 All right. Thank you. So hello, everyone. This is my first BlenderCon. A little bit nervous, but I think I should be fine. Anyway, before I start the presentation, I just want to say thanks to the entire Blender community and the Blender themselves for giving this opportunity. And let's see if the slides will work. All right. So how did I get from just being a kid to meeting one of the two most legendary directors ever? And still being a kid. So my name is Preston Matanga. I'm 15 years old. I made this presentation at like 14, though, so. But yeah, I worked on Across the Spiderverse. My hobbies are LEGO, Blender, animation. I love Stranger Things. I also love drawing. And I'm a YouTuber. I upload to my YouTube channel. So how I got into Blender, I first was super inspired by all these animated movies, mainly from Pixar. Like Toy Story, Brave, the LEGO movie, especially, Monsters University, Angry Birds movie. Yeah, those movies that really inspired me. That was like, hey, I kind of want to do this 3D animation thing. So I found out about Blender when my dad, hello, was using it for medical, yeah, yeah. Yeah, shout out to dad. Anyway, I first found out about him using it because he was using it for some medical physicist stuff. He's a medical physicist, and he uses it for treating cancer and stuff. So yeah, he uses it for. He uses it for designing some machines, and just simple geometric shapes. One day I found him using it, and I was like, hey, what's this? And he was like, it's Blender. And then I did some research, and then I found out that I could use it for animations and 3D stuff. And I got super invested on day one. So I remember the first tutorial I ever followed was, of course, the doughnut, as you can see. I did the old version, too. Only real ones remember that. So yeah, moving on. My first LEGO animation was, I want to say, like, 2018, something like that. I first started using Blender, by the way, in 2017. So when I was seven, eight years old, something like that. So yeah, you can see not too much going on here, just like me experimenting. The first one that I believe I followed the tutorial for that, I animated it myself, though. But yeah, it's just a basic minifigure waving, made it limp-sinking, nonsense. And then for my first animation, I'm not sure if it's going to play or not, but it's at the bottom. It was just the minifigure jumping from one brick to another. I was testing movement, and I got the models from Mega Bricks for that. And yeah, I also used a rig. I forgot to mention, for the first one that you can see in the top, it's like, I just moved the parts individually, which looking back, that wasn't a great way to animate. But we learned. And then for the second one, it was like I was actually using a rig to move every bone in one armature. All right, so after over two years with Blender, I started doing modeling my own stuff, well, existing characters, and tested out materials and rigging. The first one, you can see it's Patrick from SpongeBob. I made it into a 3D model. I think the burger I got from Blend Swap or something. The second one at the bottom is a Minion. That might have been in tutorial too. These are really old, so I don't remember too much, but yeah, you can see he's just holding a mug, stuff like that. I'm just experimenting tiny bit with lighting. Not so much there though, more modeling materials, surfacing, that sort of thing. The second one is Berry from Cloudy with the Chains and Meatballs too. I also modeled that myself, and I used the particle system for the grass. Second, third, no, fourth one. It's just the text, it says new and old to avoid any confusion. They're both old, but one of them is newer, I guess. The one that says old is really old. I was just testing to see how I evolved from my modeling. You can see one is arguably better than the other. Fifth one is Red from the Angry Birds movie. Yeah, it's messing around with particle systems, like using hair. This was before Geometry Nodes existed, by the way. I used this. I started my first ever Blender version was 2.78, so. And then last one is Chicken Joe from Surf's Up. Yeah, it's also me just messing around with particle systems and hair. Over three years with Blender, I'm messing around more with lighting and compositing. You can see, oh, okay, the animations aren't playing, but. The first one is just the Luxo lamp. It was jumping on the ball. And then the second one, it was like E from Wall-E, just hopping out of the cup. Those motion blur, I think. I was testing out motion blur with that second one. Then the first one, it was mainly lighting. I used a spot lamp. Added some chromatic aberration. And I did all the compositing with Blender. All right, and my current hardware. I have 4GPU. I have a 470 Ti Nvidia. My processor is an Intel Core, seventh generation. I have 64 gigabytes of RAM. Well, now, actually 128, this is outdated. And then storage, two terabytes of Kingston Fury. Also, I wanted to give a special thanks to Kingston for sponsoring this trip and providing me with most of the stuff that I needed for my computer. And yeah, I think that's it for that slide. All right, so now that I've said a little bit about my backstory, story time's over, I'm gonna start talking about some of my newer advanced animations and how I made them. First, I'm just gonna go over animation, then particle systems, then lighting. All right, first, here's my reel. I'm not sure, we can get that to play. Click on it. Click on it. Oh, okay, that works. First, I'm going to be discussing animation and how I did that, some of the shots that I did in that. So first, I'm just gonna say one effect where you can kind of record your animation. So let me play the video. So you can see, I have my scene here, I have my characters, Max, Dustin, Lucas, Steve, and we have this rising effect here. Like she's rising, like it kind of looks like she's on string, you know, I kind of wanted that effect. So what I did was that I turned on auto keyframe. I selected the bone I wanted, like the one that I wanted to move during the scene. Then I start the animation while hitting spacebar so that I'm just dragging it up while it's playing. And then you can play it back and then see that it's like recorded your animation, you know. So yeah, I think that's a cool effect you can get. And yeah, we can see the final result here, blending into the, yeah. And lastly, no, not lastly, second point, I wanted to talk about animating on twos. You can see how it kind of looks a bit weird, like out of camera view, it's just kind of the minifigure sliding. But I just wanted to say like, this is how you can like pin it to the camera, just like added constraint to it, like a child up constraint. And you can see how it looks good from the camera. And yeah, so this is the final result. And now I'm gonna be talking about some lighting aspects. Once again, you can see we have our scene. There's a motorcycle, there's Miguel, there's Spider Woman on the bike. Yeah, another thing, one thing I found really useful, learn this from Blender Guru, is an IES lighting. It gets super realistic lights and you just have to, it's super simple in those set up, just add an IES node, plug it into strength. And then yeah, you can get some really cool looking results. It's another example of it here, I think. Yeah, so this is just spot lighting. And now I wanted to talk about rim lights, the red light behind miles, just change like the spread to 90 degrees so it won't show up too much on like the unreflective surfaces, like the floor. And you can adjust the strength. And yeah, I think this is, yeah, this is how you'll get like a nice rim light and it applies to any scenario. Next, this glitching effects. It's an icosphere with the node set up as shown there, three refraction nodes. Yeah, a lot of things like it looks stupid outside, but when you actually from the camera view, it looks good, it's a cool kind of glitching effect. You can adjust the refraction values, you can change the colors, that sort of thing, that's what I'm demonstrating. And lastly, I think particle systems. I'm gonna say how I did the rain. So yeah, here we have Racine, we have miles, we have a huge plane that isn't visible to the camera, but you can see that it's emitting rain. So what I did was I just, I got another icosphere and I stretched it, gave it a glass shader, and then made an instance with the particle system. And for the panel that I did at the bottom, I think I just used Blender's video editor for that. And so for the conclusion, Blender really allows you to be like creative. Your imagination's still there, I've seen animations that the community has made, the animation festival especially, there's been a lot of submissions, really talented submissions. And I think that Blender already has all the tools and resources to make incredible, absolutely incredible animations. And that's really thanks to the community. And Blender is open source and free, so with its huge immunity, you can collaborate with fellow users on Discord and whatnot, and create fantastic looking animations because the software is definitely capable of it. And I think, okay, so acknowledgement slides, Mecha breaks for the models, Blender obviously, because that's what I use, that's what I've always been using. Sony, LEGO, and Kingston for sponsoring the trip, and for providing the stuff for my computer. And also the real music was by Philip Beeson. And that's it. Yeah, that's it. That's it. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, thank you all, thank you all so much. It really means a lot. So if any of you have any questions, feel free to ask. Yes.