 Thank you. So my name is Rob Silvestri. I am an animation director at Tangent Animation. I've worked as a director, an animation lead, an animator, and what we're gonna talk about today is how we can prevent throwing away all that precious work we do with pre-viz, if possible. On NextGen we had the feature that we previously finished. We had an amazing pre-viz artist, and he did some fantastic character posing, his cameras were incredible, he added effects that were good enough to be in the final product of the movie, and at the end of the day we were like, how do we salvage some of this work and make sure those specific pixels end up on screen at the end? And, you know, through some brainstorming we were able to figure out a few different ways to do that, of course, but that being said, if we did throw it away completely, I don't think it was necessarily garbage anyways. You're never really throwing pre-viz away, because it's a problem-solving process, you're figuring things out. You're kind of figuring out the timing, the shot choice, the character posing, at a very rough and early stage, but that being said, if you can salvage some of it and save some of that data and move it forward to other departments, you're better off, because you're saving that time and allowing it to be spent somewhere else. So, I'm going to talk about the video sequence editor and the grease pencil together and how we use that in a 3D pipeline to save ourselves a little bit of time and save some of that work. And I think of Blender as a Swiss Army knife of software, and I'm sure people have heard that analogy before. It can do a lot of really, really cool things. It covers a lot of different disciplines. I think that it, for me, becomes really powerful when you start mixing those tools together. And in this case, it's mixing the grease pencil with the video sequencer. And that allowed us to, as a studio, work more parallel, work on top of each other a bit more, which condenses our schedule. So, this is a little bit about our journey with grease pencil, because it's relatively new. And when it first came out, we started just playing around with it and trying different things. So, even just the idea of, you know, animating a little sack in a 3D space and using different scenes felt like a good place to start. And then we started to play around with camera modes. The simple as this. So, we were starting to have fun. I mean, this is, this next one, I believe, if I get to it. This is a little TikTok video, so excuse the aspect ratio, it's a little strange. But it was something an intern did in 24 hours, and he was playing around with rigging grease pencil objects. It's even funny the third time. It's so weird. But you could tell we were just having fun with grease pencil, and that was, like, what I really liked. You know, as a studio, we were all sort of just playing with it. And for the first time, we're playing with a piece of software just to have fun and to try something new. And, you know, this is done by another animation supervisor at the studio, and he was playing around with a walk cycle and just doing a simple clean walk on a character moving through space. And this is where we started, you know, realizing the power of grease pencil. You know, you can place objects in 3D space, and you can get parallax out of them. You can use layers for coloring, and there's all these amazing things, and there's so many awesome tutorials online, and we were just trying to catch up with what was out there. But what we were doing as well was trying to brainstorm on how we could utilize this in a 3D studio, because we predominantly do 3D animation work. So, maybe we could create some kind of hybrid situation where we do the front end of our pipeline, our storyboarding in grease pencil, but in 3D environments. And so that's where this next project comes in. This is some production design work by Richard Chen, one of our amazing production designers at Tangent. And it is for a pilot that we've been working on, that's about six minutes long, and it's called MIMO, and it's created by our partners at Baozhou. And it's a beautiful little piece, and the artwork was super charming. It's a little more cinematic than your average preschool show, but we wanted it to look slightly flat from a texturing and lighting perspective, but you can see that the cameras were a little bit lower, wider-angled lenses, so it gave it a slightly richer feel. And it had some really adorable characters, so we thought, okay, wait a second, this is this pilot, let's take a risk, let's try storyboarding this in grease pencil, and let's try doing it in a slightly 3D environment. And we pitched this idea to the heads of Tangent, and one thing that's really great about working at Tangent is they're totally embracing the idea of exploring different options and using Blender to do new things, and that's a really cool environment to work in. So we just ran with this. So the first thing that we did was, like you would traditionally, we thumb-nailed our scenes, and we would take a sequence and thumbnail it out. And then based on that, we had a rough idea of what we needed out of our set, and we mocked up a quick proxy set, something really, really rudimentary. We're talking proxy objects. In this case, maybe a little further with that carpet. There's a little bit of detail in that. Jesse couldn't help himself. But at that point, once we had our proxy geometry, we got art to sign off on it as well. And we didn't go any further until we did one very important thing, and this is what saves us a lot of time down the road, is we established the scale before we started storyboarding anything in 3D space. So we established the scale of the characters. We knew that the characters were this tall within that set, and that was very, very important. And once we had that, we started kind of playing around with our shots. And you could see that a lot of applications allow you to take a snapshot of a 3D screen and draw over it and place that on top of it in another piece of software. But in this case, you could just place your drawing or your cursor where you wanted it to be, and that was really cool, using that cursor. And it was nice that you could place those drawings in space and they could be behind things and in front of things, and that made the workflow feel more natural to us. It felt like we were embedded in the scene a bit more. But before I go too much further, I want to talk about how the multi-scenes within a session really helped us through the storyboarding phase, because we were able to, if you look on the right over there, you can see that we created that master shot, and basically what we were doing, every time we created a new scene is we were duplicating it, where we were creating a copy of it, a full copy, and basically taking our grease pencil objects from previous shots and bringing them over, and copying and pasting and salvaging information, and we would have all of our shots for the sequence lined up in one blender session, which was really nice. It was like a packaged session for us to work within. And it was super awesome to tumble around your drawings in 3D. I don't know, I'm sure everybody's played around with grease pencil, but that's the coolest part, you draw something and then you tumble around and see what it looks like from different angles and it's pretty fun. So at this point, we really hammered out what our workflow was. And we learned three ways to move objects around in space. The first was obviously to draw them. So you could draw them in space, you can draw them on your screen if you wanted to, or like I said earlier, you could place your cursor in 3D space and draw them in that position in space. The second that we really loved was deforming the drawings themselves so you could manipulate them with the sculpting tools. I think that's incredible that you can sculpt your drawings with the exact same tools you can sculpt geometry with. So that was really cool. And then the third was moving things at an object level. And that to us was kind of the game changer because now we had drawings that we could move in space, in depth. And that really changed things because for my personal workflow, what I would do is I would draw the character once and then I would chess piece the character through the scene so that they were hitting the marks at where I wanted them to be within that shot, almost like I was blocking in animation. So it would just be like, here you are at this point in the shot and here you are later in the shot. Rather than having a character run towards camera and draw them getting bigger, I was moving the character closer. And so once I've established that, then I would draw over top of it and change the poses. And so why that's important was because it allowed us to really utilize the 3D cameras. So now we had drawings that live in space so our focal lengths make sense. We could compress the scene with the longer lens. We could make it more dynamic with a wider lens. We could cheat things like depth of field by using modifiers or effects. But we could really sort of establish the environment a little bit more. And parallax was natural. If you move the cameras, things would move correctly in space. That was pretty cool. So once we had all those scenes created, we were still in that position where we wanted to see it all together, even though they were all in one session. So thanks to Nathan for the last session, we ended up using the video sequence editor for that, which actually worked out really beautifully. So you can see here, basically I reused that same master set that had the proxy geometry in it, but this time I'm using it to load all my clips into it. And basically have it in a timeline. And because they're grease pencil drawings and we're dealing with rough proxy, you can see how fast it was scrubbing. I could play it and let it play once and see the whole sequence in real time. And this allowed us to do some amazing things because now I'm at a storyboarding phase in production, but I'm able to look at the pacing of my sequence. I'm able to look at the hookups. And if I need to change anything, the beautiful part is that those are not play blasts or viewport renders, they're actually linked to the files in the scene. So I could jump back into the scene, make my corrections and there they were, super live. So I'm super happy to hear that they're not removing the video sequence editor because I think that would have been a huge mistake. And this workflow, I think is something that I could see board artists really sort of clamoring on to in the future. So this is a little clip of a section of the grease pencil stuff. And you can see that in our exterior environment, we went super proxy with our geometry. We're just trying to suggest basically the compositional elements that we want to use. Wait for me. I found it, it stuck on some rocks. Oh. Mr. Creature. So you can see we chose to animate some things and not other things. It was kind of fun to play around. Thanks. I think doing that little animatic was the most fun I had in a little while. And we've been having a lot of fun over at Tangent, but that was just, it was like new ground for us, exploring how we could like work in 2D and 3D, that whole mixture of worlds. It's kind of amazing on a tangent here. Animation in general is fusing 2D and 3D. If you look at something like spider-verse, it's really taken 3D and tried to flatten it out and do interesting things with it. And then if you look at something like claws coming from studio spa, spa studio, they're taking 2D and trying to make that look more 3D. And then you've got blender with both of them. Amazing, right? Okay, so back to working in parallel. Because we locked that set down earlier, while we were doing the animatic and the story stuff, the modeling team, the design team, they were all working ahead. And they were basically going based off of the proxy geometry that we had created. So when we finished our animatic, all that stuff was ready for us. And because we scaled it to the appropriate size, we could reuse the position. So when they built these assets, they were in the exact same location. And so really, layout for us became just swapping assets. It became taking the proxy out and replacing it with the final asset. And if we were smarter, we learned from this, of course, we probably could have named our grease pencil object something specific so that we could even plop the character rigs with that as well. And then all of a sudden we sort of bypassed layout in the traditional sense of assembling files and we use it more for plusing shots. And tweaking the cameras. And so it becomes more of an artistic phase than an assembly phase. And you can see that basically things stayed pretty close. The proportions were very similar. Things that we added were things that plus the composition of the scene. So what did we learn? To be honest, the storyboarding process for us was slower than if we had hired board artists who were going to do it 2D traditionally, panel by panel, because I think they can blow through that stuff pretty quickly. But you also have to think that there is quite a few different tasks involved in the process now. It's not just storyboarding. So your story team becomes a little bit bigger. Right now you're not just drawing panels, you're timing them out. You're thinking about 3D cameras and focal length and all that sort of stuff. You're timing out your shots. If you're working at a sequence level, you're thinking about your pacing. So you're actually becoming this multifaceted artist. So in a scenario where you have people like that on your teams, it's great. When you don't, I would suggest that maybe if you're gonna adopt a process like this, it requires packaging a few people together that share those skills. So you could have a modeler, a camera specialist, and then a board artist working together to facilitate this process. And would I use it all the time? Not necessarily, but I might choose specific sequences that really call out for this sort of treatment. The other thing that we learned is that art and modeling and surfacing and rigging confidently moved ahead and were able to work in parallel. So that shrunk down our production schedule so that extra time that we spent in storyboarding, we got that back later on. Same thing goes for layout, which was dramatically faster. Editorial was much faster. We basically did a tiny bit of tweaking because most of the timing was done and it became mostly sound work at that stage. So the process overall was a bit faster. Artistically, the benefits were huge, I think. One of the really neat aspects of it is that we were able to explore the scenes. So traditionally, if you drew a storyboard panel and you did a bunch of poses, and then later on you wanted to compare it to the scene after it, if it didn't work, you're kind of stuck with that or redrawing the shot completely. In this case, we could just change the cameras. We could explore, we could move our grease pencil objects and we could see if we could find something better. And that's always fun, being able to explore your scenes. Revisions were super quick with the video sequence editor. We were able to spot them right away. Normally you'd have to wait for your panels to go to editorial, they'd have to be assembled, and there's this lull in between. This way we could see it all together really quickly. And I think that what I really like about it is it gives you the best of both worlds. You have the 2D expressive posing and expressions, and then you have 3D cameras that add parallax and mood and all sorts of things. So it's really a great merger of 2D and 3D at a previous stage. And not to mention, you can save all that work. So here's a clip of the final thing. Wait for me. I found it, Aggie. It stuck on some rocks. I keep saying it, but it was a lot of fun to work on that. It was really fun to do something a little bit stylized and it was great to get to the departments beyond layout as well because I think that process allowed us to figure out a lot of things early on. I felt like when you're directing something, you have a number of cards in your hand that you get to play at certain times. And being able to do the pre-vis this way allows you to play those cards earlier and allows you to see if they're working earlier so that when we got to the animation stage, we knew we had one job to do. It wasn't to fix the layout or adjust the shots or fix something that wasn't working. It was basically to do something cool with our performance and the same thing goes for lighting. So we were able to focus a little bit more down the chain. So I'm pretty new to Blender. I started using it about two and a half years ago and the first time I used it, I recall left clicking and that stupid little ball moving around my scene and I cursed that cursor. Like it was like, what is this thing? And now I'm at a point where I'm like, I love that cursor. That thing is so cool. The fact that it allowed us to do something new, I understand it now. And so I'm really happy with the fact that Blender is able to do really different things with the software and that it has the ability now to inspire artists to do new things. So that's really cool when the tools are inspiring the artists. Thank you guys. Thank you. Thank you.