 lost the clicker. And the clicker doesn't work. Yeah. Two moments. It works now. Okay. Cool. Hi. Sorry. Forget about those things. My name is Henrik Svilling and I'm the creative director and co-founder of iStudio's visuals in Kaskrona. And I'm going to start by talking just a little bit about my background in Blender. And I've been using Blender since I was 14 and I was in 2001. So it's really cool for me to be here and be able to show some stuff. Like, yeah, it feels really exciting. And by not coincidence, by digging a lot, I found one of the first animations that I did back in 2001. So I'm going to start by just showing that. So it looks like this. Amazing. Yeah. That's as good as it gets. I'm pretty stoked that I actually had motion blur. There were no ray-traced shadows. So I know that that was really hard to do back then. And I actually missed the Starfield effect that you can do in the environment like stuff. But okay. Anyway. So iStudio's visuals, we are a team of nine. And we are situated in Kaskrona, Sweden. We started iStudio's visuals back in 2006. And we've been in Kaskrona since then. And it's a very nice environment closer to sea and a lot of historical places. It's a really nice place. Now we also have facilities in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. So all over Sweden. And we are focused in game trailer production, VFX production and cinematics. And what I'm going to talk about today is the use of Eve in one of our trailers that we did recently. Okay. Oh sorry. I do still think that the one you saw before is the best. The guy hit by a ball falling down in the ramp. Anyway, as you can see we do a lot of stuff. A lot of game stuff. And we also do a lot of VFX and stuff like this. But what I'm going to talk about today is something more looking like this. So this is a project we did about a year ago for Paradox Interactive. And Paradox Interactive is a game developer in Sweden. And we kind of like doing this non-photoreal render stuff. So in this case we did six of these faction focuses for the game Planet Fall. So these are two. Here are two others and two others. And the thing was when we started with these, these are pretty long. They're like about one minute. And one minute is a lot of frames. So even though it's a non-photoreal look, but we needed to render it somehow so we render it in cycles. And that was heavy, as you all know. So it's kind of a hassle. So we thought, because this was kind of when 2.8 started to rise and we saw a lot of Eve stuff. So can we do this in Eve instead? So we basically tried. And these two are made in cycles and they look nice. And these four are made in Eve. And there's not a big difference on the quality of the movies, the quality of the films. And there are even some pros. It's easier to make reflections look nice in this non-photoreal style than it was with cycles. And of course, when you have better feedback, you get more creative. So this was a nice thing. So we thought, okay, can we try this on a bigger project? And perhaps. Let me give you some numbers on the Planetfall first. So for each of these animations, there were one illustration that was provided by Paradox. And we did in total six animations. And we had a production time of six months. So briefly one month per animation. And we were four artists doing this. So that gives you kind of the time frame that we were working on. So yeah, pretty decent. And then we thought about scaling this up. And then another project arrived. If we can click through it. Yeah. And this was this project. Imperator Roam. Also by Paradox Interactive. And in this case, we were able to start working with the story trailer for Paradox Interactive Imperator Roam. And this trailer consists of 27 illustrations. But four of these were provided by Paradox and all of the others we had to make ourselves. And we had a total working time of 65 days or three months from beginning to end. And as I said, 27 animations. And at this case, we scaled it up a little bit so we were 11 artists. So yeah, you can say that we had more time. But still, if you split that down, that leaves us two days per illustration or slash animation. So the time frame was really short. So we needed to find a smarter way of doing this. So let me walk you through the production pipeline. The first thing that we got was the storyboard. And the storyboard was drawn by the director. This was directed by a guy named Hugo Lilja. Really nice directors. He actually made the Swedish Oscar nominee film. So he was great. And he does like all of these, you know, basic drawings on pen and paper. And here you can see the ones that are created by Paradox. And we were also in the task, had to mimic the style as much as possible so the style will be consistent. So the first thing that we did was to reinterpret the storyboard and make our version of it. In later productions, we have actually done this with Grease Pencil as well. In this production, we used Storyboard Pro. But we could have saved even more time if we did it in Grease Pencil, but we didn't here. Okay, and what we end up with then is the animatic. And it looks something like this. And the nice thing with the animatic is that now we can see what we need to animate in the scene, like we get all the characters and we, okay, this part is in frame. Let's focus on that one and so on and so forth. Walking into production, this is kind of like where we enter Blender and when it actually starts to get interesting. So as I said before, we had to create all of these animations. In previous projects, we got like an illustration from Paradox and then we just meshed it up and projected, painted everything and stuff like that. But in this case, when we could create the animations ourselves, we had the opportunity to start with 3D. So the first thing that we did was to make everything in, like, make human models. We rigged them, we rigified, and then we did paintovers in Photoshop. And the really good thing with that is that then we get the geometry first and paint over it later. And then we get, like, mock-up scenes that we could then project back onto the geometry. And as you can see here, like, most of the geometry is really flat. The only thing that is really 3D in this scene is the guy carrying the chest. Everything else is just planes, basically. And a lot of those assets are also just import images as planes. And that gave us the opportunity to be able to paint better and to have everything really nice. And we projected everything back using the UV projector. And as you can see here, like, the characters were rigged first and then we projected the texture onto the geometry. And then we applied the UV project. We saved it in the stack just in case we wanted to change anything. And that made it possible to have the character in T-Post, but it was project-painted at whatever shape the guy was. And then we added the cloth. And we also used a lot of corrective smooth. I mean, I will have to say that corrective smooth is one of the... Yeah, it saves a lot of time. And since we were doing 27 animations and a lot of characters, like the rigging was basically just slap on the rigify and just make it work and just add a lot of corrective smooth. And it worked. Okay. So after we project from the camera, the UV project, then we get some obvious problems like we don't... Some parts get obscured by itself, right? So if you have a picture from here and you project my face, then you have the back side of the nose. So that's a big problem. So we fixed that by just adding another UV map in Blender. And since we were using Make Human, we already had really nice UV maps. So we used that UV map as a second UV map and just painted in the parts that were missing. This is one of the super, super nice things. And the ability to do this and be in shaded mode, like we could do this in Eve, then we could also paint other stuff like roughness and everything and just have it right in there. And not having the need to go to Substance Painter. Substance Painter is great, but still it's not rendering the exactly same render. You can be in the node system of Blender doing this without having to switch programs. So that's really nice. And when it comes to materials, one thing that I really recommend, like when we do this non-photo-realistic style, we can benefit from MatCaps, for example. So we created a MatCap that has a painted specularity. So when controlling specularities from eyes, it's kind of hard to set up a reflective surface and stuff like that, but it works super fine. Just adding MatCap with something painted on it. And we used this technique also to emphasize other areas. You can see it just in a little bit where you can see underneath his eyes there, for example, there's a little bit of reflection. So that reflection makes him look a little bit sweaty. That is also just a MatCap. For materials like metal and water and stuff like that that really needed to reflect, needed to reflect the sunlight, for example, then we used metal surfaces or stuff like that, just basic P-brars. But another cool thing with Eve is that it keeps, even if you add in some of these reflective surfaces and stuff, you still kind of keep the feeling of it being illustrated. Okay, after everything got rigged and painted and stuff like that, we had to animate it. And we animate it and make sure to see his sliced pyjamas there. Also, you can see how optimized it was because the only thing that we see in this scene is his head, so he doesn't have any body, but we still have to make human body. So we just read it with the simple tools that you get from Rigify. Didn't do much custom things at all. It's just like all of the expressions and everything like that. Also, lip-syncing was made using Rigify, some shape keys, but mostly just Rigify. And just adding simple stuff. There are some particles flowing in the background, but just keep it simple and focus on what's in camera and what's out of camera. Okay, so going back to what I think is really the beauty of working this way, and this could also be even better if the things that people talked about yesterday, like using the timeline in Blender, we could make it even better. But in this case, when we worked with Hugo, who had a lot of directions, of course, because he's the director, fast turnarounds is important. And what we could do, we could just animate it, change the keyframes for a bit, and then go into turnoff all the overlays, turn on depth of field, turn on motion blur, and just super, super fast make render. So this is a render made in real-time. There's just a screen capture. And this is the render time that we had, which is quite nice. And when the render got finished, we used Premiere Pro to edit. So basically, we just popped that render into Premiere and made the edit. And this kind of workflow really feels like being on set and being in the editing room at the same time. Because you just tab from one application to the other, and you just have a really nice workflow. And this, of course, could be improved even better. Imagine if we had one editing file, which linked all the other blender scenes. So we had a master blender edit, and then we had all the scenes by themselves. So we didn't need to do any renders at all. That would have cost even better. So hopefully we will have that in the future. On top of this, when we were in Eevee, when we were in 3D, there were some other really nice things that we could do. And one of those was adding grease pencil. And this was something that we have been thinking about. And I personally think that this is going to be a big step in the future, like mixing those styles. Because we are working with an illustrated style, so why not add in some 2D effects in 3D, like grease pencil effects? So we had this very talented guy, Emile Svit. You can follow him on Instagram, Christian.emile. He's super talented. He makes all of these 3D paintings, like 3D animals and stuff. And he created these splashes, like these blood splashes and stuff. And we can render them in the same render as everything else. And then we can just composite them in. And if we move the camera, you can move the camera, you know all of this. But this just adds like extra awesomeness. Okay. Next part is of course post-production. So let's talk a little bit about rendering. And this, I think this is the third place where we actually had some problems. Because this is a little bit hard. Like we can't get as many passes out of Eve as we would like. What we do get is basically ambient occlusion. We get a main pass and we get a miss pass. Sometimes we use SSS color, like subsurfing color, to get like a color pass. We did also create our own glow pass because we liked the way the glow looked in Eve. And we did that by taking one main render, duplicating the main scene, and rendering one scene without bloom and one scene with bloom, and then using the difference node to extract the glow pass. So we could add it into post afterwards. And this works fine. But our normal renders tend to look like this. So we felt really short. We didn't have like the UV pass. And one of the most important things that we did not have was the cryptomet. We didn't have any ID passes. We had to extract those manually. In this case, it was kind of fine because we had to do so many animations that weren't really time to go in and tweak so much. It was like, okay, this scene, smash, boom. Let's get to the next one. But it still makes a little bit of problems. And then we get to compositing. We did composite all of these in After Effects. The things that we did in After Effects was basically adding elements like snow, debris, stuff like that. And also we added depth of field and motion blur in After Effects. And the reason for using After Effects depth of field instead of using it in Blender, is basically because the passes that we render from Eve doesn't have those applied. So if we render a depth pass from Eve and have motion blur on the main render, it doesn't apply on each passes. So that added a little bit of a problem. And a very, very interesting thing as well. It's not the case it usually is when we work in 3D. This was the most tedious process of the entire project. The thing that took most time was rendering from After Effects and getting the masters, not rendering from the 3D to the comp. And finally, we finalized everything in Premiere Pro where we graded it and added sound and stuff like that. OK, so you haven't seen what we actually did, so let's take a look at the results. With such abundance, new roads and aqueducts decorate the landscape built by the fruits of conquest. Our once humble city is the flourishing center of a mighty empire. This wealth was bought by the bravery of our legions, victors in a thousand battles over a thousand enemies. And it is to one man that we owe this new infusion of wealth dedicated to our gods. Some of you grumble about more honors heaped on an already honored man. You whisper the word king and spit the word tyrant. But has he not honored us with his feats of arms? Has he not cleansed the Republic of its impure elements? Even our most ancient enemies cower in a baseless and crammer for his friendship. It is safer for you to be his friend. Thank you. Yeah, we all feel really proud about that project and it feels really cool when you look back at it and say that we had two days per scene. That feels great. Okay, so also looking back at it, we of course get some ideas on how to make this better and what we could use for the next project and so on and so forth. And one of those things that we really want to work with is more of the grease pencil effect because that's super cool to have that implemented in 3D. So what actually happened was that two weeks ago we released a new project and it's this one. There's no sound. So if you want to watch it, you can watch it on YouTube or I can show you afterwards. But here we actually tried to do this. So we created the streets of Paris. Emil did this as well. So really cool. We tried to make it kind of look like it would be in a sketchbook and then it turns into another style in the end. But we wanted to make this kind of style and it was super fun and it was super cool. Then we stumbled upon some problems like when we had that many grease pencil objects we had all of them linked. Blender just crashed. We might have done it wrongly or I don't know. But it was really choppy. You can see how choppy it is in the viewport up there. It worked by converting all of the grease pencil objects into splines then converting into geometry and that rendered fine. And we kept some of the objects like grease pencil. Another very important and fun thing about this project as well was that what happened was that I talked about it earlier that we wanted the cryptomats. To get cryptomats we have to render a cycles render. And that's not a big problem by itself. We can just render something really quick like four samples or something like that. So we did that. And we get the cryptomats and we get a UV pass and all of those things that we need. And then all of a sudden the Intel denoiser got released. The artificial intelligence denoiser. And then we try like, okay, let's try and denoise the cycles render. And it looked just beautiful. So all of a sudden we could get a cycles render that matched this style very fast. So the first project was a year ago and this was just two weeks ago. So it's just shifted. And I think that is super interesting to just imagine like these ones that you can see here. And I think for us because you know when you denoise something too much it gets a little bit like mushy mushy but that kind of looks cool when it's an illustrated painted style. So we might even have gained from denoising it. But also like just imagine in a year hopefully we will have cryptomats in Eve. I really, really wish so. And then we won't need to render the cycles again. So I guess it's like a back and forth for what gets the most gets the job done best. But the end of the line just staying on top of things and it's always evolving. So, yeah. I think that's really, really interesting. Least of all, I would like to say oh, sorry, forgot about those. We also developed a painted depth of field effect which is really cool. If you follow DUIK he's created some tutorials about how to make a painted depth of field. So we did that in this one as well. Super nice. All in all, thank you for listening and you can follow us there. Thanks.