 Oh, hi everyone. Oh, it works excellent. So yeah, I'm really happy to be here and to talk to you here today I want to take this opportunity to thank Tom and the Blender Institute for inviting me Excellent. So my name is Don Elbez Ditt and I work as lead creature artist and head of modeling at goodbye cancer studios in Stockholm and During the development phase of 2.8. I did a bunch of blender EV demos demos and personal art for the Blender Institute So I'm here to talk about the sort of creative process there So first I wanted to just briefly mention where I work Goodbye, Kansas is a VFX studio and we have our headquarters in Stockholm in Sweden but we also have offices in Hamburg, London and Los Angeles and We use a bunch of different 3d applications and Blender is one of them and we mainly have used it for things like layout, modeling, concepts, grooming and to some extent even texturing So we do game cinematics both real-time and Pre-rendered, UV effects for a film, TV and commercials Motion capture and facial performance capture and also facial rigs for external clients Visual development, IP development and storytelling So I wanted to show some recent productions as well So here we have cyberpunk. This is Yeah This was a game trailer that we did for an upcoming action RPG game from CD project red So, yeah, we're excited about the release of that We have oh, yeah hellboy. This was a feature film that came out earlier this year and we did a lot of shots at the end of the movie and We've done numerous shots for this TV show the Walking Dead over the years You know working with blood gore and zombies is something that we love and adore Troll this was released at GDC earlier this year and this was a tech demo that we did for Epic's Unreal Engine. So this is all done in real-time so For this project we created five different game trailers that told the story of the four main characters for the game Over kills the walking dead, which is a four-player co-op game So I wanted to show just a like little montage of my blender artwork or Bit of my blender artwork at least here we go. Is there any sound? No? It's not the end of the world. You can listen to me That was fun tree creature. This was like first off when it was possible to animate and Deform objects within render 2.8 This is a target. I did Really wanted to try out, you know pushing the limits of EV with fur as well. So it's like, I don't know Millions of hair strands there This was a good night Claire Lot of there's kind of a start it out as a very small project that just bloated No add a little list a little of that And this is a tiger as well. We'll be talking a bit about the shading there later on Yeah Just got to say it's amazing to work in in vendor and the EV viewport but seeing the Something that is so, you know something a final result directly in the viewport Super inspiring Okay Okay, I want to talk about the pipeline and scene structure So first off, this is more of a simplified view of a classical studio pipeline So we're here on the left. We have a bunch of assets. This is like malls. So for instance a door over here and All of these assets are contained within separate files And then the artist publishes different versions of these as He or she improves the object and then the assets are brought into the layouts and placed accordingly And then the layout artist sort of publishes new versions and then it's brought into lighting and render So the advantages of working like this is that it's very suitable for a big number of artists Since all the assets are in their separate files There's a very low risk that multiple artists needs to act the same file at once And it's very structured. So that's cool There are some disadvantages though and it's kind of a slow workflow and There's a lot of logistics since you have to jump in between different files and stuff like that So when I'm doing personal artwork, I tend to simplify this sort of pipeline a bit so this orange box and represents My sort of assets blender file. So here I have all of my assets that I want to create and the door for instance is Consisting of several objects with different materials and then I put that in a collection and Then all of these separate asset collections are put in a main collection and this main collection sort of ass acts as a package that I can link into other files So then on the to my left I have the room layout And then I link in the main collection. So that's sort of just like a dump in there And then I can access the separate small collections and place them So the advantage here is that it's pretty flexible and fast It's very suitable for a small team or one person and it's great that I can you know have shared materials between these different assets as well and see them updated in real time and It's very easy to keep track of which asset. I want to bring into the room layout So the disadvantage here is that it's not very suitable for a large number of artists since Multiple artists might want to access this asset blender file at once But then you can sort of break it out into separate files as well So with more complex assets like this character Claire here It's consisting of geometry textures shading a rig and an animation then I put that in a collection and link the collection into the room layouts and Then if I want to do additional Animation I can there should be an arrow here somewhere. Okay, so If I want to do additional animation of that rig within the room layout file I can just use make proxy Now this is fun because I handed in the slides on Sunday and on Monday. It was like, oh now we have Library override, so that's blender development for you. That's the amazing improvements all the time I Also work with the kind of a push workflow. So My source files. So the asset File here, for instance, I always link in the same file. So I never have to Relocate it and stuff like that and if I need to save up versions I just save them out as a copy so that I can go back if I need to. Oh Yeah, so yeah, I have to just Say that I put in a bit too much information in this presentation. So We have to pause a bit and I might Run over 30 minutes, you know, okay so here we have the asset file and As you can see up there in the outliner I have separate collections for each object and it's contained within a main collection Called assets and here is the layout file. It's quite empty now as you can see and now I need to dump the assets in here. So I create a new scene and Then I just link the asset file go to the collection and bring in the assets So what I see now is just one locator with all the the assets Appear to be sort of merged, but what really happens is now I suddenly have Access to the individual Collections, so that's really handy for me and now I just yeah go on and populate the scene and Yeah, so it's very easy for me to filter out the assets as well if I use a prefix and Here is the prefix AST Now I just place these and I can use snapping as well snap to face and Orient the objects to the face normal as well. That really helps Yeah, so this is just a really fun way to work where you have the lighting and everything within the scene And you basically see what the yeah kind of the final image will look like There's also this thing where you have these big mechanical arms that have animation from the source files and I mean, that's kind of handy if I make loop Then they just play and go around but it's the same thing as with the character if I want to replace that I'm an animation I can just Do library overrides on the armature and do a unique animation for this shot. Oh Yeah pause Okay, great. So here I'm just gonna show an example of where I use nested collections So I'm gonna create this fantastic snowman here and we're gonna make Separate variations of the snowman like we're gonna have a snowman base and then a snowman with a top hat and snowman with a Party hat as well. So play So you're just creating the asset really quick This is great stuff super inspiring Just add some quick materials So then I just select the base of snowman create a new collection called snowman base Now I put the 3d locator there and a pause Thank you. I was a bit too fast there So basically I put the 3d locator at the base of the snowman and then in the object settings I can go into the collection settings and choose Set offset from 3d cursor and that means that when I create a collection instance of this the The origin of the collection will be sort of where I Intended to be like in the base of the foot of the snowman play Okay, so now I create an instance of the snowman base and then I just No duplicate that hat put it on top now It's like the hat and the base of the snowman and create a new asset called snowman top hats Create a new asset called And create the party hat there Create the asset and pause So the advantage here is that I if I want to add, you know a third eye or a bigger nose or something This will ripple out to all of the different versions of the snowman. So that's Super nice. You can just create something very basic at first then go back and sort of Create more detail and then it ripples out into all these different collections play So now I'm back into no, sorry here. I put those snowman assets into the main Collection and now I'm in the layout scene and as you can see it has updated and the snowman are there and Here are the settings for the collection or sort of the source files if you need to Reload that or relocate it and now I can suddenly just yeah find my snowman assets and place them in the scene and if I want to replace this collection with the one with the party hats I can just go into the obvious settings in the collection and change To another another collection. So that's super handy as well So imagine like you're doing a forest You just have 100% trees at first and then you can randomly select a bunch of these trees and Choose another collection sort of a bush instead and that's a way you can yeah, just Change the scene as you progress Okay So much talking and so little time Okay, I wanted to talk about sort of my mindset and time constraints when working in Personal projects. So one problem is that I need to create a lot of content in a short amount of time and Some of the solutions are that I try to cut corners and cheat as much as I can So every aspect of a project doesn't need to be perfect, but if you just start with a very basic idea You sort of free up time and you can put that time into the Assets and objects that are most visible in your scene later on you don't want to spend, you know five Days on you know a screw that is like in the corner of your camera view So what I do is I create stuff very simple at first and then I iterate so there's three creatures for instance the mesh to the left there is very just like raw and Not pretty at all, but I can still you know Decimate it bring into a blender file to rig it up Since if I have locked joint positions and then I can animate it and then I like huh I want to you know improve it and then go back to modeling face Improve it bring it into the rig scene and just transfer the skin weights So here's something that is important Evaluate things in contexts. So if your shot is gonna look like the image to the left here The the eagle is very small in frame. You don't want to you know be very you don't want to sit close and like Oh put the amazing amount of details in the feathers and stuff like that Another thing I do to save time is that I avoid UVs as much as I can when it comes to environment and non-deforming props So I use a Tri-planar mapping as much as I can this is Thing called box mapping in blender But like in other software is known as tri-planar mapping and I will go over that at the end of the presentation Also do a lot of like use auto-remesh tools as much as I can So sculpting is just like I just have a very rough mesh I don't care about topology at all just whoo-hoo and then I order a mesh We're the either C remesh or in C brush and now we have the quadrimesh or add-on in blender and You know also quadrimesh that is implemented in blender 2.81 as well and then when you have Auto-remesh you can just go in and fix the areas that are not working out really well And usually this is stuff like face hands feet that kind of thing And also don't be too afraid of triangles and endgones I've done my fair share of rigging in my days So I can say that as long as something looks good and deforms good. It's okay Sometimes I I'm not saying that people should use bad topology all the time But it's also important to think about when it's okay to use it and sometimes you really have to to Make it work So Tiger shader, I just wanted to go over this like a very brief overview of how I created that effect so it's basically Having these color fields where they appear to be moving across the surface of the tiger so it's a Rather simple idea really You can see here that I have the tiger and I have created a hand-painted Texture which consists of it's basically an ID texture So it's painted in RG and B red blue green and blue And it's just a very normal UV layout and here you can see the texture as well So I also created a secondary UV set where I took a copy of the tiger just folded up the arms Sorry the legs to the back and straighten out the tail and then if I put in a like an arrow texture on this one for the This side prediction the arrow sort of appears to be flowing through the shape of the tiger so here you can see me I have the arrow texture and If I use the mapping node and move it the texture appear to be moving Through the surface of the tiger, so here I'm just adding noise texture and adding the contrast a bit Putting in a mixed node pause Pause pause Okay, thank you. So So mapping Can also be seen like it can be x y and z right but it can also be seen as colors red green and blue So if I put a mix node where put it to add and just add a green value It basically moves It the texture appears to be moving up and down in UV space So I can use this to sort of deform the texture as it moves through the tiger play Great So as you can see when I drive the slider there it appears to be moving up and down So I can add a noise texture and this is consisting of three colors right red green and blue But I own only want to use the green values to display the texture So I multiply the noise texture with green. So there's no red or blue information and now It's just displacing a bit too much. So I'm adding a Math node and just offsetting these values minus point five So now you can see with the arrow texture that it sort of deforms a bit as It will move through the surface of the tiger So this sort of way of working is just to add some more interesting Deformation to the noise texture Yeah, so here I have the ID texture that I painted earlier and I'm just separating out the red channel here I'm just adding a mix node and Connecting the noise texture to that mix node. So I'm basically multiplying The red channel of the ID texture with the noise texture, right and then I slide the mapping And now in then a 2.81. We suddenly have access to okay pause Thank you We suddenly have access to time offsets in Noise textures as well. So that's really handy for just creating variants of noise as well. So and Here on the left there I have something a little node that's kind of out of frame that says my time and it's basically just a value that is keyed to match the current frame of the time slider and Then I multiply that with minus 0.1. So I if I just connect the time to the Mapping of the texture of the tiger the the the texture will appear to be moving forward, right? So I have to make it move the other way So that's why the minus one then I just combine this to x y c vector and plug it into the location Okay, play Okay, pause pause. Oh, thank you. So great So now I have the basic setup of how it's going to work with one of the ID channels, right? The red channel plus the noise texture now I have this great setup there and I can just group it to one of these group nodes in blender's shading system, okay play great, so that's the node group that I get and I just change the Input values to the first one is frame and the second one is offset and the offset is just changing the time of the noise texture basically So what am I doing now? So now I have to do the same setup for the green channel, right? And since I've already created a node group of the basic setup. I can just combine the ID of the green channel Sorry the green channel the ID texture with the noise texture and here I'm just realizing Oh, I forgot to disconnect that arrow texture So I'm making sure that I get the noise texture as an output Then I can just now I have the red channel and the green channel Fixed so I just combine those with a mixed node by using add Cool, so now I just need to add the Oh, yeah, and now I'm thinking oh it moves a bit too fast now can just use a multiply value and just Lower that value that multiplies so the noise texture doesn't move as fast to the tiger Okay, just selecting those duplicating and multiplying again the blue channel with the animated noise and Combining it with the rest of the channels with a mixed node that is set to add and now I just Tie it up a bit. So it's more clean and visible what I'm doing with each of the different node sets So now I basically have this mask right consisting of different IDs and different noises and I can multiply each of these masks with a collar that I choose and you basically get this sort of effect And then I just create an emission node pipe in these color values and Combine it with just a normal BSDF shader that is black And now I see it in the you know the amazing EV viewport just seeing everything moving. Oh and pause Yeah, I realized I made a mistake here So there the noise is not moving perfectly in the x-axis. It's also moving up, right? So I realized I had by accident connected it to the y In the combined XYC node there play Yep, so now I can drag the time slider. Everything moves to the tiger Very cool It's just amazing to you know work in this sort of an environment Just you know having the animation playing in real-time having the shading the noise moving in real-time as well Am I way over time wise It's all good. Okay, great. This is the final thing So I'm gonna go over try planar mapping or box mapping as it's called in blender and this is something that is really useful for Objects that are not deforming basically so it could be you know pillars environment stuff It works great with scaling rotating and translating But this particular setup will sort of have Texture sliding if you start deforming your model So here's the same model on the left and the right side It doesn't have any UVs whatsoever The left one is textured map by UVs and the right one is textured map by using the objects Output and you saying box Mapping in the texture node. So you see that it's just like yeah Working off the bat So the main idea is to have From the texture coordinates you put take the object output and then you usually have a mapping node Right for scaling it and stuff like that and then you put it into the texture node Into the vector input and then you change it to box and you adjust the blend so you don't get any hard edges where the different axis meets basically So here's an example. I have this model just adding some kind of metal fader And I'm using the object output Connecting it to mapping node changing the texture to using box now I can scale it and I just add a color ramp and you know I crank up the Contrast a bit and you can see there how there's a line and if I use blend it just blends super nice and I connect that to the roughness of the shader and just adjust the values So we get something that looks a little bit more appealing and what do we have here? Yeah, I'm gonna create some kind of very simple rust shader as well just connect the same texture and In the color ramp. I just Change it so it looks more like a rust kind of color values Then I connect the color Output the other color to the base color, right? So now we get something that looks somewhat decent and I can Combine these two shaders with a mix node and either show the metal shader or the rust shader, right? So now I just take another color ramp create a very Contrasty look and I can use this as a mask and put it into the factor of the mix node and thereby Combining these two shaders And I you know I haven't done any UVs. I haven't done any hand-painted texture It's just off the bat very fast and you can do this kind of shading as complex as you want And once you've done it you can just replicate it to other objects in your scene So here I'm just using the ambient occlusion node Which amazingly enough works in EV and I can use that output as a mask and combine it with the The rust or the blending mask just contrast it up So this means that I get more rust where you have more ambient occlusion basically and This setup works both in blender and cycles as well Yep, and they're just yeah Adjust the values and this is usually how I start just something very basic and then you add features on top of the shading Of course, this is very basic setup, but it's super useful. Oh That's the end of my presentation