 I'd just like to introduce ourselves. My name's Rob Kringle from Tangent Labs, and with me is Dan Murray. And we're here to actually talk about Loop, which is a product we introduced at SeaGraph. And everything you see here, a little bit of a disclaimer, is that this isn't quite the finished product. This is actually what we showed at SeaGraph. It's actually getting better as it's going along. But we just want to sort of give you a preview and sort of discuss what we're trying to accomplish with Loop. We'll just start off with who actually we are and what our company does in case you don't know. So we're Tangent Labs, which is actually part of Tangent Studios. So Tangent Studios has broken up actually into three divisions. One is the animation side. And last year, we finished NextGen, which is a pretty big feature film for Netflix. And the feature film before that was Aussie. So they actually completed two feature films and were on another big project. So the studio itself is probably, I would say, medium size, maybe, is 150 people up to 200 people for this next project. The second division is Tangent Labs, which is the division that Dan and I both work for. And what we're actually trying to accomplish is production management system for feature film production. And it's not necessarily just for feature film production, but it's sort of to bring the technologies that we use on the previous film and sort of give everyone else a head start. So it's very, very expensive product. We want to make sure that people who actually want to get into this sort of business, even if they're starting from scratch, can do it quickly and easily. Yep, sure. And then the third division that we have is Tangent Interactive, which is a fairly new division. That's our game division. So at the end of this slide, we actually note that we have another project going on now. So we're in a growth phase right now. We'll get up to about 200 people. And the software that we're presenting here is software that we're using on these productions. So this actually started on the last show, which is 7723. So if you're not aware of what Tangent is, they're a studio in Toronto that just finished 7723. Yep, next gen. So that was released on Netflix to pretty big acclaim. And we're pretty proud of that. It looks great. And that's where Loop started, actually. So we focused a lot on asset management. And we're really, really have been heavily focused on task management now and production management. So what does that mean for us? So we're trying to integrate asset management, task management, render management. Next slide. So you see, these are the core components that we're trying to accomplish here. And we're trying to create an integrated product for people. So what happens for a lot of studios is they try to build everything from scratch or reinvent the wheel, or they buy disparate products and they try to integrate them together. What we're trying to do is come up with one cohesive product that people can just use. And it's almost turnkey, almost a push button thing. We want people to be native in the cloud where they can. So if you're starting off from home, you can start using this product with too much of an issue. And we're trying to really democratize the whole thing. So if you're just someone starting out as a one-person studio, frankly, you'll wonder why you need this product. And we'll get into that after that. But once you start really getting to the five-person collaboration, you're going to need to start needing stuff like this. Especially if you're working in remote locations. And that's something that we're actually trying to facilitate. So I'm going to pass this off to Dan, and he can just start with the next slide. So one of the core underpinnings of the product is being able to do task management. And for those people that have done a production work, either episodic TV or CG feature VFX, there's two streams of tasks that we consider. One is relating to assets, so typical modeling, rigging, surfacing. The other stream would be related to shot work, so pre-vis, layout, animation, lighting, and so on. So at the core of the product, we have the ability to define the processes first. So different studios work in different ways. So they're able to define what their workflow is. And track each of those two streams. And we've integrated those two streams as well, so that you can clearly see the dependencies, the relationships between assets and shots. So if you're a producer in a shot department, and you're wondering why your shots aren't done, you can see that there's three assets that are still pending that aren't quite finished yet. And that's why your shot artist can't finish those shots. There is a facility in the product to define your statuses. So again, different departments, we've seen different departments actually have different statuses from one department to the next. There may or may not be, the sort of core statuses would be waiting to start in progress and done. But depending on the department, you could have lead approvals, you could have director approvals, you could be better, is sort of a final status where you think you're done, but you might come back to it. So all of these statuses are definable in the product, and they're relatable across all of the processes within any given project as well. So quite easy to see all of those together. We also have a integrated media review component. Again, I don't know that Rob touched on this, but this is all web-enabled. Everything that we're showing is run from the web. We currently are deploying it on the Amazon ecosystem, so it's all AWS. We have integration for on-prem facilities as well. So if you're a bigger studio and you've already made an investment in hardware infrastructure, you don't just throw it out with the bathwater and move to this product. You can run both of them at the same time. Back to the media review capabilities, though. You can take whatever media output that you've created, so whether that's Playblast or movie files from renders, you can build yourself a playlist, and then bring that media into a review room where you can have collaborations with whether all your artists are in a studio, if you're in disparate locations. Because it's web-enabled, anybody can just go to a URL and participate in a media review. We also have a 3D model streamer that's integrated into the product as well. So what is it? GLTF is the format that we're supporting. It allows you to produce those models out of a Blender file and then facilitate anybody going to your media library, looking at the models and tumbling around in 3D space and looking at those models. We'll also be supporting notes on those models that can then go back to the artists. And this is a short video of how the product works. Let's see here. My name is Vika Malvian. I'm a developer here at Tangent Labs. And today I'm going to show you a demo of Loup, our cloud-enabled production management system. And so the first thing you're going to want to do is log in, as usual, from your username and password. So here we have several thumbnails. You can select each one by clicking on them or a drop-down navigation that lists them out. Let's select 7.7.2.3, and you'll immediately be brought to the project overview page, which gives you recent activity of new media and render activity that has been taking place for the project. So the first thing I'd like to show is the media library for the project, which can be accessed on the left navigation bar. And it's this third icon over here, which gives you a list of all the published media by artists on the project that have published to Loup. You have your standard sorting options on the top right and filtering options on the left. So right now we're viewing all media types, but you can filter for specific types. Let's go look at the 3D models right now. And these are published 3D models that have been done for the project. Clicking on them will give you a preview, which takes a moment to load. And the model will stream in so that it's a little bit quicker, more responsive, and interactive. There we go. Once it's fully loaded in, you have a real-time view of the model, which supports all mouse control, rotate, and zoom in. So it's great for review purposes and approvals. Of course, you can view videos of your published media. So here we have mostly editorial videos. And clicking on these movies will, of course, bring up a preview of the movie. So we can also quickly create playlists out of these movies for sharing with other team members on the project. And that is done using the right navigation pane, which pops out over here. And with simple drag and drop, you can grab some movies and start very quickly creating a playlist. So here's three video clips that I've put in there. You can reorder them if you like. But let's just keep it like that, simple sequences. And give it a title and description. I'm just going to call it an action sequence. And the description, nice. Clicking save saves the playlist. So once the playlist is created, you can view all the playlists that have been made for the project by going to the left navigation pane again. And just below the media library are your playlists. So we'll come there. We have a view of all the playlists, some previews of the recent ones. I'll just sort by the creation time. And there we go. At the top is my newly created playlist. You can expand it, view the clips that were included as part of it. Now on the very far right side is an actions column. And we can review this playlist by clicking on the play button up there. So the media review tool is a collaborative way of viewing back playlists. You can select the clips in your playlist. And we can add draw over highlights onto the clips in our playlist to highlight changes that the artists need to make. Our work easily communicated visually. Something like that, which we can add to any frame. And let's see. Move the eye a little bit over here. Move this one a little bit lower. And we can quickly jump between the two keyframes that we've added. Let's add some notes now to let our team know. And finally, you may have noticed there's this members list at the top, which indicates who is currently participating in the current review session while you're playing back the playlist. So the loop review tool supports simultaneous review of your playlist with members of your team from remote locations. So other people can easily join this review session and watch the playback as well as adding these annotations to your playlist in the draw overs, all occurring in real time. And it gives a really collaborative experience with you and your team. So another core component to loop is asset management, handling asset management, and ensuring that you can create, revision, track all of the assets in your project. And for the purposes of sort of defining what an asset is, we consider both assets such as characters, props, and sets. Those are assets to us, but so are shots as well. A shot is just a collection of other assets. So we do manage opening shots, saving a revision on a shot. There is a process for publishing shots. And all of this is also done where your data is always being synced to the file locations, to the storage locations that you want to sync with. And typically that involves your local desktop and Amazon S3 storage as well. For our studio for tangent animation, we actually have two studios, one in Toronto and one in Winnipeg. So we're actually syncing data between those physical locations and up to the cloud as well. So depending on the route, the data can go between the facilities to the cloud and down. There's multiple routes for the data to travel. And so for the asset management component, this is the only piece of software that's external to the web-based components of Loop. So we have a plug-in that comes along with this product that you add into Blender for doing all of this asset management. So I'll show you a quick video on how that works. Sorry. So one of the struggles that a lot of people will have when they're starting out in production is how to sync data, like how do you save your files, how do you version them up, how do you get them to the cloud. And one of the things we didn't really touch on is we're also integrating render management. And so getting all that data up to the cloud is actually a challenge for people. And we're providing tools to actually do this as well. And that's just part of the package that goes along. And one thing we haven't really touched on is tangent support of Blender. We're very, very Blender-centric. Tangent Studios has sponsored developers here at the Blender Foundation. We use Blender almost exclusively for our productions, certainly for 7.7.2.3 and Aussie, almost entirely. We render in cycles as well, something we didn't really touch on in case you don't know the studio. So for asset management, we're providing a Blender plug-in to deal with this. And all of this is that the Blender plug-in itself will be open-sourced as well. So if you want to experiment with it or add to it, that's fine. We'll touch on some of the features and how that works afterwards. But as Dan said, we'll play a video and you can sort of see how it works. Well, this is a demonstration of the Asset Manager add-on, which is the main interface between loop and the Blender scene files for your project. And it can be accessed just like any other regular add-on for Blender through your preferences panel over here by selecting add-ons. And if you search for it by typing in asset, there it is. So it'll appear inside of the properties pane in Blender under the Active Tool and Workspace Settings context tab. And the main panel that it uses is the asset browser over here. And this is used for navigating and selecting your different assets and different versions of the assets and shot files. So if we go to the Assets Library, you can see your different asset categories, such as character, props, sets, VFX, the different categories of types of assets to be used in your scene shot files, which can be found in the Shots Library over here. So this particular project is episodic-based. So over here, we can see that there's a couple episodes that have been made, Episodes 1, 2, 3, 4. So an episodic project such as this one can be organized so that it's episodes followed by sequences and then the actual shots. So if we select one like this one, go into sequence 50, for example, and shot 10. Below, we'll see versions for that specific shot file populating down here below. So up over here, you can see that your project files are organized in a tree-like structure. It's like a directory hierarchy. So it's easy to navigate. It's very convenient. It follows a logical structure. So if we clear this out and go back to the top level, I have a testing that we can use over here for this demonstration. And I'm going to switch over to the Layout Department. And over here, you can see that there's 10 different versions that have been saved. I'm just going to open up the latest one. And here's a test scene that I've prepared for this demonstration. If we switch it to EV, we can see that there's a ground texture on the ground plane and some simple geometry that I've thrown in here with some simple dynamics on the monkey. So now if we make some changes to the scene, like let's say if I move the monkey guy over a little bit over here to the side, whatever, and we want to make some, and we want to save a new version. We click on the Save New Version button on the side over here. And we enter a comment, moved things around. And what this will do is it'll save a new version into the database, save out the file, and it'll also upload your files to all the remote locations that are associated with your project. So this current project has two remote locations associated with it. And so what it did was it uploaded the blend file and whatever associated resource files that are being used inside of it to the other remote locations. Now it's important to note that only the files that need to be uploaded actually do. So new files or files that have changed. So in this case, only the blender file was a new file. The texture on the ground was unchanged, so it didn't actually have to upload to the remote locations. They were already in sync. And of course, not only does this hold true for texture files, but any sort of dependency file external to the blender scene will get sync to the remote locations. So other files types, like audio files or cache files, the same behavior will apply of comparing if the destination remote location has the file already. If not, it'll upload it to make sure that the latest version is there as well. So I can demonstrate this by, let's say, making a cache version of the monkey asset over here. Let's cache it out as an Olympic file. Export Olympic. And if we delete it, bring it back. And now if I save a new version, made Olympic cache. So now the blender scene is uploaded to the remote locations as well as the Olympic cache and the texture ground plan gets skipped over. It prints it out, but it's behind the scenes. It's just doing a quick comparison and skipping them. Only the blender file and the ABC cache was actually uploaded. So what really might not be clear is what's actually going on. So we're taking care of sort of we're templating all this infrastructure for you. So you don't have to worry about uploads. You don't have to worry about the file management. We take care of that for you. So the intention for us is to give you sort of guidance as to how you structure your projects. But we're not actually enforcing it for you. Obviously, everyone works in a different way. This is just based on our experience, how we work in feature film production. But we'll be providing templates for users and customizability for you. So if you want to work your own way, that's fine as well. But what we want to do is just make this transition easy for people. Because what ends up happening is people are just start writing their own code. They just keep redoing the same work over and over again. And it takes a lot of time. It takes months sometimes for studios to start ramping up. So if you're just starting out in a 5, 10-person studio, I recommend doing something like this. Instead of writing your own code, because it's a lot of work, we just take care of it for you. So this is all in this particular case. In our studio, we actually have a remote location in Winnipeg. So we're in Toronto. We have a studio in Winnipeg. We're also rendering on Amazon. So we're doing the syncs to both places automatically. We're not even thinking about it. People are just publishing. And they just keep working as they normally would. They don't notice too much of a difference. So it versions up files. It tracks textures. It tracks caches. It takes care of all that for you. Version notes. And this is integrated in the task management system, which is also important. So I'll just give you a little bit of a warning if anyone's written asset managers or asset management. It's a tricky problem. And we don't have all the answers. But I think we have a lot of this stuff solved. So it's probably we recommend take a look at this and see what you think. And hopefully, you'll like it. So if you look here, there's some additional features that we sort of touched on. One thing we didn't talk about is there's a REST API for all of this. And it's a developer-friendly API. It's based on REST, but it's a Python API that is really, really easily accessible. So if you worked with some other REST APIs, what ends up happening is they return JSON dictionaries back and you have to parse them and it's a pain. Ours is like a real full-fledged Python API. And that's integrated with production management, asset management. And in fact, once you see the blender version of this, it's all making REST API calls. Like, you can see actually how it works. So it's really extensible. Render management, we didn't show you what we're doing with that, but that's included as well. So it's basically one-button renders, note-taking, and we're hoping the UI's intuitive. So moving on. So, I mean, why do you want this? We touched a little bit on it earlier. We really want to democratize production. So we want to provide tools to people who wouldn't necessarily have the means that normally to do this kind of work. It's the same tools that we're using in RStudio. And we just want to release them to the blender community. You can go from small to medium to large teams pretty easily, I think. And I touched on this a little bit earlier. If you're just one person doing work on your own, I'd argue you don't need this. But once you start getting, you know, to five, 10 people, you're going to need something like this to collaborate with. And it does promote collaboration across different geographical locations. I kind of touched a little bit on this. Like, in our particular case, we have on-premise filers as well as AWS. We support that as well. And Dan touched on this as well. Earlier, if you have your own internal infrastructure, we want to make sure you still have access to your own internal infrastructure. We're not trying to hide your data. But we are moving. RStudio itself is moving to the cloud, almost all extensively. So we're deprecating our own internal hardware. And we're sort of, we're just jumping on the cloud bandwagon. We have a really good relationship with AWS. And they're working with us. We're using Deadline on AWS. And they're helping us integrate into our product, which will be available Q1 2020 for you guys to take a look at. There's a lot of stuff we haven't touched on. We just kind of glossed over. So if you have questions, I think it'd be great to hear from you. Otherwise, that's, that's kind of it. It's just a, this is just a preview. There's lots of stuff coming. We haven't touched on, you know, the event system. We have that built in as well. That's probably more interesting to developers, I think, but I don't know. Anything else you want to touch on? Do we, do we have time for questions? Can we ask a couple of questions? Yeah. Anybody? Any questions on what we've spoken about? Yeah. Not yet. I think that's more production management. Yeah. That's, that's not what this is doing. It's managing the data for you. But it's not, like Dan said, this is actually a production thing. Like they, TD would write tools that would do this. What we're actually really doing is introspecting the blender file, determining what actual external dependencies are required to upload. So when these, essentially what you're really trying to do is go to render all the data's there. And one thing we didn't really touch on is that there's a check-in and check-out system as well as a push system. So if you have all your data on AWS and you want to check out your file to work on at home, you can do that and then check it back in again. So it's a, it's really a collaborative system, but that's really what we're, we're focused on. Not so much the internal blender stuff, because that's, that's up to you guys to manage, I think, if that makes sense. Hey, Luca. Yeah. So that's, I'm not sure exactly how that would work. I mean, technically speaking, you could, you can, we've done this actually, you can export data directly into our system. But I think the key for interoperability is the API. So it's a Python API that, you know, that is integrated into our system. Shotgun also has their own API. So I mean, if you're, if you have the will, then yeah, you could write, you could write whatever. Yeah. I mean, that's the difference. Like, I mean, Shotgun doesn't have asset management. It has, you know, they have a concept of versions, but not asset management. So we're combining all of these things, all these disparate tools into one cohesive package. And I think that's really important. I mean, you can certainly buy, you know, web-based review tools, you can buy asset managers, you can buy Shotgun, you can, but you have to glue them all together. I think the beauty here is that everything is in one web-based package. And it's all integrated and it's just going to get better and better. It's important for reporting. It makes it a lot easier for, for people to deal with, especially artists. One thing we're really focusing on is usability. Because a lot of these systems are hard to use. They get very confusing very quickly. And we've taken note of that internally in our productions. And so when you have 150, 200 people, I don't know, a huge proportion of them are artists. And they're doing, you know, the same thing all the time. They don't want to hunt and peck and look for stuff. It's, it's, it's really frustrating. So we want to produce, we want to present data to artists that's useful for them for their task. We don't want to have them just hunting around looking for stuff. And that's, that's what we find with a lot of these systems. So we're really, really, really focusing hard on UI. And what we mentioned at the beginning of the, this sort of presentation for people who are here is that what you're seeing is just, what we showed at Seagraph is just getting better and better as we're going along. So by the time it rolls out, it's, it's going to be pretty slick. So, so I just want to introduce some people that are with us. A lot of you will probably know Jeff Bell back there. There's Julie Steiner, who's head of business development. John Anas, who's head of sales. And then Stefan over there, who's, who also works for us. He does a lot of cycles development. Luca's worked with us at one point as well. So no other questions? You guys good? Okay. Thanks a lot for coming.