 Rwyn, mae'n maen nhw'n ddim wedi ei gael iawn ac yn ffair yn gwybod yn dŷlio'r yr amlwg. Felly, nawr rydych chi nhw'n gwybod i'r arddangos. Felly, mae hynny'n gwybod yn ffair yn gwybod yn dŷlio ar yr amlwg, yn ffair, yn camwy i'r arddangos, yn phropio ac ynherwydd. Felly, wel女ff 말씀 i ddechrau'r amlwg yma llawerd honno ar y gynhyrch rwy'r arddangos yma yng Nghyrch, ac i ddweud i gael hynny ond fe dweud wrth mor wathig yw papyt fe go i ddechrau o gwbl symud ein sgul a gallwn ni wedi allanogau a cyfwil hannol yn ei w ROM a'r gwahau a dweud i ddim bydd ychydig i'r erioed yn Llef MM ac i ddod i'r Gwybeth Newydd a'n gweld ei ddweud i'r thyfr ac ych chi'n fyddiaeth ac ddweud i'r cyfrif pofyt a ni'n grwp ei fod a wefwil ar yr ysgol ac fe ddweudio i'r ysgol?' Felly ydych chi wedi'i gweithio o gwmpbeth, ni wnes yw'r unig, ac roeddwn i roi'i gain i'r ysgolawr. Diolch i'r llythydd, wrth gyd, ystod y fath o April, Maeill. Fyddwn i'r cyfnod ar gyfnod 45-minius script hefyd y teimlo, gyda'r llyth Карgwyr argridol. Ac byddwch ni wnaeth ei wnaeth grwmp hefyd i roi grwmp hefyd. Ac byddwch chi wnaeth ei wnaeth grwmp hefyd i roi grwmp hefyd. So we bought these really cheap nasty suits off eBay, which were kind of scary and the puppets moved around and then we had to somehow put them into a 3D set to make this show. You might have guessed it's a Christmas show by the costume. The other costumes might have given you a different impression. So this has been quite almost every part of blender I've used as part of this project, so I'm going to cover the whole thing really quickly now. Please shout if you want me to talk about more different bits of any part of this. I have other stuff available I can show as well, but I thought I'd just cover the whole lot to start with and we'll see you again. So set design. The concept they wanted was a generic late night talk show type thing, but puppets don't have legs so you can't really sit down on couches so we've got this desk that they sit behind. And we've tried as much as possible to design it for puppets that don't have legs. I think four puppets in the whole show have legs. You can see most of them there. And we needed to map them all into a set that somehow worked together. They wanted it to be really photo real. We wanted it to be much more cartoony. Do you know Calvin and Hobbes, the little cartoon guy? He has this great line which is, good compromise leaves everyone unhappy. Which hopefully we somehow managed to get a compromise that wasn't quite like that. So this is a mixture of semi-cartoony, semi-photo, almost not quite real. So a studio set by definition is very evenly lit so I can't hide all of my mistakes and my laziness behind a bit of extra cloud or fog or something. I intend to add a whole bunch of lens flare and stuff later to cover all of the mistakes but I've not got there yet so you can see them all. Here's the basic set that I came up with and made in Blender. They wanted to have world landmarks in the background so most of those were sculpted in Blender. The tree I didn't make, that one's a Creative Commons one from one of the download sites. The community is fantastic with so much resources available. This is where the band is. Here's the Blender set. It's fairly low resolution actually for this complex of thing. It's 500,000 faces for the whole thing so it's really low resolution really. Here's a quick pan across the front. Rendering this took quite a long time. We don't have a render farm and we don't have a lot of money so I got a whole bunch of just random computers stuffed in corners. All sort of rendering like crazy to make things happen. Here's some of the background objects. Sculpted in Blender really quickly off photo references. Blender's really good for coming up with really quick concept stuff. The logo as well was another fun thing to come up with. They wanted it to look sort of neon so I had to come up with how do I get neon in Blender that actually looks like neon and doesn't take four years to render. The way that neon's actually working is there's two different objects inside the neon tube. There's a tube inner element filament layer which is emitting like crazy. Then an outside layer which is using refraction type thing to scatter the path and you can actually see the glow coming through there which looks very glowing. I like it. Then using some Fresnel stuff to give more glossy around the edges and things. Then an emit node on the same shader but only for non-camera arrays. The outside tubing emits to the world and it doesn't have to bounce through that in order to figure out where the actual light's coming from which got rid of a ton of the fireflies. So pre-visualisation for the puppets thing. The original version of the pre-vis that we did was a scratch drag us just talking through the script and the producer made this in PowerPoint. Welcome everyone to The Night Show with your favourite and not to mention very handsome host, yours truly, Eddie! Tonight the show is full of surprises. Everyone will be surprised if they find the floor manager behind the presenter's desk. Come on, get out of there, live in 60 seconds. Well, I just thought that... Eddie! Clunky, those are photographs of the puppets we were given. If I'd been cleverer, I think I would have got the producer to do it all in Blender. Unfortunately I wasn't ready for that and he wasn't ready for that and we didn't manage to. I wrote a small Blender plug-in which is a camera switcher which is available in the usual places. Get her band on the plug-in repository which lets you jump between different cameras by just clicking the preview button and then if you press take it inserts a marker in the timeline and jumps to that camera when you get to it. So it's much like working on a standard vision mixer. This means you can actually play through the entire thing and just cut to different cameras when you feel like it. Cut to a tight, cut to a wide and it just works. I think this could be developed a bit further. I'd really like it to be able to see the different cameras and have viewpoints and things doing clever stuff but I didn't get that far. This worked for where we were up to. So this was then the previews in Blender of the same scene. Welcome everyone to The Night Show with your favourite and not to mention very handsome host, yours truly, Eddie! Tonight the show is full of surprises. Everyone will be surprised if they find the floor manager behind the presenter's desk. Come on, get out of there, live in 60 seconds. Well I just thought that... Eddie! Count us down. So that's the previews in Blender, which again was only maybe a week if that's to do, not working full time. Blender's really good at this. I think we could do a lot more with Blender for previews for choreography, for stage shows and stuff. It's very easy to say we want this character to move in from stage left and then this other character to come in. They'll talk for a bit and then they move off again. And then use Blender's cameras to cut between them and figure out how the show's going to work. It's really good at this. So this is then the current version of where it's up to with the actual puppets. Welcome everyone to The Night Show with your favourite and not to mention very handsome host, yours truly, Eddie! Tonight the show is full of surprises. Everyone will be surprised if they see the floor manager behind the presenter's desk. Come on, get out of there, we're live in 60 seconds. Well I just thought that... Eddie, cover us down, the band is ready and we need to start rolling. Oh, all right, all right. Positions people, let's move. Quite on the set! We're live in five, four... Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, monsters and animals. Let's give a very warm welcome to the one, the only, Daniel Bond! Pleasure to be here with you this evening. We're starting the most wonderful time of the year. A time of joy, of celebration, of family and friends. It's Christmas time. So tonight we have a very special programme for you. Lots of toys, good food, music and a wonderful star guest. That's right my friends. As Christmas is just around the corner, Billy and his bands are ready to put us in the right mood. Here they are now to bring us joy to the... Still need some work, there's a lot of little edges, little keying, glitches and stuff which we're working on cleaning up. It's a 45 minute show so it's quite long. And during this year, because of various management decisions, our team has divided half the team, moved to Atlanta. Two of the other guys have left, moved on to different places. So it's just myself and another guy working on this at the moment. And neither of us have done anything like this before. So it's fun. So the two types of shots we've got in a production like this are static background shots where the camera stays the same pretty much the whole time. There's moving shots and then there's other random stuff. As much as possible we wanted to use static shots because then you had to render it once. Most of the renders for the scene take between 45 minutes and an hour and a half to render the shot. So if every single frame takes that long, it's going to take us months to render, which we don't have. So we've done a lot of the stuff in Final Cut Pro just doing the compositing and then the blender stuff is there already. Moving shots, again, we tried to do the same kind of thing in blender. Often in a television program, in a studio thing, you actually use the same shot lots and lots of times. You'll have a camera that slowly pans across the back of the audience and it's exactly the same shot four times during the show. But the puppets or the actors are doing different things each time. So it's been a lot of working out what shots do we need, render it first and then composite it multiple times. And I've stuffed up a lot with that, which has made life really complicated. So here's Final Cut. You can see a lot of the different layers going on. Final Cut is great if you want to work its way, otherwise it's a pig. It's really, really irritating in very specific ways. And otherwise, for some things, it's great. It's very, very fast. This type of shot we can't do in Final Cut is just way too complicated. So we've done this in blender, actually, is by keying all of the characters first and then shoving them on planes inside blender. And then rendering that out, rendering out a reflection pass as well for the floor and desk and so on. Then compositing that into the previously rendered main 3D scene. I can show you the compositing and stuff if you're interested as well. See that now? So here is, there's the main set. You can see just the background. It's okay. You can see it. Cool. We've got the shadow pass here. So this actually is updated when the characters move. So if they are moving around, you can actually see the shadows change, which really helps to add to the realism and stuff. We then, it's rendered quite low sample rate so we blur it and do a couple of other little hacks to make it mix in nicely. There's another extra layer you can see down there with just the spotlight for one of the characters on because we wanted that to do some slightly different things. There's the overlay layer with the fallback monitors, piano cover, that sort of stuff that's there. Mask for bits of hair to make the hair matching better. If you look at the hair of a character there, there's still a bit of the keying that just went wrong. So just using the mask there to tidy that up. So there's lots of different bits going on. Sometimes the depth stuff got confused. I think possibly to do with 16-bit and 8-bit channel depths and stuff, which again, I had no clue what I was doing. So it just sort of ended up working eventually. Here you can see the bits starting to come together. Lots and lots of nodey stuff. You can see she's actually floating ever so slightly there, but probably no one's going to notice. So it's okay, we can move on. And then there's a little bit of extra magic thrown on top just to make it feel a little bit more camarie. So that's roughly what we're doing to make the whole thing composite together. I can talk more about that later if you're interested. So then here's one of the final shots. There's a bit of extra glitchy stuff on the sides, but ignore that. It comes together quite well. We've used this same camera movement six or so times throughout the whole piece, and there's a couple of other camera moves, but again, it only needed rendered ones. The lighting will be re-rendered as different lighting things to go over the top of that. So this was one of the big tasks was going through and keying all of the different puppets and then producing small PNG files or a whole series of them that were the right size to fit in nicely. So this blender was great out. Other things we did in Final Cut because it was just quicker and I could get other people who knew Final Cut to do the work. Delegation is a good thing. I can show you the keying blender for this if people are interested as well or not. So here's the drummer. There's a garbage mask around him there. One of the things I realised was that the drums are very reflective. And they don't move. So actually I don't need to worry about the gear at all. Stuff the gear. I'm just going to mask that out and then muck around with the colours later. The cymbals were a right stinking pain because they're green. They've become green. Another thing which was a pain was his hair. It's the same colour as the suit. So yes, lots and lots of nasty little things to make my life difficult. I'm using another mask here just to monkey with the colours of the cymbals and the drum metal. There's a core mask which is there. So you can see there's the original footage. They've cropped it to the approximate right size. The cropping tool is cool and being able to shift stuff around, move things in the right place is great. One thing that would be really nice to have in Blender would be a way to see what the output size is going to be. Because if you just render this now, there it's correct. But if I... Okay, I can't render it now. It's in the wrong place. It needs to be shifted. And there's no way when you're looking at this picture here to see where the actual outline is. So I developed a small trick for that, which is create a new mask input. Look at the mask, you can then see what the final output size is going to be exactly. So if we look at that, you can see it's not quite the right size. So we just turn on the grease pencil, draw a box around what you want it's going to be. Then go back to here. Now you can see what you need to do to move it. Grease pencil is wonderful. Really stupid ugly hack but it works. The grease pencil is one of those things which it makes the whole of Blender's technical thing feel more artistic. Because, yeah, literally just grab a sharpie and write on something is what we do. So here's more of the shots which then come together into shots like this. There's lots of other layers going on. I've rendered a whole ton of light beams following the tutorial from the Commander of the Ries. How have you pronounced them? Thing, they did some awesome tutorials on how to make light beams that look great. And so I've rendered a ton of light beams and can put them all over the place. Keying. Final Cut Pro has great defaults for keying. Frequently you can just drop the keyer on a video clip and it's done. Or done enough. It has very nice tactile feeling controls. Blender, the default colour for the keyer is white. And all you have is sliders. So it's very unintuitive to work with but really powerful. Doing multiple layers in Final Cut is horrible. Masking is obscene. Blender, it's great. You just create the mask, route stuff in. You want to do two different keys. Create a single mask to split the two and then route it both ways. Works really nicely. You change a mask, you've then got to duplicate the mask onto a different layer. It's horrible. Being able to attach a preview node to anything is great. Final Cut, you can't. Final Cut has instant feedback of stuff. So you make a change, it's done like that. Blender takes a couple of seconds to update the whole compositing chain. It's pretty horrible. These are the two main keys side by side. There's a whole ton of extra special keys which you often use and bring in. But this control here, the circle control, the select thing which colour you're using is really nice. As an artist, it feels very obvious what it's doing. Blender's controls don't feel obvious even though they do almost exactly the same thing. Blender could be improved by some good defaults. Cashing of nodes would be really, really nice for instant feedback. Cashing of rendering for the whole thing so you can do real-time playback. There's a video about it just recently showed up on one of the news sites. How you can use the sequencer to automatically cache stuff. It's cool. I've tried it once now because I only found out about it like this week. I wish I'd known about it like three months ago. Also on my wish list will be an output border size. Being able to temporarily parent mask points would be really cool. If you're masking a symbol crashing up and down or something moving in front of something else, it would be really nice to create the mask, parent it to the moving object. As soon as it's moved off, unparent it again and it just keeps working, but it doesn't quite work that way. A bit more artificially intelligent magic would be really nice and blender. If you create a new mask and then you go to the node editor and you create a mask input, it's a reasonable guess that you actually want that to say mask. It would be really cool if it would just say, oh, I know what you're doing and that was the default. Some other tricks and keying input freeze frame. If we go back to the drama again, here you can see the green on the background isn't actually a particularly even colour. This is not the best shot to show it with. There's some keying tools which help really well for that to be able to select what colour you want. If you have objects moving in front of your keying screen thing, it messes it up, you can actually just freeze frame the first frame of your shot before any characters are there and use that as your keying colour input for the entire rest of the shot. That way whatever unevenness is in your background disappears. Then you can do that final cut count. Then you can do a lot of things that final cut count, must be sad. If stuff is static and the key just isn't working, just mask it, it's really, really good the masking tools. One thing we often did was filling in the backgrounds of the keyed stuff with black before saving it out. When you say the transparent PNG, it still has the colour information of the background. If it's quite complicated with lots of different shades, you end up with PNG files which are like 10 megabytes. If you just fill it with black, it's transparent anyway, suddenly the PNG shrinks down to a megabyte. So if you've got say 10,000 frames, it's actually quite a lot of file size space saved. Don't be afraid of using multiple keiers, it's fine, it works really well. Reverse keying, if you have an orange puppet, why not use a keier to only select the orange and then reverse the mask and use that as an input to a different keier. It worked really well and saved me a lot of time. Finally, get someone else to do all the grunt boring work because it's really nice people who will do that for you if you can find them. Rendering was really difficult, we didn't have a render farm, I tried a bunch of different ones, but one of the problems I had was that with a single shot with say 15 puppets, each of those 15 puppets is a separate frame and every single frame it changes. So to pack the blend file with the entirety of the animation in, means you end up with a packed blend file which is say 40 or 50 gigabytes in size, which is a bit unwieldy and it didn't work very well. So we ended up using a shared render space like a shared network drive which we mapped to the same point on every computer. That way if I screwed up with the relative path names or anything, it didn't matter because the absolute path name was the same anyway. So it would be really nice to develop more of, I think that there's lots of pipeline stuff that's supposed to be happening this year and the asset management stuff which is coming along and I'm so excited about it, but we weren't able to so I just had to hack it. You can do CPU and GPU rendering on the same machine concurrently. Just open a second instance of Blender and run it in the background and set it to the right settings of course. Shared network space is what we used. If you're using Unix, then if you've got say 20 computers all rendering and one of them crashes, if you're using the placeholders thing it will leave a zero sized file in place. So if you look at the directory you don't necessarily see that there's a problem but you can say find where the size is zero and delete it and then start the process again and your faster computers will fix the problem. You can use the animation render to render multiple shots overnight. So what I did, if I wanted say six different camera shots to be rendered I could set up an animation where the first frame was on this camera shot, the second frame was this camera shot, the third frame was that one then tell it to render overnight and it would render those six different camera shots for me. So the camera switcher plug-in I wrote worked really well for that. I also made a bunch of mistakes with it. If you have multiple sizes that you want to render, like a really big panoramic shot and a couple of smaller shots, use different scenes and link back to the original data. You can do scene linking, works really well. That way you can have whatever resolution and render settings and samples you need for the different render settings. I didn't use the distributed render bot stuff. I tried it out and I struggled with the whole difference with things being missing. I ended up using a program called Ansible which is used for DevOps, like orchestrating loads of different servers. You actually use that to run lots of different blender instances on computers too. So that's everything that I had sort of prepared. If you have any questions or anything, you can ask them now or later or anything. The rest of the people on my team all know Final Cut and use that all the time. Most of what we do is documentaries and Final Cut works okay for that. It's also a lot cheaper. With Final Cut you only have to buy one license and it lasts forever. With Creative Suite, wonderful as it is. You have this monthly thing which we couldn't afford. The ones I tried was Render Street, Sheep Farm, Sheep Render, Lion Render and a couple others. I used them for rendering some of the big static shots when I needed to have something done the next day for one of the other editors to work on. But just distributing terabytes of video footage around between Render Farms. There's a session about it. We're using a program called Resilio Sync which is like BitTorrent Sync, the new branding version of it to share a lot of our files between our server and other things. It works really well. It's free. It's peer-to-peer on your local network. I really recommend it if you need to distribute files around the place. Any more questions? We shouted at it and cursed it and kicked it. Eventually decided that it seemed that it was only in the 3D viewpoint that there was a problem. When you actually render it, it updates the chain properly. I never found a workaround for it and it would drive me crazy. I tried baking but apparently I'm not very good at it. I can cook pasta and noodles and stuff but my wife does the baking and it seems the same with Blender. I tried and I just ended up with really horrible results. After three days of trying it, I was like, I give up. I failed. Camera projection? We did a similar kind of thing just by rendering really big static pictures. I did some work with motion actually doing some one-shot. Let's see if I can find it. Nope, that has the old version. This is motion. Five minutes. Next part is shafty. Kids, you can go back this way. Wait, wait, wait. Are we done already? Eddie, that conversation was just getting interesting. I saw one. Yeah, basically, yeah. So it's multiple 2D objects moving around and then 2D effects for the whole thing. Tell me about it, I want to learn. Cool, yeah, it'd be great. To mask the... Not for the keying. No, I didn't try that. Sounds like an interesting technique. Yeah, it'd be great. We didn't... Well, the entire set is in Blender so it wasn't such an issue for us. The drums are a static thing anyway so just a 2D mask actually worked fine most of the time. The simp... Yeah, it makes sense. It totally makes sense. Yeah, sure. So here's the shader tree for the neon. Started off by... You split whether it's a camera array or not. If it's not a camera array, then it just emits light. So every other element on the scene doesn't have to try and do any clever bouncing and stuff through there. It just treats it as a light and then reflections work nicely or nice enough because you generally can't tell at that distance. Otherwise it's a standard mix on the layer weight, the Fresnel thing. Either a fraction, which is for rays coming straight into it.