 So, I work in a company called L'Effet Speciale in Montpellier, France. It's a pun about special effects. It sounds kind of the same in French, L'Effet Speciale. So we work in animation. We have been working on a feature film for last year, and most of what we do is in free software including Blender for the 3D and animation. The feature film that we've been working on is Cutout. So the title of the conference is Cutout Feature Film in Blender. It's not entirely in Blender, but we collaborated with other studios, and what we did was the Cutout part, so crowd characters. So what is Cutout Animation? Here's a demo, not a demo, but an extract from a film showcasing the art of Lotte Reiniger, who is a German, I think, Cutout director from the 1930s probably, and she was like the mother of this technique, and here we can see her cutting out literally bits of papers and assembling them and making a character. In Blender, there are tools that exist to help us with that, such as Cutout tools, which we haven't used. Then there was One Rig by Nikolai Mamachev, based on a paper character by David Alvois, which served kind of as an inspiration for the rest of what we did. So this movie is called Dillili à Paris, which means Dillili in Paris. You might have guessed that even if you don't speak French. It's, well, it's in Paris, obviously, in the beginning of the 20th century, so really colorful and à nouveau. It involves a little girl, Dillili, who you can see here, who is from New Caledonia, an island, a Pacific island, and she comes to Paris and meets, well, she does stuff. Here's another image where we can see the Paris opera, and these are the main characters. This is the first shot that we made, jumping straight into it. All of these characters were animated in Blender. There are many of them. It's a big shot, and it was kind of complicated to put it all together, but yeah, it works. So this shot shows how useful it was to use Blender, because, well, we have a 3D space, which is something that we just wouldn't have had easily if we had used 2D software for the animation. So I'm going to talk a bit about the process that we went through for every shot. So it starts with Studio O, which is actually Michel Oslo, the director, but he calls himself a studio sometimes. He draws the storyboards and designs, and he took a lot of pictures in Paris as a reference for the sets. So it starts with him, then he sends this information to another studio called Northwest in Paris, which comprises the set team. So they paint and do, like, yeah, made paintings from the photo references. Then we have us, Lévi Speciale, in Montpellier, so south. We did all of the layout for the film in Blender, and the animation of the crowds that I'm talking about here more specifically. We exchange a lot with them with the other studio for how we import sets as a PNG in Blender, and then sometimes we render things from a camera and send it to them so that they can make a projection mapping sometimes. And then we work with another studio who does the main animation and, yeah, 3D animation for the main characters, lighting, compositing. They work in Maya, so we export everything to Maya format. And the final step was for the sets to go to MacGuff for rendering through us for the conversion again from Blender format to Maya format. So the pattern is French for puppet. I cannot get myself to say anything else than pattern because I've used that term for a long, long while. So the process is we need to import textures from Photoshop or Krita in our case. And then we have to rig them. There are many, many of such characters. So we had to find a way to make it kind of quick. Many characters. So here's what it looks like when it's coming from Michelot's design. He draws the characters. And we have a template which we use to make sure that the character fits at the right scale so that he's not Godzilla or something. And so we resize the character. We have a frame from the storyboard to serve as a reference for coloring which we do afterwards. Then you can see we draw lines around the limbs and joints. And then we cut out, well, digitally, but we don't use paper anymore. We cut out each of the limb parts. And then we have this. This is not what it looks like in the film. So as you can see, there are many characters. This is a presentation that we made about a year ago, I think. And there are many more characters added to that. One thing I'd like to insist on is that in this really fast sequence, you can see some characters are the same multiple times but with different colors. And we could add many more variations to the movie, to the crowd using this principle. So this is just to show up the whole team at the opportunity to appear in the film, which is something that in animation isn't, I don't know if it's the standard, but anyway, you may recognize some of us in this slide. I don't have my scarf right now. So what tools did we use? To the animation tools by, sorry, Jasper, I can't say your name. But we used this tool, which allows one to import from Photoshop, PSD format, into Blender. This is what it looks like. It's really quick. And it's really useful to have each of the limbs I was talking about at the right position in the 3D space. Then we used Rigify, which is, of course, extensible since it's, well, free software. We forked it from GitHub, Lucio made a presentation yesterday saying that we shouldn't do that, but we did it anyway because we didn't know it wasn't the proper way. And we modified it quite heavily to fit our needs for cutout animation, which are, well, very different from 3D normal stuff. So this is a demonstration of our rig, which you may or may not recognize Rigify here, but it's, as I said, a customization of Rigify. So it's the same principles, but just not the same rigs. Well, this is sped up a bit, but it allows one to create a fully rigged character in, like, five minutes instead of one day, which is nice when you have 1,000 or, I don't know, 500 characters to make in a movie. Then we have another tool, which was useful for adding variation to this crowd, this very colorful Paris 1900 crowd, which I designed, which I call material tuning, which is a bit of a joke because in French it means like car customization and it's really vulgar kind of stuff, but this is not. So this is how it works. You select a plane and you have this interface with color customization, kind of standard things for color grading and stuff, which we can then apply to the whole character at once, and this was useful for adjustments to some characters. This is really short. This is the first time that we've been presenting images from the movie. So kind of a Blender conference exclusivity. As you can see, it's 3D, but all of the characters that we did, which are the background characters are cut out, but it works really well in Blender, and this is the final look as rendered in Maya, not by us, and then composited. The movie is going out in 2018, so, well, you'll have to wait. So a bit about the pipeline. As I said, we communicated with another studio who used Maya, so we had to come up with ways to export from Blender. This was 2016, so there was a big kind of, but we couldn't really use it. So we used the FBX and this was, I'm sorry if I'm hurtful, but this was a bit of a pain because some functionality was missing. Now we had to export actually many JSON files for storing info about the various other files that we export. So an FBX for the camera, an FBX for the objects, and sometimes several FBX for the objects, then animation cache for the layout 3D animation in Maya. Then we had a sound file so that further animators could have the same sound as us. This is what the JSON file looks like. It's been simplified for this presentation, but you can see that there are many files such as one FBX for the sets, one other for the other kind of sets, one for the layout, then you have some properties. This was, well, a workaround that we came up with and it worked. I think the most difficult part was creating the other side in Maya because I just don't like to do that. Luckily, I don't have to anymore most of the time. So yeah, this is the same slide as before, but just to have a clear idea of what I was referring to, the FBX export is this part, the last part, and it took time. So what's next for this rig project? We've been developing this for the DLE movie, but we're going to continue using it, so we're developing further features. So we've added deformation because up until now, none of the limbs could be deformed like as in skinning. So this tool is automatic desolation add-on, which works, which is always good. And you can see automatic weighting of the mesh, which is 2D, it's a flat plane, but it's going to be useful for smooth joints in some characters. So this is an example of a new project that we're working on. And as you can see, the wings of this character are, well, deformable and this helps us a lot for such kind of, well, rigging, like for tails or some situations. Then we have FK, because for all of this one-year and a half project, we didn't have FK, so I made an IK AFK switch, which is, of course, standard in 3D rigify, but not in this rig. So this is the same character as before, and I upgraded it so that it can have FK. This, I'm showing several features. We have a tool for moving automatically all of the objects from the character in two different layers, which is a pain to do manually. We can show everything at once or hide everything at once, make things not selectable or selectable. So this is still pretty standard, but as I said, it works. On the right, you can see the standard rigify interface, which was slightly customized with little hands to select all limbs, which is something that wasn't in rigify, so we can add things and hopefully make a poor request someday. This is the snapping FK, IK, I was referring to. For all limbs, we have a foot roll. That's not the foot roll. This one is a bit peculiar because she has a dress, so she's got four legs. This is obscene. It's free software since it's a GPL fork from a rigify, so you can find the sources online on github.com slash this. Just watch the presentation again if you want to check it out. Some more images from the film. I'd like to thank Michelle Oslo, the director, and also Mars, the distributor who allowed us to show these images today, and the other studio, Northwest and MacGuff, thanks. That's me. So I don't think I can take questions. Ten minutes question, that's stressful. Is there any question? For the questions, I have a microphone if someone has a question. Yeah, you can come talk to us if you have got something to say about this process. Thanks.