 Thank you. Thank you. All right. Let's do this one last time Abandonment and for the past two years. I've been the one and only in client technical aid on spider-verse Well, you all know the rest of the story, but maybe what you don't know is how he's blender in spider-man across the spider-verse So thank you for the blender foundation for making this event happen and I would like to introduce our other speaker Sharon FX animator on spider-verse She will be sharing her experience during short work using blender as inclined artists and Monica effect animator Who will be discussing blender usage in the animation department? So first I would like to start with a little bit of a background At sunny picture image works. We have in-house developed pipeline where so many different talents work on so many different shows both CG animated and live action and This polyvalent modular approach is what allows us to tackle unique look never seen before such as the look of spider-verse. I Remember watching the first spider-verse in 2018 and being blown away by how much I couldn't understand how it was made The blend of different mediums a different rendering technique The stylization from all department was really coming together and pushing what it means to tell a story in a stylized way So we were really excited what we could do to push that even further in the sequel So Sharon and I we both work in the FX department But the FX department on spider-verse is made of two teams There are FX artists that do smoke destruction and all kind of effect animation And they are inclined artists that focuses on generating and ingesting in clients. So what are in clients? inclines or curves in 3d space and Into the spider-verse we use them a lot on face and ends in order to make you feel like character or and run rather than 3d rendered It's a stylization layer That makes the final image much more imaginative With the power of incline You can simplify silhouettes with outline or you can add more detail by doing the wrinkle on the ends or the underlip shadow and We really like this idea and we wanted to do more But incline drawing at every frame making sure the outline match the silhouette can be very very time-consuming and tedious So we knew that if we were to do more we needed to simplify and automate the process In the end we were quite successful. So it's almost 90% of the all the shots in the movie that received inclines We at every shot we were generating incline based on camera perspective and character performance For the face We had machine learning inspired Library based workflow where we will predict where the incline on the face should be based on camera perspective instead of drawing it manually But we were also doing full body and clothes So for instance, we have the incline on Peter's dress that are kind of make you feel like fur We have the overshoot on Miguel's shoulder We have OB paper line around his body and OB is covered in incline and Ben Rayleigh is also receiving incline from all department And all those layer of incline are reacting to how the character moves depending on the fast and slow is moving the incline is behaving differently and that kind of emulates the process of 2d animation the traditional process of drawing character and We were also doing environments the 290 and world is receiving incline that are very architectural Based on camera perspective with a lot of line work that is overshooting from the surface We were doing actually incline everywhere probes crowds vehicles even some effects So we are to wrap everything into common line tools So we could just deploy incline on any shot without having to open any software But we still add a lot of artistic control at any shot We could open the file to some parameter to get exactly the design that we wanted But one thing that we realized is that for some shots. It was not enough We were really missing a human touch just the idea of putting a couple of lining on there was really missing So one thing we haven't tried yet Was drawing the incline ourselves So at first we had one of our 2d freelance artists to do 2d sketches into 2d animation software And we will export the sketches as curves Project them into 3d space and he made the curve and we really like this idea. So we wanted all our in-house 3d artist 2d artist to do the same So we had them draw annotation in each view which is the same process that clients and director use to annotate during reviewing process Which was not the most Artist friendly workflow. So we opted for a more elegant approach which is using the gris pencil tool from blender It was Also an easy animation department kind of express the need to use blender in the same way So we joined development efforts and in the end the workflow was similar We will open Blender import some camera backplate shot asset and we will draw the incline Export it back to Maya or Odini for processing and publishing So now I would like to welcome to the stage Sharon that will be talking about this process in the FX department All right, it's my mic working. It is hello again Seeing as that was an awful lot of information. I'll start us off with a fun fact. I She don't need these I wear contacts Right Thank you So I am going to backpedal back to the beginning of spider-verse 2 for a bit So at the start of production, we were still using the inclines tool from spider-verse 1 and only those That was one that allows to predict where the lines are going to go and tweak them to our liking But because this was the second movie we had new characters new worlds and new art styles that were more ambitious than the last Our main culprits were the villains vulture in the spot who not only gave us a hard time in the real world But were menaces in the story of spider-verse Right, so our first culprit is the vulture mr. Da Vinci blueprints himself He's comprised of sketchy quilt pens strokes on old worn parchment quite literally like an ancient ink drawing That's come to life and it's a traditional art style That's really difficult to capture with 3d tools Next up we have the spot who starts off as chaotic and then for those of you who watch the movie it descends into even more chaos He's got a really deceptively simple design, but it evolves over the course of the story to visually represent his growing power his key points include the splotches that make up his portals or his holes as he likes to call them and The sketchy accent lines that go from scribbly to scrawly depending on his emotional state Now the key point of this is that both these characters have a lot of hand-drawn design elements that are difficult to capture with our existing 3d tools and That is where blender came in handy now as previously mentioned We would use blender for shots that needed a more human touch and we would go about that by getting artists such as yours truly To use grease pencil to draw directly onto the model and then ship our work off to the rest of the pipeline So to help us get a better idea of what that would actually look like I'm going to do a shot breakdown, but we're not going to start here. We are going to start here So this is the screenshot of what a file setup might actually look like in blender And I'm going to play a video that kind of maybe shows what our process would have looked like as well So what's going on here is that we're just going through the frames that have already been drawn And what's actually going on in this file is that once we receive our work from our lovely and talented animators We'll pick up everything throw it into a blend file and start drawing on it like so now on an artistic note for spot We tend to focus on his spots his joints the outlines of his body and everywhere else that may need a little more care and attention and We will just draw frame by frame like so I will note that this shot was done by our lovely and talented Brittany Corbin who is our resident spot and vulture expert Now just by looking at the video alone You might be thinking are you not just tracing over the animation and you know why get artists to trace something when you get a Machine to do it You may just tell me to use tune shader at this point Now you can already see here that a lot of the lines are being drawn are not traced They're not really coming from anywhere except for our own brains And the second piece of evidence that I will raise you is that spots model is bald It's barren. It's naked. It's empty and we have to put in a lot of those details by ourselves Now you could still argue from a corporate standpoint that you could use 3d Computer-generated tools to generate the lines instead of having to draw them by hand However with the technology that we have right now It's not really possible to recreate 2d drawing principles And what I mean by that is that when an actual comic artist inks their panels They're not really running their pen around an outline It's more like they're defining the features of their characters and their worlds using the ink It's less like tracing and more like shading with line work There are deliberate decisions being made about things like line weight Which is how thick the lines are being drawn and where the lines are being drawn as you can tell from that little example on the Left a bunch of well-placed lines can define shadows on an otherwise flat object Also hand-drawn lines just look really cool. So I don't know why I'm making this argument now Of the first pass of a shot might look like this And you can see it looks kind of the 2d lines are lagging behind the 3d animation because the 3d model is constantly moving around the space as Is the nature of animation which brings us to our first dilemma, which is getting 2d lines to keep up with the 3d model Now the obvious answer would be to make like traditional 2d animators and draw in all the in-between frames But at that point is that not just rotoscoping It's not and I'll explain why so while it's true that we do draw our lines in screen space I feel like that's where the similarities end because with rotoscoping you're kind of tracing on top of an end product on an Isolated layer and the lines do not exist in the 3d space But what we'll do is that we will project our lines onto the model and stick them on there like so and this does two things One because our lines are now attached to the model it actually follows the animation Which means that we don't have to draw every single frame anymore and secondly because we do get that nice bit of Interactivity it helps to marry the 2d and 3d aesthetics a bit more seamlessly than just comping flat footage of lines on top of a flat Render of a 3d model now the thing is because we are projecting the lines from camera screen space if the character turns away from the Camera or moves around a bit too much We do have to redraw the lines on those frames and you might be thinking oh well that still seems like a lot of work It's not we have something for that So we have a way to sample data from keyframes to interpolate the missing links And what I mean by that is say at frame one you pick up your pen You hand draw the lines in that frame and you move on to the next key pose Which in this example is conveniently at frame 3 you pick up your pen and then you draw your frame again Now traditionally in 2d animation We would draw what is called an in-between frame at frame 2 but thanks to the wonders of technology We can actually Frankenstein frames 1 and 3 effectively drawing the in-between for us now if this sounds really familiar It's because blender does have an interpolation tool already But ours is different. I promise We needed a tool that was cross compatible with other programs in our pipeline things like Houdini Katana nukes so on and so forth And we also needed a tool that took 3d animation into account when generating the interpolations Now how this works is that it will use the frames at the beginning and end of the range as parents to create a child That is a mix of the two so where the model starts to move it will begin to erase out the lines on the previous frame and then Sampling from the next frame. It'll begin to draw in While taking the 3d animation into account in 2d animation terms It's kind of like tweening but instead of using transformations to get from point a to point B The machine is actually recalculating everything Now the cool thing about this workflow is that it's not limited to one frame So long as the animation makes sense we can interpolate between a whole range of them Now to kind of help you guys get a better idea of what that would actually look like I've traced over this shot So the green frames are the ones that we would have drawn by hand and the blue and the red frames are the ones That would have been interpolated for us And as you can see this does save us a lot of time and busy work and on a show like spider-verse time is very very precious now Phil go not only are these tools major time savers and essential for 2d and 3d hybrid production It's proof that blender can be integrated within a mainstream 3d pipeline and exist as part of a larger production ecosystem Or if I were to say it using tech buzzwords cross-deficient cross compatibility Now after shipping our work off to the rest of the pipeline and having it pass through many other people's talented hands The final product will look like this and I will leave that up there for people to admire for a bit Now I'll move on because we need time In my opinion as both a 2d artist and a 3d artist I really like this developmental direction because it involves traditional 2d artists I feel like there's a love for hand-drawn animation That's still very much alive and I'm glad that we found a way to incorporate that craft in an industrial production pipeline I think when we think about innovation and animation, we're thinking VR We're thinking AR we're thinking procedural nodes and photogrammetry and all those things are groundbreaking amazing things But I also think that innovation is not only looking forward to the future But also learning from our history and moving forward together with old crafts and moving evolving with them as I would like to say I think the pen is as mighty as the keyboard Thank you, and I will be handing it back to Edmund We use the same idea to also cover the Smoke with line work from the artist perspective the workflow was the same open blender draw the line work exported to a Dini It's the only difference was on the technical side because we couldn't project on any geo and follow The geo because there was no geo. It's the volume So instead what we did that we compressed the velocity of the point cloud of the volume as point cloud and we Adjected the line work using this point cloud So this idea allows to cover the most destruction every sequence of the movie with line work And with that said that kind of covers blender usage in the FX department So now we like to give the floor to Monica that will be discussing blender usage in the animation department Okay now animation, so I was in the animators department. I'm a meter and We thought we could talk about how do we end up using grease pencil in Spider-Verse and also what do we use it for? Okay, so we all know that spider-verse is full of like visual effects that really like give impact and power to the movements, but these effects are directly connected to Yeah, I'll put on my slide maybe To the characters movements are made by the animators So already we had a tool for that which is the inline tool It's the one that we use for the first movie and that we improved for the second one and that tool is basically you just Create a rig you had a stroke and you have it with its different controllers and you can move it around the scene You can parent say you can deform it you can color it you can do like a lot of stuff But it's still a rig to do a drawing. So it's not bad You know intuitive. I mean, how are we supposed to do stuff like this? This is so beautiful This is like so organic this feels hand-drawn because it's actually hand-drawn. It's crisp pencil So how do we end up using it? I'll tell you the story it'll start in the beginning of the production We will like really three people one of them. Oh, sorry. I forgot about a slide Yeah, you can see here a Comparation between what it's the inlines that feels more graphic and controlled and the crisp pencil that feels more organic I guess you can see right Okay Sorry the story. How do we end up doing that? There was a guy the man the legend it was Seagate He's a lead animator Spider-Verse he was also friends with healthy. That's how he knows blender and he Didn't quite lighting lines tool. He wanted something more intuitive. So he was like hey guys gris pencil So he started testing it by himself like trying to import From Maya that is the so where we use Into blender the models and the cameras and then he just draw and he exported it as images So complex and use it, but then what happened who came into the scene? Pipeline and pipeline say hey what instead of images? We just take this Vertex and we export it as geo You have the image and you export import it into Maya So we have it in the actual free space and then effects and compo can use it And then we have that tool when animators began Entering the production will present that this tool. Okay. You have this amazing thing and you can either use or gris pencil Or the inline so that I talked to you about what do we use? It depends on first looks because as you saw earlier The inline tool just more graphic. Maybe you want something more precise But if you need something more organic you just use gris pencil tools And also there are people that are not familiar maybe with drawing. They're not that comfortable So for them it's it's easier the inlines But for me or for example for Sharon that also has like a 2d tendency We really appreciate being able like to actually draw like a human being I don't know and then more people became interested into this tool We kept developing doing the production more people learn blender Which is super cool and happy ending. We have a tool Okay Now that we have a tool in production. What do we use it for? I'll show you some examples and all of these of course It's Chris pencil Smears, that's the classic one. You have the big smears. You have the small smears. Look at all these lines here I mean, isn't it like easier to actually draw them? Another example of smears in this case you can see how they adapted this gris pencil into the world's style It's really cool. Okay, not only smears and our thing that we do is that when we flip, you know, the classic We try to Emphasize the impact of the shooting in the wrist do it a bit of In this case, it's chose to do like a big lines developing two particles now an animators can do particles Oh my god, that's amazing And more effects for example this this an impact on the floor really simple Well, when we animate this we try to think about This is a very visual movie Remember that it's coming from a comic book and a comic book doesn't have any audio So whatever you can emphasize visually you do it So ahead maybe someone's attention we try to do it with lines with animation with everything So it's it's a great resource and then a spider cat where you can see a bit of Smears a bit of particles a bit of everything and it's so cute because it's tiny cats and And this this is really cool. This is the first victory of wrist pencil. This is from the teaser It's the first it's first time people saw like wrist pencil and spider, so it's really cool And other users that we use it for on sometimes the directors wanted to see like certain effects like Okay, there will be water and fire and they're here. Can you do it? I'm like I'm an animator I can't do it effects will do it So what we did was just draw them and like presented them that like a temp so they can see it you like it Yes, okay next and that effects would do it another one another use really important a lot of people in spider verse Are really coming from from 2d backgrounds? So what we like to do is instead of doing reference because sometimes you cannot do references You know these shots with swinging and how you feel my reference for that. I'm not spider-man and And What we do is we block it out with drawings so we can enjoy what you can do It's you just have your blender you have your layout imported from Maya And then you just parent your wrist pencil to the character and you can simply like animated block it out with drawings Show it does it work does it not work super simple and then all I could talk more, but we don't have much time so As a conclusion, I just wanted to say that this comes to show that you don't need to change you like your whole Pipeline to introduce tools like grease pencil that it will definitely make your artist lives better and your piece better So that comes with you and I'll invite my colleagues back to the stage All right, that's it for our talk. We really hope you enjoyed it I would like to finish with a quick word of thank you for all the artists that contributed to the visuals and the tools One thing that I want to mention about those amazing people is that when it came to a printing for incline We will mainly look at the artistic background a lot We our goal was to make tool that anyone who likes art can just join and draw the spider-verse Even if you don't know blender even even if you don't know Dini you can still join learn as a show goes and do all those things and This is why blender a free tool that does so much while staying so simple to use is such a good pick to do that It just allows artists to join and spread their wings Thanks again, please check out those talk from our spider people and we have to see you soon in the spider-verse