 Oh, wow, that's a lot of people. That was way more than I was expecting for this talk. Well, it seems like everyone's here, so let's get started. That is not the right slide. Anyway, nice to meet you. You guys may have known me from the Spider-Bridge talk yesterday or the one we're doing again in an hour. I'm Sharon. And that brings us to a total of, instead of 20 minutes of uncut footage of me on the internet, there will not be 40 minutes, so I'm looking forward to that. Yesterday was more of a work thing, but today is more of a play thing. It's more of a chill talk featuring my personal work, which is boring, I get it. I wish that I could play Spider-Verse 2 under here at double speed like they do on TikTok to get you to pay attention, but unfortunately I couldn't get the clearance for that. So what I brought today for show and tell is a ticket for a Spider-Verse event at my school back in 2018. And to kind of put things into perspective, I was 17 when the first movie came out and I started working on the second movie right after I graduated university. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you again. They won't mind. One of my biggest inspirations is my mom and I'll show you one of her works now. I'm sure she'll appreciate that, thank you. In case you couldn't tell, that is a horse. Now, I think it's a bit boring to just stand here and continue talking about myself, so I'm gonna play a little game with you guys, seeing as I am both a, if the slide will turn, seeing as I'm both a 2D artist and a 3D artist, I thought it would be kind of fun to show you guys some of my work and have everyone guess whether it was made in 2D or if it was made in 3D. So once you guys have like an answer, whatever you can call it out, just like scream at me, I'm cool with that. So we'll start off with something really easy. What do we think? I swear to God, the one that said 3D, don't be already, so this isn't fair. But yeah, it was made in grease pencil, but I'll go more into how I did that later. But yeah, you can see that. Next up, we have this nice little basketball. What do we think? You guys are right, it's grease pencil again. And here we have a postcard. This one should be pretty easy. What do we think? Those of you who said 2D are right, this is some character work for my third year film and as you guys can imagine, I was really happy when the Barbie movie came out. So now I will show a shot from my fourth year film and I'll let you guys guess once again how this was made. It was grease pencil. You guys are really good at this. I thought I'll get some of you. I'm kind of mad, but it's okay. The funny thing about this one is that when I first showed this to my professor as proof of concept, he said that if I couldn't prove that my film was in 3D, that he would fail me and I wouldn't be able to graduate. But after I showed him this, he was like, oh yeah, that's not 3D. You just took a 2D drawing and split it up into a whole bunch of different planes. So that was a bust, Elm Scottum. But the cool thing about this is that the colors of the grease pencil are actually all flat and it's being entirely lit using the 3D light setup which saves some 2D animators some busy work. And now I will show another shot that has a background and I'll let you guys think about which parts might have been made in 3D and which parts might have been made in 2D. I think if no one said anything, I'll move on. It's okay. Now, I hated modeling so much that I drew the whole thing in grease pencil. That's a joke, but the grease pencil part isn't. There isn't like a single piece of geometry in this scene. There are no polygons, there are no planes, there's no nothing. I hand painted the whole thing. Why? Because I could, I don't know. Now, this is the last one we'll be looking at. It's almost over, but this one is super duper easy, I think. Oh, thank you. Yes, 3D, obviously. We're doing an outdoor set this time and the whole thing has been once again painted in grease pencil. Now, because this was, I just realized how it looks because I was only drawing to the view so I did cheat to the camera a lot but because this was one of the money shots for my short film, I did paint a lot more textures by hand so everything on the road, the crosswalk, the little tent and the metal tray thing, I did draw some 2D details and that's just what it all looks like without any 3D lighting. So I'm going to show the breakdown of the process super quick and I would say that the way of working is really similar to 2D animation. You have your rough phase, you have your cleanups, you have flat colors and you have lighting but I feel like it's worse because I'm working in a 3D environment and it's really hard to tell what's going on even from just a breakdown. So yeah, congratulations. Nobody won and nothing makes sense. Yay! Yeah! This is how I felt when I was learning grease pencil for the first time. When I was looking at artists I really admired and trying to figure out what they did or even when looking at breakdowns of their work I would just be like, oh my God, what the hell is going on? So let's go back to the basics for a second. I feel like that's a little too far back but we're going to roll with this. So way back in the beginning, grease pencil was this. Not literally this but it was an annotation tool used to make notes on shots and back then it couldn't even be key-framed. There was no way to animate with it. I'm staying off really far to the side but as development went on you could actually key-frame with it and 2D animators began picking up the tool as a way to transition from a 2D animation pipeline to a 3D animation pipeline. So what they would do is that they would block out the anim by sketching it like so and then animate over top with a 3D rig but I'm pretty sure you guys heard a lot about that from the animation panel the other day. So I will move on. But before it was more of a 2D to 3D pipeline instead of a 2D and 3D pipeline but lately because of recent developments in grease pencil people have started using it for 2D and 3D hybrid art. As of right now grease pencil is extremely tactile and hands-on like blender itself and it's really versatile and lets people do pretty much anything with it. It's especially appealing to 2D artists because you can just directly draw with it instead of having to work with a mouse and keyboard workflow which is why so many people including myself have started to learn how to use it. But a question that my professor had for me when I first pitched using grease pencil for my film was if you were going to work in 3D space anyway why not just use the 3D tools? They work perfectly fine. Now anyone who actually works in the industry would know that the 3D tools do not work perfectly fine. Like I guarantee you if you're trying to learn something and you're like pulling your hair out at your desk you can't figure out why something's working and you feel so stupid. There is a studio exec somewhere with 20 more years of experience feeling the exact same way. It never gets better. Thank you. Anyway, my answer that I found eventually was related to this controversial painting. So this painting is something that every new art student would have had to study. The Treasury of Images by my name but great and what Mr. McGregor has written on this painting is this is not a pipe. Now I don't know about you guys but that looks an awful lot like a pipe to me. But what my professor had to say about that was Sharon, it's not a pipe. It's an oil painting. Duh. But I understood a couple years later what she meant because when our brains look in an image like this we kind of skip steps and we start filtering information and that's when we look at this we think pipe instead of painting of pipe. And I want you guys to keep this in mind while I make my next point. Which is that because so much of 3D is math before a model has been converted to an image it's not like yes, it doesn't like. You can infinitely zoom in on it excluding textures that aren't procedural or vectors. But if you walk closer to a painting in real life you can actually see the individual brush strokes. Duh. But the picture starts to come apart a little bit. Because in the real world there's a sense of scale once you get too close to something it just stops making sense. And it is the same thing with photography. That's not like a foot. It's a whole bunch of molecules coming together to form the image of a foot. And that's where the painting thing kind of comes in. The image is not literally what is being depicted but it's an attempt to capture it. It's one step removed from reality but our brains erase that step when we're looking at things. But from an artistic perspective it's important to remember that the painting is a painting or a photo is a photo because the medium is the filter that the artist created through and that dictates the final look of the piece. Now I can't take sole credit for this point because I didn't know this at the time but Spider-Verse was using the exact same principles when developing the visual look of their film and I went to a talk that my lead held at Google and he said the exact same thing. And I was just like, oh my God, I'm gonna have to delete all of this. But I didn't and we're here. Thank you, Pav. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks again. Anyway, so this is right. I wanted to pick a medium that I could really take advantage of the properties of because everything has unique traits that could look really good or really bad depending on what you do with them. And when it comes to 2D it's far more effort to simulate something than it is to just draw it. And I think that with enough time, effort and research, you could simulate it. But I needed to graduate which is why I landed on grease pencil. This is an early test shot from my student film. There were two key points that I wanted to have with this piece which was a hand drawn art style and handheld camera movement. I wanted it to feel like someone was literally just holding a phone and like running around the world with my film. And 2D parallax alone wasn't enough to capture the freedom of camera movement I wanted. And this is what that setup would kind of look like in my file. But when I was in school, no one in the 3D animation program was using Blender for in class production. Like it was to the point where the render farm did not support Blender. So I was the first one to make that happen. And a similar thing happened at my first studio. There were a lot of things back in the day that I had to figure out myself. So I will show you some of the tricks I picked up. This will go. I'm sure this scene looks very familiar to some of you Blender users. What we're going to do now is that we're going to make something together and you guys will get to pick what we make. Every time we have to make a creative decision, I'll put it up to a vote and whichever one gets the most votes is the one that we'll go with. So say like we have options A and B, if people want option A, then they'll put up their hands. Nobody put up their hands, so that's fine. That's fine, it's just the example. But we are just going to start off with something super easy, which is, do we delete or keep the default cube? Those of you who want to delete the cube, please put your hands up. Okay, that was an overwhelming majority. Okay, for the sake of fairness, did anyone want to keep the cube? All right, delete the cube one, so that is what we'll be doing. All right, so the next thing we'll be deciding is the art direction we'll be going with. So I think you guys know which option I want you to go with, but because this is a fair thing, I will be taking a vote anyway. Those of you with taste, please put your hands up for cartoony. Yeah, let's go! Okay, those of you who want realistic, put your hands up. Interesting. All right, let's see what Blender spit out. Congratulations, it's a bouncing baby blob. Well, everyone say hi. Well, since we have birthed this thing into the world, I feel like it's only right that we give it a name, so if anyone has any ideas, feel free to shout them out. GORP? What? Cloudy. Cloudy? What do we think between GORP and Cloudy? These are cloudy pads. Cloudy pads, okay, let's go with that. Mr. Cloudy Pants, I think he likes the name. So I feel like the world seems a little bit empty, so let's give Mr. Cloudy Pants a home, and here will be our second vote. Do we want them to live indoors or outdoors? So those of you who want to give Mr. Cloudy Pants a home indoors, please put up your hands. Okay. Okay, those of you who want to touch grass and go outside, please put up your hands. Wow, that was really different from the beginning, but okay, outdoors it is. So before we start drawing, I'm gonna go quickly into what it's like to switch from a 2D canvas to a 3D canvas. When switching, if he'll go, please, it did not. That's cool. Let's go into 3D drawing basics. So there are kind of two ways of working that I find are best for beginners, either by just drawing a wetter plane works and then moving the grease pencil around manually or by targeting the grease pencil to a 3D cursor and then moving the cursor around instead of the thing when you want to draw on a new depth. And some camera movements I think work best for the sign of workflow is either dollying backwards and forwards or just panning around on a flat plane and not really rotating around the scene. Cause if you work in 2.5D, the drawings are flat. So rotating a bit too much is not good. So I am going to start drawing the environment and it's really similar to 2D drawing. I'll put down my lines, I'll fill things in and because I'm actually drawing it, it's a fast and intuitive way of working for people who like to draw and a crystal clear way of getting that 2D aesthetic in a 3D space and then I start separating my drawings into different depths. And after I do that, I'll use some texture brushes to add some grit to the scene here and there and I'll also use some lights just to see what that would look like and how the lights interact with the volume of the grease pencil while I'm working so I can get a better sense of what colors to put down and whatnot. And I'm just finishing up with a few more texture bits and we are done. So I will give credit where credit is due. Our community is held together by artists who make amazing tools for others to use. So I will credit Sophie Jantak and Katie Sketch for the brushes I'm using in today's presentation. Please check them out if you have the chance and now that we are done, let's plop our little guy in there and see what he thinks. I feel like he seems to like it. I think we forgot to feed him. Now that brings back the point I was bringing back earlier about rotation in 2D planes because we were drawing in a flat space. Once a character turns around or if you move the camera around, they become flat. So let's explore some ways to bring dimension to our world. First off is by cheating with lights and this is how I would go about it. And done. It looks 3D now. We did it. But a more complex way of using this method. For this particular shot, the characters fly, didn't separate out the planes, but with a crap ton of spotlights and a rudimentary understanding of how shading works, you can cheat the hell out of a flat plane. Which is fine. There we go. But this method can also be used to shapes that aren't entirely flat as well. Splitting up a character into different layers, let's let light interact with them as if they were 3D because the individual body parts do technically exist where they would if the character was a 3D model. And the picture on the left is kind of what the early stages of my workflow would look like. I drew the animatic using an actor's reference and then translated that 2D information into my scene when I was working in 3D. And as you can see, it's fully interactable, which is cool. And then here I'm playing around with our little guy. I've used a different textured brush. The whole thing is still grease pencil, by the way. It's not volumetrics. I've used a different textured brush to kind of add a little bit of fluffiness. And if you noticed, it is actually 3D now. You can paint in 3D and make fully 3D models of grease pencil as it is right now, which I think is super cool. And I don't know, I like the look. It's fluffy, it's cute. So after all of that, this is what the final product may look like. Yeah. We went through. Sorry. Thank you. I'm really sleepy, but you know what, we're gonna power through this. So we went through a lot today, but I want you guys to remember that no matter what crazy things people do with grease pencil, it all comes back to this. Oh shit, sorry. If you could. Thank you. So there are a million technical reasons to pursue more tactile and accessible tools, but my personal favorite is to preserve the simple joy of creating and saving that initial spark. I think we all remember being kids and opening up MS Paint for the first time and doodling something like this. And there was no rhyme or reason as to why we did something like that. It was just fun. And that's the kind of feeling that I'd like to preserve when we're creating. Because if there's no, what? There's no roadblocks getting in the way of creativity, it's easier to create. And just because a tool is easy to use doesn't mean you can't make masterpieces with it. I'm pretty sure everyone has seen that video where that one guy draws a photorealistic Santa in Microsoft Paint. So yeah, it just means that more people will be able to learn it. Now a counterpoint that I hear a lot is why make things more accessible for people. Animation is a skilled trade so you should learn the proper programs, right? Well, I implore those people to look at this. This is the peak of artistry. So there's a related story to this, I promise. So my mom drew this when I was in high school and I was doing a design contest for my school's grad hoodie, but because my school's mascot was a horse, you can imagine that I was having a tough time coming up with anything. And while I was freaking out in front of the computer, she came up to me with this and she was like, this is so easy. Just draw something like this. You know, I didn't win, but I think if I submitted this, I would have actually won. Anyway, I like this drawing so much that I put it up on the fridge, but when I woke up the next morning to look at it, she had thrown it in the garbage. So when I asked her why she did that, she said, oh well, why would you put up such a horrible drawing? Now the thing is my mom isn't an artist, she's a nurse, but she saw that I was struggling and she picked up a pen and tried to find a solution in a way that I would understand. And I really appreciated that. In a similar vein, I learned that last year my friend was learning how to draw for the first time, but I was the last one in my group to know. They never told me because they were embarrassed and that made me really sad. I get it, you know, it's really hard being a learner surrounded by talent. I went to art school and experienced ego death. But outside of art being my career, I really like art. Obviously seeing as I survived ego death for it. And it made me really sad that I couldn't share something that I liked with a friend. The same way it made me sad when my mom thought that her drawing wasn't worth sharing. Sorry, can you scroll down? I didn't learn to make art to show off to people or to feed some kind of superiority complex. I learned it to make money, you know. I was two years old picking up a crayon for the first time. I didn't know what any of that meant. I didn't understand how the world worked. I was just doing it for fun. And I'm pretty sure that at some point in this presentation, you thought, oh well, I can do that. That looks so easy. And that's good because you can. I don't think creating should be scary and I don't think it should be reserved for a few special people. Like imagine for a second being unable to speak. Imagine having like thoughts and feelings and ideas but no way to express them. You're all better people than me because I would be locked up. But have you ever heard someone say something and feel so vindicated because they said exactly what you were feeling? And not only do you get the satisfaction of them saying out loud for everyone to hear but you also understand yourself better because they put your abstract thoughts into concrete words. I feel like that's art because not only, wait, hold on a second. Not only is art a way to be seen and heard and learn. It's a conversation that's happening everywhere all the time. It could be about loss, about love, about people, dressed in spandex, slinging spiderwebs across the multiverse. Expression is a key part of the human experience and I think that's why art should be accessible. Thank you.