to a fully Blender focused pipeline We took what worked and I hope we made it even better It's great if you don't have to start your pipeline from zero and you can start from something at the very least The inspiration part is great. However, do be careful and question everything. Do not adopt mistakes already made Question why things are the way they are and if they still make sense for you Which is easier said than done because rarely you have a heavy option to start from a clean slate You often have to adapt to what is already working in the pipeline the transition that the transition can hard The transition has mostly be done in baby steps Ideally you want to imagine your idea pipeline then take the pipeline you already have and create some kind of role plan How to get to the desired results as you can see it just takes time And you will need allies You can be a great tech artist and come up with the most amazing time-saving solutions But if you are the only one willing and capable of using them, you wouldn't become discouraged You need an opportunity and a willing environment to try new things and be willing to work with Blender So let's say you have a team and an opportunity. What next? Let's hear our tech artist Patrick. Thank you So hi everyone. Thanks for being here. It's a great pleasure Let's start with a simple question Why Blender where for me personally? I think Blender is the software for 21st century and we can talk about all the nice things that we all love We are all here because Blender, but maybe I can just summarize it that it just works I mean it boots up instantly There are almost no crashes you can have multiple instances of Blender running and you can control C and control V from one to another And honestly this feels like being light years ahead Compared to different software packages, which is kind of sad because I think this should be a standard, right? so yeah, it just works but well until it doesn't and Stuff changes between long-term support sub versions and then your tools break and they're like, okay, but At least when you report bugs they get actually fixed at least that was our experience And it's really nice to see the developers actually care about you So and of course there's another reason to love Blender and it's the community, right? That's the reason why we're all here today. So please give yourself a round of applause So yeah, we all love Blender And there's one big another reason and it's not of course you may be far above them already They're everywhere nowadays and yeah notes are just awesome. They're non-destructive They're fast to iterate They're a huge time saver if you use them correctly and there's no prior coding experience needed Although maybe you might use some when you want to try the more complex stuff But overall they're very artist-friendly and every one can start poking around with them So and of course if you can't navigate the spaghetti yourself just talk to your fellow technical artists You know, we always love the opportunity to flex our skills. So just don't be afraid and talk to us We're actually nice people sometimes and Here are some of the tools that we've made in notes those procedural tools and Some are pretty easy some are maybe more complex But what I want to say here is that it's important to focus on the stuff that is being reused So we were trying to make the assets that are Constantly being reused in our game and the art direction is already established for this asset So there's very little creative work left for the artist artists So why don't we give them just a speed up and they can focus on the creative stuff? So that's what we did and This is something you often Come to these days like okay blinders is nice everyone lies you you want to use it, but Your hope horrible pipeline depends on a different software package and For that here are five tips from me to get you started building your custom tools The first one is don't be afraid and just dive in just try it. What can you lose? It's just try if it works for you and It's that's what I thought it's just a couple of scripts put together like how hard it can be actually and it turns out It's not that easy either, but still just go for it. Try it. It's there's nothing to be afraid of And the blender API is well documented. Well, that is true. If you're a Python programmer otherwise, it's bit of a nonsense and It actually doesn't make any sense for non tech people. It's really hard So the onboarding could be made a little bit easier, but still it's there and of course just start experimenting you know, there's a lot of way to start experimenting and There's always the blender scripting scripting tab in the default blender installation with the Python interactive console and all the examples You can dig it and try for yourself Nowadays there are some also add-ons to make add-ons, which is awesome or add-ons to make different macros so you can try if that is the way that that can help you build your custom tools and Of course, you can chat with your favorite AI if you don't mind arguing about hallucinated classes or Mistaking who a blender API versions if that's for you just go for it But at least you will get pretty good at debugging. So yeah, just go for it It teaches you something and if none of that works Well, just find someone who can do it for you and at this point I would like to say hello to Samo who made most of our tools possible he's a magician coder and He made it just some from some of my notes and half-baked half-baked solutions and I would like to say at this point that he's Student working with us part-time and he made all of the tools during his summer break, which is just awesome and I have no idea how he did it and it just shows that If you find the right person to do the task everything is possible And After you've done and you have your tools Maybe the hardest part may start because you have to actually test them in the production and you have to call it Collect feedback from the artists you have to report various bugs that might come up And of course you have to reiterate on the ideas that you had and think that someone something is going to work But it turns out it's not working as you intended and in the end make your team happy So what were the problems that we need to solve? Except the Existing things that we need that we had and we just translated it's one to one We also need it in blender and missed in blender or direct access to vertex attributes mainly the vertex color attribute and we wanted to work on it per vertex in edit mode Because you know painting mode is great, but it's good for well painting And not so much for precise editing of low-poly models So we also needed a way to preview and edit alpha channel because our shaders and a lot of VFX rely on alpha channel on data in alpha channel or in different Attributes like UVS and stuff. So we also needed some pipeline specific automation This is one of the tools we've made it's called vertex artist Sadly, there's no link or fancy qr But if you search for it, you're gonna find it the on blender market and also on github So please support the author and it gives us direct access to the vertex attribute in edit mode Which is great because that's the place where most of our artists spent the most of the time And we can assign colors to the vertices. We can assign colors to faces We can work with color palettes. We can preview the alpha channel independently from the color channel and then just switch back to the color channel So it's really awesome. You can see the colors that the object has and edit it. So it's pretty non-destructive also Another thing this is just a Specific thing to our pipeline. We are baking different data into different channels and attributes so like alpha channel and UVS and stuff like that and We just wanted to make the life of our artists easy and So they can with just one click check if the object contains any errors if there's maybe some redundant attributes or the attributes channels are not correctly named and If they find some errors, there's a simple log that shows you what's wrong with the asset and you can with with simple clicks Just fix the various various stages the mistakes and check again and see that your asset is good and ready to get exported We've seen the presentation on Thursday where they've used a QA bot and we're definitely stealing that idea It's it sounds really great So and this is just a little tool But it's one of my favorites because it solves a specific problem and it's that sometimes you have to merge different meshes and some of them might be rotated and You apply the rotations and you get you lose the the actual rotation and you want to reuse that as asset At a different time and here we've just selecting three vertices that conform a 90 degree angle You just press a button and it gets aligned to do or to gonna play so it's a simple thing but it saves a lot of time and Another thing this is also specific to our pipeline to how we work and our game designers I are using sheets a lot for for day purposes And we need the data from those sheets in a slightly varied form in blender and in the end in the unity to To work with them. So we have the data, right? Why don't we just use them? So just simple solution to download CSV upload it into blender with just one click it gets created all all the stuff that we are working with and I would like to stop here for a minute and we've all heard the news and We've seen decisions being made and then unmade and I would like to say that the best thing about building pipeline in blender is actually that there's no party holding you hostage and You know, it's this gives us huge freedom and that's all thanks to blender So fake thanks to everyone who made this possible and now back to Martin Thank you very much Thank you very much Patrick and And Here we are and holding a hostage is something that you really don't want to do to your team full of artists What you exactly want to do is exactly opposite of it. You want to give them a freedom you give to them You want to show them that you care and what is the best way to spread the fact that you care to share? I think this is the biggest question I could use in the presentation Because sharing is caring, but I asked myself What is the thing that blunders community is so special? What's there and then I just found that they do this they do this with passion knowledge environment they have and In order to share our artists knowledge We need to find their passion what they are patient about Then to show them basics basics of blender and create system allowing us to find those willing to share And that's exactly what we did. We just asked them. I'm just asked them about the interests We asked them about modeling animation genotes scripting coding stuff Then we evaluate the data create seal ups found the teacher who is also the founder of Blender Slovakia Joseph Zajac and taught them and You may ask this is it. Well, no, of course is not but this well-guided introduction and Our open eyes led us to those willing to share and now out of 70 artists We have already 20 plus artists production already with Blender as their main tool if they in their pipeline and Each day we have more and more opening lectures of those willing to share and Everyone's different and also days. They are environment. So this is actually the thing you really want to share also Even in a situation when you have almost 100 add-ons directories parts different tools Etc. And what we did is exactly the same we find a solution found a guy make it happen We still we are able to share add-on list tools library past asset or Libraries etc. Just so you have to select the correct tap Bros wire the list Open file folder or read documentation or install add-on directly Keep it simple and now Our story comes to the end and like for most stories even from these one you can take a thing or two And we already did it for you. So to wrap it up. We have three points be comfortable being an outlier and There's a super high probability that the problem you have somebody had Sorry, somebody have already solved the problem you have. So just keep your eyes open and look everywhere and rely on people and let them share so And if you are in a situation that none of the above apply just well, this is a whole different story and Now I would like to thank all of you and If you have a question just feel free and step by. Thank you