 So nice to see everybody all all still lively after three days of this conference. I'm personally exhausted, but but we'll bear through this is great This is great. I I'm Mike. I work on the work on Blender specifically the viewport project for 2.8 and Thanks, y'all see All right, and I wanted to I know 2.8 is is quite a ways off. We just did 278 There's probably gonna be a 279 sometime in the future But 2.8 is where really the the focus is for big changes for big things So we want to do something cool with that and so I wanted to talk a little about about kind of where we where we're at right now and So last month we met here in Amsterdam for a little while and worked out Kind of the design of what's going on a lot of that was technical design, but a lot of it was kind of artist centric of what do we want? Like what's the whole point of doing this thing and we came with this task-driven viewport design Basically instead of having to switch a bunch of modes and trying to get exactly what you want on screen It will be a little bit smarter and figure out what you're doing and show you what you need to do to make that task a little easier And we wrote about that on the Code dot Blender org some of you've seen that I hope and we've seen a lot of really good comments and good feedback on that Another big part of it is an open GL upgrade and This has been coming for a long time We finally finally moved up to 2.1, which is about 10 years old now or it's Yeah, it's about 10 years old now. We finally moved to that last year for a version 2.77 and Last year at this conference. We kind of had a round table and said well What are we gonna do next for 2.8? It's gonna come out in more than a year from now So where are we gonna be at and we went ahead and decided to go with 3.2 Since then we decided to go to 3.3, which is essentially the same hardware just a little bit a little bit better version and That's really gonna help us bring open sub div to the Mac to across platforms and to enable techniques that we just can't do today with 2.7 Another big thing that's gotten a lot of excitement is the physically based rendering branch from claymont. Are you around here? Ah, hey back there Yeah Yeah, and there's some some really good examples some artwork even a short film that was at the Suzanne Awards this year Was all made in that and basically that's really cool because you can While you're working on a thing you don't have to do a render You don't have to think what's this gonna look like once I'm finally done because it everything just works in real time And that's that's really cool. And so we're definitely bringing that into the 2.8 fold and Yeah, he's gonna help us do that a Lot of the work right now happens in the blender 2.8 branch Which is separate from the master branch so that we can do these small point releases until it's ready because it is It's a large project. It's gonna take a while and we don't want to make everyone wait for the next release Some of the goals here Since we're allowed to do a bunch of big changes. We want to make everything really smooth really responsive So that's a performance thing and it's also a usability thing We want the visuals to be super high quality a lot better than what we've got today They're in the viewport And a big thing is task-appropriate visuals, which I talked about a little bit and we talked about on the the code blog and For developers we want to make it a lot easier to develop new techniques to use these new features and combine them in interesting Interesting ways because right now everything is this huge tangle like when you go to draw the 3d view There's all this stuff and it's like if if if this and these other situations and all these hacks in there And we really want to get rid of that because it's it's really hard to add things and to change things right now It's very active development in the 2.8 branch We're still very much at the beginning or maybe maybe about here, but a release on this side of the screen We're really looking forward to that but we've got a long way to go And some of the changes that are out there right now because I didn't want to just talk about You know things we plan to do or things we intend to do There's there's things out there right now This is the first screenshot of the 2.8 that found up on Twitter, which is great Blende if I put this up and it kind of shows the difference between the old and the new and when I first saw this He was talking to me on RC and I was like well Yeah, it's a little bit different, but I can't you have to look closely here But there was still there's some response to this some excitement about this If you look really close you can tell a difference But I'm gonna do a live demo towards the end of this and kind of show off that a little bit better Other surfaces here's from the PBR viewport For the short film that you guys all saw It's very cool very cool And this is the last slide of my presentation that has anything to do with realism or PBR so Because a lot of people say well, why are you guys spending all this time all this energy on Making the viewport fancy making it look a little pretty isn't that just I candied how does that help me do my job and a lot of people are skeptical of this and You know a lot of people aren't making games they're not making real-time content and so what good is all this new stuff in the viewport and I hope by the end of This that you'll at least be on board a little bit with me on this Because there's other things you can do that are not PBR they're not realistic They're not for real-time games when you're designing a character for instance of the silhouette of that character making it unique Making it interesting and making it distinguishable from the other characters in your in your group is Is very important and I've seen artists do some kind of tricks to do this to be able to see this while they're working in 3d Something like turning turning enabling lighting but turning all the lights off or changing them material to do something like this But I think it would be really great if we could just say I just want to see this in silhouette Real quick and not have to mess with anything else and it just works and so we're gonna make that and there's Lots of things I heard a woo. I heard a woo. Is that somebody? All right. Thank you. Thank you And because it's really important in in character design. Here's a bunch of examples You know all these stand out all these are recognizable and even there's some there's some sets of guys We've got pinky in the brain down here We've got rent and stumpy up there when you're designing a set you want them to kind of work together and But it's not just character design if you're doing game development You have a set of weapons you want to have really unique things you can spot it way over there and be like oh shotgun Got it or units or other items things like that. So silhouettes is is a is part of your workflow It's not you're not gonna spend a lot of time in this, but it'd be nice to just have that automatically work and And so And so part of this part of this project where we're thinking big we're thinking you know Okay, we're moving up in technology. We're using the technology better We can kind of we can push things a bit further and decide what what old hacks we want to get rid of and and kind of some some new areas we want to go into And this there's been a conversation about this over the past years since there was a declaration that wireframes are dead and Are going away and that nobody ever uses them anyway, and there's been a lot of reactions. I gathered some Some different people's opinions here. It's an actual quote actual quote from the expiles here and Some people are very upset about the way things work right now and So they definitely want change. They want something different But this is this is the reaction. I've seen most often is The when somebody says we're getting rid of wireframes. We don't need it anymore people come with They can say volumes about how they use them right now, and I've seen you use them Yes, yes, and so and so it's a big part of the way people work and a lot of people don't want to live in a world Without wireframes, and I'm not sure if SpongeBob is really talking about wireframes here I just kind of pulled this but I can assume he is And so here's what we've got right now Um, can we pull the lights down a little bit because it's hard to see because you know we see Suzanne here Or I might have just needed to put some extra Yeah, we can barely see this but all the slides for all these talks are available online if you want to look closer So we see Suzanne here. There's other objects that I can't see at least from here But I can see them on the screen. So we've got some basically unselected there. We go We've got some unselected objects here, and we've got Suzanne selected with a lot of detail and What we see this is what we have today and what we see here is is just a bunch of lines and We see there's some shapes here, and there's some other things here And there's Suzanne popping towards the front because that's what we got selected and that's what you're using But you can't really make sense of it at a glance You can kind of figure out what the relationships are here, but at a glance you can't really make sense of it because because really this is just just this jumble of line segments and and this is from an actual mesh Which I'll show later, but there's no way to tell what's going on here And it's just this just kind of this amorphous blob of line segments And this is what we're looking at This is what we're working with and if you have really high density meshes that even gets worse You just have these clusters of pixels that are either on or off and there's there's no information here There's just something on the screen, and you can't really work with it And so I was I've been thinking about this a while What if we took you know what we have right now exact same pixels exact same everything and just pop some new colors in there and so now oh yeah and So now this adds a lot more information here we can we can see it depth works properly We can see what's in front and what's behind. What's the front of a mesh? What's the back of a mesh? Which objects are inside other objects with which are behind and a lot of the relationships here are very clear We got nice contours around the edges and all that And I got this working a while back, but I didn't make it part of blender yet So I was looking for something that was a bit beyond a simple test mesh I found that can anybody tell what this is really I Saw there was a post on blender nation the other day, and I saw this I was like oh very cool Yes, Cosmo's the laundromat island. This is actually a um, this is a This is a fragment of a statue from Palmyra in Syria There's this company doing three scans there and doing some basically having cultural artifacts and Digitizing them so we can all experience these things a lot of things are just so people around the world can experience it but in certain places let's experience it now while it's still there and And this is this is an ice mesh I just did wireframe because it's not very good looking but But I did the same thing I said What if we took this the same pixels and everything and just pop some different colors in there and it's a bit of a subtle difference here But even there you can see the eyebrow ridge you can see the curls of the hair It's a head sideways and his jaw is gone But wait you can see a little bit more just at a glance what's going on here same angle same model exactly the same And this got me thinking. I was like, well, let me get let me get a nicer mesh So I found this guy with the worries taking a little sit-down break And I found both of these on um Where did I find these check the slides later and um And so I looked at this guy. It looks pretty nice This is just a standard viewport that we have today just textured and lit and popped into a wireframe And that's where I got that image of just pixels on or off Is a segment of this and I wanted to do the same thing here Take the same thing same pixels and just pops some different stuff in there And now you can kind of see the forms take shape you can see the face you can see whatever that is He's holding you see where the arms are and it's just not this is this amorphous blob And these aren't renders or anything. This is this is right in the viewport live Another another kind of thing you do with edges is you want to see the surface but you also want to see the edges overlaid with it and this is a picture actually from a bug report somebody sent in Because Here you can see the these these smaller kind of ramping surfaces in the middle those edges are not supposed to poke through Those are those are edges from the thing behind it But because of depth precision and just numerical precision they do poke through and there's no real magic fix to this beyond going to new techniques that were introduced by this Danish researcher or this group of Danish researchers back in 2006 Nvidia did a Geometry shader implementation 2007 and And we really needed something like that and so I started working on it And this is what I came to the conference with my this is my prototype This is what I had working on the airplane here and I was like okay I'm gonna get something going by the time by two o'clock Sunday and and it took a long time so by This is a Friday night. This is Friday night. And so this is working in the viewport. This is using geometry shaders, but what what we see here is the tessellated mesh This is just triangle meshes, which is which is what's described in the papers and it's in that limitation like do your homework and you can do a little bit better than this and So I thought I do a little bit better than that and so here it is with actual polygon edges and this works No, there's no poke through there's no anything else and this is the kind of thing that can only be done with the OpenGL upgrade Because we can't like this is definitely a 2.8 only capable feature And I got this working about on 30 minutes ago upstairs But this is great this is working and this is this is gonna be part of 2.8 and there's something else here I'm gonna save for the demo that Can't really do and so revisiting this eye candy thing is Are these things really? Just for looks I mean none of these things were fancy none of them even had materials or textures or anything But these are really ways that I believe will help us Will help all of us work When the things on screen aren't Deceptive when they're not saying something when they're not showing something that's not actually there when they're showing all the things That are there and when they're kind of showing relationships, but not taking up any more UI or any more Space on the screen as they were before So instead of eye candy, I like to think of them as veggies because they're good for us. They're delicious. They're there They're edible and because it's not about looking pretty. That's not the point of this I I mean, I think the the before and after I think the after looks better But that's not the point. The point is that it's more accurately showing What you're working on and that's the important thing is what you're working on I want to see that I want to think about that But I don't want to have to look at the screen and try to figure out what I'm looking at that should be taken care of by these wonderful GPUs we have these days and And really free up our brain free up our thinking For what we're actually wanting to think about instead of just figuring out what's what's being shown And I'm gonna skip that for time, but like I said, these slides are available And kind of some things we can use here in the in the wireframe example The first one is definitely the use of color to pull things forward and back and to show relationships a lot of these are I didn't show here But See slides, I'm gonna go ahead And another thing this is a little bit shifting gears here is someone was asking for this outside on the sidewalk last year and Deli actually got this working of several weeks ago is If you can see what's going on here, we have a cycles preview But we still have UI and things layered on top of it. We have the grids. We've got selection outlines We have widgets and so you can work in a cycles preview live But still have all your tools available and still have you know all the UI there And we plan on doing a lot more of this kind of stuff I'll go into this real quick Real real quick Basically, we're upgrading our requirements. We're upgrading the software. We're trying to do new things And so a lot of people using using older stuff or lower and stuff. They're curious about, you know, is this Am I gonna be able to run it and we're actually we're reaching real far back if you're running on AMD It goes all the way back to when they were at I Back to 2006 anything from there up is gonna be able to run the new stuff in video the next year Actually holiday season right before that they released a card that will be able to run it and Intel caught up with this. They've been doing cool stuff since about 2012 and so before that We can't support that anymore On Intel but you can still run two seven eight or nine or Z or whatever. We're gonna come up with On the OS side, I believe we're gonna still stick to Windows Vista as the lowest Have to check with some other people on that the biggest change here is we're going from a quest 10.6 to 10.9 It's a big leap. That's a big leap but um But a lot of the same hardware is able to run that it's a free upgrade And so I think it's worth a little inconvenience to upgrade if you're still hanging on to the old stuff Because the real requirement here is open gel 3.3 anything that could run that and this is just the things that can run that That's what the real requirement is For all these things and this is another thing I hear on the forums It's like oh you're choosing no matter what we choose It's either too old or too new and a lot of people say well four point something something is out And so why aren't you guys using that and really we are we're just saying the very minimum very minimum is 3.3 It'll run on everyone's hardware. It's not gonna slow down your new stuff It's not gonna slow down the good stuff everyone's of course it runs better on the newer hardware If you have if you have multiple cores if you have a really nice GPU if you have you know the good stuff Yeah, it's gonna run great for you But we didn't want to leave behind a lot of the old the people that are still using old stuff or that are you know They're hanging on to what they have because we want it to work really well with whatever you're using right now I'm gonna skip the other thing for after the demo five. Yeah, that's perfect. All right I'm watching Blinder here, and this is the the latest actual release All right, so we got a very simple test scene here Got a couple of monkeys in a box very simple stuff and so I'm gonna select you Make that the center and this is really showing something actually off that first image with the with the new smooth shading That's always enabled in the 2.8 and here we get we get a nice Subdivision modifier on this so it's not that bad. It's pretty smooth. But once you get close you can really see the You can see where the polygons are That's okay But if we cranked up that done a little more than it gets a little uglier we can see him popping In and out like that. All right. I just wanted to show that The same thing in the new version of Blinder is 2.8 You know super smooth super smooth, but actually, let me center that guy All right, so it's really smooth, but I'm also gonna crank down the Subdivision on that You still get really nice smooth highlights and and what this kind of says to us is That if you're if you're just doing like if you want a nice silhouette Yes, you need in higher subdivision levels, but if all you want is a nice smooth surface like this Just this new shading is gonna allow you to kind of bump down your your detail levels I bumped down your subdivision and really get by and you'd be all right between flat and smooth Sure, I mean flats can be the same no matter which one you do. Let's see So flat will be the same here. So here's flat Which is gonna look the same in the in Blinder 2.8 or 2.7 because flat is flat but in the smooth shading here It's just nice. It's doing this per pixel. It just it just looks nicer I think this shows a little bit better than the the sphere image that's been that's been put out there Although that that's awesome. That's been out there and people are saying. Oh, that's great and pulling out their hair and being like finally But really I think this shows the same thing a little better All right, I also wanted to show some other stuff here Let's pop into wireframe mode my favorite and And so here we have the standard wires, this is the I mean This looks the same as the old Blinder, but There is a difference here because all this is running in The new OpenGL. This is running with the new APIs underneath You can't really tell what such a simple scene, but this stuff is blazing fast It's good stuff because it's not touching the GPU. I mean, it's all on the GPU It's not touching the CPU at all all the CPU has to do is say draw that thing that I told you about and I didn't do the UI for this because I was in a bit of a rush But let's see how far I have to crank this up to get the new wire frames. Okay, so here's the new wire frames Thank you. I agree. I agree. I like this stuff and And so here's the new stuff and this is all this is all real-time This is all good and this is a this is the kind of thing that we need the new OpenGL for to get these nice Stuff around the edge and so we get the we get the edges here We get the front in the back. We got another de-selected one down here. It's using the same effect You can really see it on the cube. Let me select that You can really see it on the cube very simply you've got your front You've got your back and you've got your silhouette and all three different colors the silhouettes a little bit thicker so you can you can That really stands out. Let's see, but I wanted to show a little bit more About that task-centric I was talking about See let's go ahead and pop that into edit mode real quick and this is a very very simplified edit mode but Let's see what might not have been super clear here is when we went into edit mode For this one object the things around it You're not working on those so there's still there for context, but they're very much Can you guys see that out there on the screen? Okay? Okay, they're very much diminished because you want to see where your thing is relation to the other things But you don't really care about the details there because that's not what you're working on Maybe so show her this one Of course everything else is going to fade away and so these these kind of things right here We're it automatically adjusts what's being displayed and how it's being displayed based on what you're doing And this is a very very simple example of that But but we want to take that kind of idea and apply it all kinds of places And but these these wire outlines they're kind of they're a little ugly and So that's the other thing I was working on until just before this And so I think we have to crank it up a little more and pop that into edit mode and now we have these nice smooth anti alias lines on all the edges and We don't have that artifact that we saw before where they poke through other things like these edges are literally on the triangles They're they're they're pasted to them. They're tied to them and so there's not going to be any lines poking through here if you're doing really fine geometry work and But what this is showing is the the triangulated mesh, which is usually not what you want to think about and so So this is the Friday night version We're gonna put one more and we get the nice polygon edges And this is this is harder to figure out than I thought it was going to be but but yeah It's working. It's there and by the time I get home and have a little rest of gonna go ahead and put it into 2.8 So we can all use this. All right, so we covered Basically Can I run it and the answer is usually yes unless you're running something really ancient and you don't have anything else I mean at that point you're gonna have to get something else to run this but of the vast majority of people all this is very common hardware When can I run it? That's a totally different question and We don't have an exact release date But we definitely want to have a preview at least by the next SIGGRAPH that's coming up in August usually So we want to have something to show there I'm not sure if it's gonna be an alpha or or anything like that But by the this time of the conference next year a lot of these possibilities that we're talking about here I can't wait to be able to use them and we're all gonna be use them and talking about them and seeing what else we can do after this And if you're in a real big hurry to see this 2.8 release a lot of people ask when's it gonna be out? Is it out yet? Is it released? You know don't sit around a wait come help us build it I mentioned bug reports in here those really help, you know that says oh This is a problem for people and this is something we can do about it Anything like that go on right-click select and say hey this feature would be great. See if it goes anywhere yeah, that's right, and You know just talk to people on IRC talk to people we have mailing lists about this sort of stuff And viewport is just one part of 2.8 is the part that I'm most interested in But but there's all kinds of other cool stuff going on So really if you're interested in getting it out help us talk to us Let's let's build it together because that's that's the way this stuff works Thank you. Thank you That's it. That's it. I'm done