 Hello, hi everybody, I am Silvano Imboden and he's Daniele Deluca and we're presenting a Made with Braids, our talk about the creation of our new character. We both work in Shinneca, Shinneca is the main Italian supercomputing facility, hosting machine used by both research and industries. Okay, in particular we work in two small departments called the Visit Lab focused on computer graphic application. We have been doing real-time programs, short movie and later many other applications of computer graphics, both used to communicate scientific results and cultural knowledge. Okay, our first opportunity to make a movie with character animation was a couple of years ago. The movie was called Apadietruscan and the goal of the short movie was to tell the history of our city, which is Bologna, from the Etruscan age until the present. The movie is now a resident exhibition into the museum of the city. And we received many awards for this work so it was a very happy experience. Yeah, of course, everything was made with Blender. And in 2013 the museum of the city of Bologna in collaboration with the museum of Villa Giulia in Rome began to prepare a new exhibition centered on the Etruscan age. And we were asked to extend the upper movie with a new chapter introducing the Etruscan in the Rome area. This time the main character will be a female. Her name is Ati, which means mother in Etruscan. And her voice is Sabrina Feriglia, famous Italian actress. These are some of the people involved in this project. And Daniele De Luca, which is here, was involved in many parts of this production. In particular, he done a lot of work in the modeling, all the lighting and compositing. And one of the most challenging tasks was the animation of the braids of Ati, which is the topic of this talk. Okay. For this character, we begin to design it starting from some reference that we received from the museum. Reference material consists of wall paintings, sculpture, and other related remains. As you can see, we have many, many interesting materials to be used, in particular the silhouette of the face of the Etruscan people in their paintings are very peculiar with those straight nose. And we have also nice reference for the color palette and many other information starting from the braids, which you can see in the sculpture in the center. And the previous character we have made was modelled from scratch in Blender by Spark and Enrico Valenza, and then Rigged by Bassan Cordali, animated by Gianpaolo Fragale. And that character involved really a huge amount of work. For this new one, I leave, Daniel, let's speak. We need to find a short way to continue the work on Appa to Ati. So we searched in the community and we found this, the Chichicugli Flex Rig. I don't know if you know the Flex Rig, it's really flexible and just rigged, so you can change every peculiarity, the shape of the body, the face conformation, the hairstyle, eyes, dress, every color. And with this infinite variation, infinite kind of conformation, we developed this. This is a customized version of the Chichicugli Flex Rig, because all the characteristics that we take from the Rig are in the body, but we also modelled the cloth, and we need a peculiar face. This is not obtainable because the eyes are stretched and the rigs doesn't react well, so we adapted it. Also, we need the braids, because as you see from the references, the air from the Etruscan people are braids like Rasta people or something like that. And yeah, we want to style like this. To do this, we looked around, we found Rapunzel from Disney, his own complexity, a lot of people working with braids, and they are animated and controlled by animators, so many animators for the braids. We are a small team, so we are looking for a cheap way to do this. So the inspiration came from the, show you, show your, sorry for me spelling, I don't know, a video on YouTube about Blender, how to animate with soft bodies for Blender, from Blender for the air of an anime or manga character. From this, I understand that we need bones, bones are everywhere in the rig of the character, and also we had used in the braids. To do this, we abandoned the soft body logic, because, oh, I can see a short piece of the movie in the details. We can show the entire movie, you need to go to the, yeah, the museum, but I can. Sorry, this is the old movie, and this is the connection. There is Ati in the museum, the new museum, that is watching the movie on his old TV, so the connection begins here. Okay, this is just a small piece of the movie. To do all the stuff for the braids animation, we have a switch from the soft body technique to a cloth-driven technique. It's a secondary animation, so connected to the main character rig, so when Ati shakes her body, she's going to be like, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. It's a secondary animation, so connected to the main character rig, so when Ati shakes her body or her head, the rig follows, and the cloth do, magically, all the stuff with the simulation of a blender, of course. There are, so the cloth, made by extruded mesh, and I've named it because I can't remember the first, the second, the third. There are Lugina, Morgana, Yvonne, and I have a few problems with some of those, and like Lugina. Yeah, there are some lovely issues. I can show you that the magic, yeah, cloth simulation sometimes fail, so with no gravity, of course, the braids look like this. No, stop. She's like flying, I don't know. And with more gravity, but some problem. I like that one in particular. So we need the solution. There are also other lovely issues that follow me in my nightmare, like, you know, this one, in particular, my favorite, this one. So we need a solution to all this. We can present a product like this, maybe an horror movie, but not this. So don't panic. As I learned from Douglas Adams, there are always solutions. As a token of our appreciation, we hope you will enjoy the two thermonuclear missiles we've just sent to converge with your craft. To ensure ongoing quality of service, your death may be monitored for training purposes. Thank you. Guys, I'm delighted to tell you that there are two thermonuclear missiles heading right for us. So, the manual control. Good luck with that. The idea is the manual control, but it's not easy to do. We have a cloth that controls a bone system that moves all the braids, because the bones move heavy mesh easily. This is the bones, the first series of bones that do the dark animation. A second series of bones that copy the dark animation made by the first bones. And a last series of bones here represented by pins. And this is our manual control. With this, we have modded Chigikuki panels, extended them with Python, so we can switch from automatic braids to manual during the animation. Yeah, it's like IK and FK inverse cinematic. To do this, we made a driver and hidden the main rig and created a manual rig. This manual rig follows every time our braids. In this way, you have always the position of the braid when it's set it up. But when you want, select some of those. And some of these, you can animate the sliders during the animation when I think it's rather the flies that goes up. You can bring it down and then animate the position manually. If you want to see a short demo. Oh, there is also a little thing. Number two, the copy-cloth position. Because the rig is always in post-mode. The pins are always stretched on the horizontal line, then settled down. But when you want to switch to manual, the rigs, the braids that you are switching, returns to the pose, to the rest pose. So you have to place them to the position and then emulate the cloth position that is at the previous frame. With the copy-cloth position, we can mimic and transfer this. But there is a bug in an option, a visual transformation. Apply visual transformation to bones. When I'm working on this, the 2.7 version of Blender came up. And they are solving this. So we finally have this working feature because of the bug fixing of this bug. Five minutes, okay. So this is our main character. And the 2-rig system. You can see that the system doesn't follow immediately the cloth. Because the dependency system of Blender doesn't update well. So if I remember, with Syntel, they have a similar problem. And in Tone, maybe, add a collection extras fix, which is extra object update and extra dot update. We have to apply this to a real-time workflow. Maybe I have to delete the cache. Okay. This is the main behavior. But if you want to go into edit. What is this? No, pause. Sorry. Of course. Have a track, please. Don't back off. Okay. We can do things like this. And the braids collides to the cloth. So moving hard, make the braid. I don't know if you can see that. A little. Okay. All the braids collide. But when we are on our pause, stop, please. And we want to animate a single braid that, I don't know, is going somewhere. We can just pick the rig. I need to start my modified Python script, which comes from the cookie-flexing ideas. And we have this, Ernest. Okay. We can swap. And Ernest is in our rest pause. But now I can animate it and give it, I don't know, which shape I want. We use three control points. We can add as many as we want. And the cool feature is that we haven't bind the cloth and the braid. But with copy, cloth position, we added a keyframe. So I don't know if we want to animate a varista. Now it's animated by manual control. And now it's, yeah, also on position. So it starts from here. When my character is moving, the braids are in a certain position, and now it's fixed here. So I can, I don't know, remove the braid from our face. I think like that happens continuously. And so, yeah, if you have any questions or something, thank you all for listening. When you said that you were using gravity, what did you use the gravity with, like with the bolting physics? The gravity? Yeah, like in the beginning you showed an example with gravity, that it was going a bit upward and downward. For the gravity of the cloth? No, of the hair, or it was with clothes. Like the example before, you said that with gravity, you used gravity, but now? Are you misunderstood? Yeah. No, okay, the following one. Like, no, there is gravity, but the collision meets some stuff. But it was gravity on clothes? Yeah, yeah, yeah, the gravity is on. Okay. And it's always on. In a certain shot, we have to augment the gravity to minus 200 meters per second, because it is flying, so the brakes continue to stand straight. And in other shots, we have to animate the gravity because she is jumping or something. I don't know, I can show. Did you try also the bolting physics, maybe? Them? Bolting physics, like the physics engine, because I tried, there is the constraint, and I tried to play and... With the real time physics? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, we try also the soft body, or we have the closed pilot. The physics engine that is from the game engine, but now it's also... Oh, okay, yes, but it's also pilot. So, for the real time, this character is not made for real time, so we can't switch this easily. Okay. Does this answer your question? Or we can talk later. Thanks for your talk, really cool. I was wondering, I saw that the brakes were not a fixed length, like if you changed it, then the brake length also changed. Was that deliberate, or... Was that deliberate, an effect that you wanted to achieve? Yeah, your more flexibility. Yeah, your more flexibility. In certain shots, we are thinking about animating the brakes like, I don't know, the snakes or arms, but we didn't do that after all. We have that opportunity, too. Okay, thank you. We have fixed the scale, because if I scale up in, the brakes are still straight and thin. Okay, thank you. I think that would be... I don't think that would be... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is a... This one, this is... No, I'm fine now. This is a brand new 2.7 2.3. This is already last day. I have time. 34, 34. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I like that. All right. Uh-huh. Yeah. I think it's true, you don't have to worry about it. You just have to go ahead and do it because you want to do it. So I think that's true. So now I think we're going to have to figure it out. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes, yes. Yes, yes. Yes. Yes. Yes, yes. Yes. Yes, yes. Yeah, it's great, but this is the air, not the water, and I don't know how they do it. Yeah, there also are information about the test. Yeah, it's okay. Yeah, it's okay. Okay.