 Thank you. Hello. Hello. My name is Serge Mayurov. Welcome to the Pipeline Manager Strikes Back. Yeah, it's working. Awesome. So I was on the last Blender conference and I had those nice guns. And as usual, I'm representing today Blackboard Studios. By the way, yesterday I was in Wallaby, so my voice has changed, so I'm really sorry for that. So we had the pleasure to create live action videos and 3D animations for some of the biggest brands in the world. And I'm going to talk today about challenges and obstacles we had in various projects from previous to post and in between. I hope you learned something from this talk and occasionally it's going to be educational. And on to, wait, sorry, sorry. Of course, all the jokes are not working. Educational. Yeah. So yeah, without further ado, let's move on to our latest showreel. So the first project that I want to talk about is going to be fast and easy. Puffy, a matrix company. It's about a turtle on a shoulder. It's easier to watch the movie than to explain, so let's watch the movie. Six years ago I went to a magic show in Vegas. The next morning I wake up with a screaming turtle attached to my shoulder. Kyle! How does it feel? That's a stupid question. I am so Kyle. Freaking Kyle. Tired. So why did you leave your last job? Had to get some sleep. So I tried a puffy matrix that guarantees better sleep or your money back. Puffy comes with a lifetime warranty. Deliver straight to your door and it's made in the US. You know what? It actually worked. Even the turtle is getting some rest. Do I sleep better? Absolutely. Am I happier? Well, I still have a turtle on my shoulder that's going to ruin every chance I'll have for a normal life. But I sure am glad I got that puffy matrix. It says here your name is Dave. Yes. Yes it is. Kyle. Okay. So a little bit about this project. We had a shooting day for less than a day in one location. All the shots that you've seen, they were made in the same place at somebody's home. He used to have productions at his place. So it was really nice to have a shooting day in less than a day. It was really quick and easy. And the second thing is that the turtle was an animatronic. So we got this turtle from a company named Anantomorfex. They've been in the industry for years. They did some crazy jobs for mass attack and many black. You should visit their site. They have awesome work. So we got the package from them and we opened it and we got the turtle. And we had to check that everything works technically and we had to check that everything works on somebody's shoulder. Okay. So the turtle was, as I said, an animatronic and we had to get it back to the company. The turtle is a whole undamaged because it's not cheap. So how did we pull this shot? Anyway, so let's do it like in CSI and zoom in into the hidden pixels of this shot. I'm going to explain what happened. So we bought this turtle on CGTrader, three and a half bucks, not bad. And we mushed it together in blender. We sent it to somebody who actually 3D prints stuff. He split the turtle into parts. It looked like a white glossy turd. And then he painted it and now it looked like a brown turd. So anyway, we were happy with the turtle. But the problem that we stumbled upon was that when we tried to dive with the turtle, it jumped back because it's made of plastic. So the easy solution was to make me be behind the actor, grab the turtle and dive with him. And because it was made of parts, the head was popping out occasionally to the water. But we managed to have the shot. So I want to conclude this project. Animatronics are cool. There is certain magic to animatronics. You know it's a puppy and it's still funny. Always have a stunt turtle. Oh, by the way, this shot of the elevator, it was done in a box in the backyard of the same place. We occasionally had coffee and cookies for the team there. So I guess the third conclusion is rich people have the best shooting locations. I'll move on to the next project. Sodastream. Bubbly bottles everywhere. Let's watch the movie. Sodastream presents Duo, the first sparkling water maker that lets you sparkle in both plastic and glass bottles. Featuring a new sleek design built with stainless steel and high quality materials, including a new and innovative quick-click feature for a quick and easy setup. Enjoy ultimate control on how you sparkle your drink with the press of a button. Never ordinary. Always exciting. The Duo comes with two stylish bottles for all your indoor and outdoor needs. A stylishly designed glass carafe for a perfect dining experience. And a sleek and slim Triton durable bottle for outdoor use. Sodastream Duo compact design fits almost anywhere and comes in both black and white, so it's sure to complement your decor. Sodastream Duo, the new generation of eco-friendly sparkling water. Yes, bottles. So in this project we had zero simulations. We decided that it would be quicker to have a shooting day just for pouring water and liquids. And those two shots are the only shots that made it to the final edit. And I'm going to talk about sexy bottles. So how do you do a sexy bottle with bubbles? I'm going to take you to an old article by Greg Zhao. He wrote about how we create bad glasses of water in 3D. So the rough idea is that when you create your bottle or a glass of water, this is the model, for example, you get the cylinder for the liquids, and then you get this thing, which is wrong. You can really see the borders of the glass. And the way the ray light works is it gets into a first breaking point, gets another one into the water, a third and a fourth one. In reality, they should be unanimous. You get one entering point and then you get out. So it should look like this. So we had the same approach. We took the bottle and it looks weird. You can see the weird borders we had around the bottle. And we just took the liquids inside, flipped them, and then it looks more natural. And for the bubbles, we actually rendered a separate render for the bubbles. We just made a simple particle system with some shading tricks of simple fresneles. And that's it. We just rendered them as cards. We spliced everything together in After Effects and we put some nose on the bottles and we pasted some bubble cards. That way we have full control over the bubbles in this project. So now that we learned how to create sexy bottles, SodaStream told us that they want another project. We had the 70s Independence Day in Israel. So a project with lots of flags, lots of patriotism and sexy bottles in stock footages. Let's watch the movie. Yeah, flags. So let's watch some breakdowns from this project. So the first shot is the statue of David. And this is the original stock footage. Now we had to decide whether we manipulate the existing footage and the existing David or we just replace it with a more controllable 3D model. And also the client wanted us to cover his stuff. So we decided to go with the 3D model approach. We bought it from CJ Trader, I think. And we erased David from the footage. And then as usual, we just rendered something with the bottle itself. By the way, as I mentioned before about the flipping normals, at that time we didn't have geometry nodes, so we used dynamic paint. So every time the liquid touches the bottle, it flips the normals or have a control over the transparency of the shader. And this is the final shot. And to the next one, the koala shot. So again, we have the original footage. And again, we bought a 3D model of koala. We created a rough representation of the scene with the koala hugging the bottle for the shadows and ambient occlusion. And by the way, koalas have two thumbs on their hands. Educational. So we have the shot, we have some shadows. We Photoshopped the hand of the koala. The rest of the bottle was made. Some highlights, some colors and some posts. And this is the final shot. We managed this shot easily because koalas barely move, so the pasted hand just worked out of the box. And to the last shot of this project, the Golden Gate. So again, we have this shot. We have the original stock footage. And we had to put some bottles on the bridge. So again, we raised the thing, bought a model, got it back, but this time with some bottles. Some shadows and we wanted to bring back the road for realism. Some shading and shadows, optical flares, because we can't have a project without that. And some colors and this is the final shot. Now let's conclude this project. Replacing the entire subject. This is what I say about deciding whether we erase the whole thing or modify the stock footage. Yep. Beware of your ray lights. And shooting liquids. As I said, sometimes you need to use simulations, but I hate simulations. And sometimes it's just faster and quicker to have a shooting day for liquids. Yeah, on to the next project. Healthy I.O. Turn table rooms. Let's watch the movie. Light moves at its own pace. Healthcare isn't always in sync. Healthy I.O. empowers people to transform minutes in their daily routine into meaningful healthcare moments. Turn the smartphone camera into a medical device, providing clinical-grade results that are transmitted to a clinician instantly. Pull our partners to generate better healthcare outcomes across a variety of patients' needs by seeking healthcare with the speed of life. Healthy I.O. Yeah, so in this project it looks like we had a rotating stage with a static camera that shoots it all. But in reality, when we had the pitch for this project, we couldn't find such stage and we didn't have much time until the shooting day. And creating something like that from scratch was just too costly. So we explored the idea of 36 degrees of rails and the camera will shoot the stage around. Now, the idea of rails wasn't the only one which we explored. We also had a talk with a guy who uses spider camps. Those are crazy camps with networks of cables that float around. You can see those on live shows or stadiums. But it wasn't steady enough for us to get this smooth ride around the stage. And also, for the same reason, we had a talk with cameraman on rollerskates. But we passed for the same reasons. By the way, this is an AI-generated image. I couldn't find something better on the web. Okay, so we have the perfect circle of rails. And we stumbled upon a problem that we didn't find an indoor big enough to have such a big rail. So we had to cut it to half. Anyway, we searched for rails and we got this video from someone who found some rails. And we had like a few days before shooting day. And the head of the studio, we will call him Noam because it's his real name. He told them, well, guys, it looks really oval to me. It doesn't look like a semicircle. And of course they answered, nah, it's fine. It's gonna be okay. So whenever you hear someone says that, it's not gonna be okay. But anyway, we couldn't be too choosy because, again, the deadline is coming. And we started to build the whole production. And as you can see from the video, it's a big production. Lots of crewmates and lots of gear, even for a semicircle. To stitch together the rooms, we wanted to stitch the rooms together with the half rail. And simultaneously, we wanted to shoot one room and build the other one. Now, I'm going to show you how it looks roughly. So we have the camera covering the first room. This is the point of view of the camera. Then we offset the semicircle to the other room and it covers the right room. Now, at this point, I had lots and lots of previs sent to the cameraman. We used Blender to show the cameraman what's the distance of the camera. Can we stitch those rooms? What's the radius of the rail? And so dozens and dozens of previs just to get it done. And at this point, I told the cameraman, it's okay. We can stitch the rooms. For example, this is the point of view of the last one. For example, those are the two rooms that you've seen right now. This is the first one, this is the second one. All I have to do is to find a point where they conjure. And the next problem is, of course, the overlapping of the walls. But that's not a problem because the fix is good old masking. Now, this is a rough representation. It was made under a minute. But it's only made to get the idea that we can stitch the rooms. Everything's fine. And then they told me that they want... Yeah, this is how it looks like. They told me they want the rooms bigger. They want it to be more realistic. Let's make it feel like they live in real rooms. So I said, okay, fine, we'll manage that. And then they told me that they want to split the rooms. Because they wanted to control the cables and lights in between the rooms and create a real door that can actually open. And this is a good representation of how we shoot one room and simultaneously build the other one. Now, remember this guy? Well, non was absolutely right. It was shorter and it was oval. So we had to get the idea how we managed to end this production successfully. And we were at set the day before the shooting day and we got live footages on the spot and we sent some privacy. So the idea was like that. We offset the camera. We shoot to the center of the room. Then I'm sending some privacy for the cameraman to get the markings of the next rail so it will look roughly like a semi-circle. They put from the same point the camera and continue the rest of the shooting. This is how it looks like. This is the first rail. And then when we finish, we start to build the next one. In the meantime, we get some other shots like close-up or medium shots. And then we get another one. And because we have to stitch the same room from the center, we have to tell the actors to be in the same exact pose to stitch it well. Yeah, I tried to find a conclusion for this project. But the problem is that we couldn't be too choosy because the solution of the rails and those specific rails were the only thing that we had before the shooting day. But maybe the post team is crucial on set. We were the day before the shooting day and we tackled those problems because I couldn't stitch the rooms together and we didn't know why. And so, yeah, we had to find a solution also. So be the shooting day guys and those. So on to the next project. Anxious. A music video clip with time-lapse lighting. So the premise was fairly simple. We had a singer floating over the bed inside a room with a window, with a cityscape, with a time-lapse of 90 days that projects the lighting into the room. And we have a time-lapse of appearing and disappearing trash over the place. Now, I'm going to show you a special cut of the clip. It's shorter, it's under a minute because it's too long and we don't have much time. And also, I switched the music because I don't want to have YouTube copyright infringement. So I searched in Audio Jungle for Elevator. And, yeah, enjoy the clip. Yeah. Okay. So what we had to do for this project was create a city-type apps, add CG trash to the footages, and also enhance dust and smokes. The director told us that they're going to use a special camera with a special crane that can record in real-time the placement in 3D space of the camera. And also he wanted to use a screen for the window. Bless you. That can parallax in real-time in front of the camera. So with Unreal Engine, with the time-lapse that we create beforehand. So in this project, we had no tracking, no green screen, and even not so much lighting because there's a trick we do every time we shoot the VFX. We get on set with a 36 degrees camera. And because we have all those light switches that you saw, it was handy to have a moving HDR. So, yeah, that was nice. I'm not going to talk about the wire removal. That's another topic. So the question that we can all ask is, well, what can get wrong? Well, we went to see the camera. At that day, it was on the set of Ninja Warrior. And we tried to export the data with this particular footage. And we went back to the studio, and what we've got is this thing. So as you can see, it didn't work. And we really tried to export the data properly and to combine it with the footage. Just couldn't make it. And we even tried some Autodesk software. And still didn't get it. And we made a conference call with the cameraman himself to ask some questions. And the first thing he told us was, well, guys, when you figure it out, can you please teach me? So we had a few days before shooting there, and we decided to force it with good old tracking. But it wasn't fun, because let's see this shot. Let's say we had some trackers all over the place. Let's track. Wap. Wap. So most of them just died. And why is that? Because the light switches were just too brutal. The tracking point didn't know how to go on. So of course there were solutions, but when you have so much light shifting, let's see, this is the upper view of the room. We have the right lights. We have the lamp on the table. We have the lamp on the left. We have those lights. We have a white box on the ceiling. And of course the cherry top. Two spots as the sun. So it wasn't fun to track at all. And about the HDR. This is the HDR that we've got from the shooting day, which looks nice, but what I learned painfully through this project is that HDRs are great for one subject or for a main character. The problem is that when you have stuff all over the place in different places of the shot and with different light conditions that switch every second, it's not going to work. So how did we manage to go through this project? Pain. So let's break down some shots. So we have this shot. This is the original one. Some green screen and some marker removal. Lots of shit lying around in CG. Then we had to balance the blacks and whites of the CG trash and make some yellow spills where needed. And this is the final shot. And what I said before about the centric subject, it worked out of the box for something like this. One hatch tray with some tickets. So the lighting was great for that. This is the final shot. And another example. This is the piano. Although it covers almost the whole shot, it still has one source of lighting. And we needed to control the keys, so we just pasted CG keys on top of that. And it looked nice fairly fast. And buffing the dust was an easy task. We just used some packages and presets. By the way, at this point one of the crew members threw a piece of wool into the single space. So that was not fun. So I want to conclude this project. Don't trust robots. And always have a guy or a girl. If the cameraman doesn't know how to get you the data that you need, those are some serious red flags. And custom address for centric subject. This is something that I learned the hard way. You need to do something else for that. So on to a happier project. Platica. This is going to be a back-to-back. Two projects at one price. We had the same client, Platica, and he wanted two movies at the same time. A 10th anniversary for a group of games they had. And another movie for the final... the ending of a trilogy for another game they had. So let's watch them together. And I want to compare the two leading female characters of those two projects. So let's watch those. Yeah, and now on to the next one. Spoilers, it won't. Yeah. So let's talk about fortune. The goddess of fortune. We had like dozens of designs for that character. I think the design process went in between four different projects for, I don't know, like a couple of years. Essentially in this specific movie, the client approved this design, which for me it looks nice. But when we sent the second project with Nancy, the client said, wow, this is the best character you've ever done for us. I mean, she looks way better than fortune. And I was baffled by that. I mean, for me she looked a bit... She looked nice, but a bit washed out and she has some weird features. And we tried to figure out what happened. And we talked to lead sculptures and models in our industry. And they told us essentially one thing. It was the appealing of her animation. Because this is a big project, we had lots of people working on it. Of course we have lots of different animators working on different shots. There is a variation between the animations and also she sometimes looked a bit robotic. And the main thing that one model had told me is that you can't really figure out where she's looking at, even if she's looking straight into the camera. So it's really important that her gaze is going to be clear. In Nancy, which was a smaller project, we had one animator working on all the shots and the animation was pretty appealing and her eyes are always focused. You always managed to see the eyes clearly. Oh, and by the way, this guy, nobody cared about. I mean, we showed this character even rendered in animation and the client said, yeah, he looks awesome. It's like, all you need for a good, approved character is a strong jawline, like a weird giga-chad. So, yeah, let's conclude this one. Inanimous appealing animation, it seems like it's a simple thing, but it's not. Even with stick figures, you can make the user feel when you see a good animation and clear eye gaze. One of the models even told me to unblur the motion blur I put on everything on the eyes of the characters because they have to be clear. So after we managed to go through those two projects, we had another one with Platica and with the same character. And this time we had epic skies and statues. One day, Noam, he told me the project is going to be with some cloud simulations and I hate simulations. I don't know why should I wait for something. It's 2022. Yesterday I was in Wallaby, I had the fast light. So he told me, he sent me this previs of some shots with clouds. Yeah, so what do we have here? A sea of clouds, a gate made out of clouds appearing from somewhere. Huge horses that interact with clouds. So we managed to do that in Embergen. They have some nice real time presets. They have good presets for clouds. Most of the presets are real time but in this case the clouds are still heavy. So all the time lapses you see are faster. So anyway, something that we stumbled upon was that we can't create a whole scene in Embergen, a whole shot, because like with different clouds and the horses and the gates all together, because then we have to upscale the resolution and then the computer just dies. You see this sad face and it looks like it's doing something but it's actually just dead. So we had to split it up as always. We made some generic clouds that we can populate with the whole scene and we have those duckling horses going through a cloud. So we have this kind of cloud that swishes up and then we had some special clouds with a swoosh on the side so it looks like the horses go by. And for this shot with the whole in the clouds that was actually simpler. We just used a Boolean cylinder with some fractal noise and vortex modifier. Now for the gates, we had to make it like it appears from downwards. So I made a windstrobe that pushes the gate down and I wanted to make it reversed in animation. So it will look like this. But the problem is that Embergen is physical software so we couldn't just make it like that. I had to export the OpenVDB sequence. This is how we connect between the softwares. And I didn't find online a good solution for reversing files by their numbers so I just had to rename it manually the whole thing. Yeah, I guess that if you're a software developer it will be easier for you but not one. I tried everything and it was just faster for me to do it under like five minutes. Anyway, you can see that we started to build the scene to see what's working, populate the shot, trying some different lights and at this time, light groups was introduced into Blender so of course I downloaded the build and you always have many builds for different occasions. So we had some light groups for heavy cyan and direct sunlight and some low red key and some different lights whatsoever. And we combined and I want to show you the final project. This is going to be the last project that I'm going to talk about so let's watch the movie. Augustus Caesar. You have arrived just in time for the festival. All Rome celebrates in your honor. Will they still remember me? Centuries from now? They surely will. The entertainment will continue far into the future. An entire month of new and exciting celebrations known forever more as August Fest. New features with more fun than ever before. It begins now. So I want to thank you. You're really positive today so that's nice. I want to conclude this talk. Everything can go wrong, just no one. And of course always have a stunt turtle. Thank you.