 Now I can hear myself. Hey. Hello, everybody. My name is Robert. Oh now it's stronger. My name is Robert Ryu I am the director of innovation technology at real by fake It's a VFX company based in Montreal and we have an office in Los Angeles and in Mexico So director of innovation technology that means that my job is to find the latest greatest technology and bring it to real by fake But before that I was a CG supervisor at the company and I want to show you the latest project I worked on the last project I worked on as CG supervisor at real by fake and it's called aftermath. It's a feature film and We did over 600 shots CG shots in blender in it It was the biggest job we ever did in blender And I'm gonna show you everything that went well and everything that went bad at the same time because there were many things I Also have a YouTube channel called blender Bob. So a show of hands. How many of you guys have seen my channel? Whoa, okay, pretty much 50% so that's good. That's good. That means the other 50% You go and go check it out on YouTube a blender Bob. So I talk about the visual effects I'm the goal of the the channel is to show that blender is a viable tool to use to use it for VFX So yeah, many clips that I did more than that actually the second one who cares is my most popular one check it out So last year I came here I did at the beacon conference and I was talking about the pipeline We use that real by fake and I've shown this shot here That was the only shot I was authorized to show and you can see the before and after since last year We only added the blinking thing and we made the bridge a little bit longer And I'm gonna show you everything else that we did on this. It's kind of dark and we lower the lights, please Like we're all adults you can go down Yeah, okay, so uh, that's that's the way it is So what I presented last year was that the idea was that everything would be linked and we would use library overrides everywhere So the modeling would be linked into the look dev Look dev would be linked into the rigging and if there's no rigging go straight to layout and the layout scene is Linked into the animation and animation in lighting VFX is separate then we mix everything together, right? That's the theory and it works for small projects, but when you work on bigger projects It becomes more complicated So the scenes were so heavy that it broke everything It did our pipeline completely broke so we had to adjust it as we're doing our stuff So modeling once the modeling was done We just renamed it look dev and we just did the look dev directly into this scene That's how we had to do it. We did link in the rigging So that was fine and we linked everything in the layout But then we had another issue is was that if we changed the look dev and we opened the layout scene It wouldn't work. So we had to do what we called a round trip where we had to Reopen the rigging scene and just to kind kind of update it just open save and reopen it into the layout for this for it To work. It was like completely insane because what so many assets like this it was It was a bit of a nightmare and for the layout animation and lighting We just updated the scene. So once the layout was done We just renamed it animation and then renamed it lighting It's not actually renaming because our pipeline is more complicated than that But that's the the simple version of how we did this We had other issues also because we have a bridge The main asset for this show is a bridge and the bridge is made of a lot of collections And the idea was that we would just unlink all the collections that we don't want But there's a bug in blender if you remove a link that is under another collection It's not gonna work when you reopen the scene everything was gonna come back and that was really problematic for us because the bridge is 1.6 gigabyte. So every time you had to reload all this stuff and it's like So what we did instead was to load the entire thing and we just checked out the visibility of the of the thing and I realized this bug actually when I was doing this presentation because I was like How come it doesn't work and then I figured out. Oh, it's when a collection is under another collection That's what it breaks if you just have collections and you you you unlink them it works But if they're under another collection, it doesn't work Nothing that saved our life was a 3.3 when it came out because there's a problem also that we had in there in blender It's that if we did a library overwrite on one object on the bridge It would do a library overwrite on every single object in the bridge and everything became so so it was unusable It was driving us crazy 3.3 fixed it and then we could like start relaxing relaxing and start doing our job the way we expected it to be done Fog was a serious issue because the bridge well They filmed in the studio and they did part of the bridge in the studio and they put a lot of fog so we had to make fog to match the plates and Rendering the fogs the bridge has 300 lights in it plus all the cars It was so the render times were just enormous. We had to do all the fog income So all the shots that you will see except for the lights for the fog for the lights all the fog You will see on all the shots. I will show you all the fog is on in come So the main issue heavy geometry We when we started this project, so we had a 80 nvidia a 2080 cards and we couldn't handle the bridge It was too heavy so we had to make a low res version of the bridge and we could switch on enough now It would have been nice It would be nice if blender add a system like you have in render man or an Arnold where you could have a proxy model and Only at render time it will load the high res model You have options like a lot of high and other systems that exist But they still load everything in the scene and this is what we wanted to avoid We didn't want to load 1.6 gigabyte of data every time we wanted to work on the bridge So when we switched for the 4090 it was not an issue anymore I will show you the bridge where the 4090 it just goes like super fast So that fixed the problem too many links level and overrides I told you that we fixed this by just copying the scene. It was a You know a stupid workaround, but that's the way we did it layer overrides was fixed with a 3.3 heavy textures That's another issue Cycles doesn't doesn't have mip mapping if you don't know what mip mapping is It's like one huge texture You could have like an 8k texture and in the same file you have a 4k 2k 1k 512 and goes on I think to 32 by 32 and at render time the renderer will say, okay, this subject is far away I don't need an 8k texture there. I'm just gonna load the 512 So you save a lot of memory doing this Cycles doesn't have this every other renderer on the planet does has it but cycle doesn't has it I know I know that they're working on it But we didn't have it at the time So the only thing you could do is to go to simplify and reduce the textures But if we have shots where we see the bridge from far away and then we get super close Then we get into an issue because we don't have enough resolution when you get into close-up So that was a bit complicated At the proxy system. I talked about it and here goes the plant It's okay. Nobody's watching you So yeah, the proxy system. I talked about that too many lights for the fog That was a problem also because we had just as I said 300 lights So we had a lot of noise for the fog it was impossible to render and the render times They were very long and we wanted to render in GPU So we had to keep everything under 25 gigabytes of VRAM. So for a lot of you guys 25 is like 24 is like I'm never gonna reach that. Yeah, we did So it was in enough So this is the bridge. It's the Tobin bridge in Boston It's a real bridge and obviously we cannot shut down the bridge and just to shoot a movie because it's a it's a bridge They need it. So we had to go to plan B, which is doing it in CG. Yay more job for us so that's the bridge here and This is with a 6088 graphics card with 48 gigs of VRAM. So it goes super fast. There's no problem with it Here's a wireframe and you can see some parts are denser. That's because we break these parts and we distort them and We can see also that's like, you know, it's a 15 million polygons. It goes super fast with this card But the 2080s was just choking on that bridge So we have many sections of the bridge so we can turn them on and off So if we just look at the north part and we don't want to load everything in the back for nothing So we're just turning it off and you will see also that we have an overwrite. Okay, we have sub sub collections also and we have a driver Lattice and override here because the bridge is curved the real bridge is curved But when they shot in the studio, they made part of the bridge. It was flat So we had to be we had to find a way to make the bridge go flat or curve depending if it was an outside shot A drone shot or if it was a studio shot So now we could have a straight flat bridge I'm gonna show you what it looks like if we look at it on the viewport with all the textured textures loaded at full resolution Because the the 6080 has 48 gigs of VRAM. So this is a real-time it takes to load it But you will see a shift, but that's actually the real-time it takes. I wanted to show you how long it takes And that's it. So it's pretty fast and This is the bridge with all the textures And if I move around See the refresh is really fast You consider renewing the sample the same thing about 128 and just goes like super fast We rendered the entire movie at 128 most of the time sometimes 256 But we didn't need to go more than that because we use the denoiser So for for the bridge For the outside of the bridge for the environment what we did we did some drone shots But they were shot outside the bridge at different angles and we would film at 45 degree angles and we would stitch them together to have a nice Long video that we would put in a card in the background on the cylinder actually, but that was done in comp So we had the cameras and blender we would export them in Alembic and it nuked they could load their cameras and they did the background in in comp So what all we would cover every part of the bridge like this so depending on which area of the bridge We were would take the background that corresponds to this So this is the set They did it's it's not that long because the studio there's a limit in how long you can do in a studio But we had like 30 cars maybe on the bridge So if they film the section they bring all the cars then they need another section They had to remove all the cars bring all the other cars and they kept switching the cars like this all the time And the cars were not always exactly at the same place So sometimes we're something like hey, it wasn't this car supposed to be there and Some issues like this and you can see there's a blue screen in the back, but not on the sides So that means we had to do some roto So some of the assets this the pickup for the main and the main character It was important to match exactly the references So like this car is dirty in front and everything because there was a blow up so other cars as dirt and dust on it So we had to match the real thing Jesus struck here All the cars we found them on the you couldn't buy them from different websites This one was impossible to find only found one that was a 3d printing Thing and it was only the body. There was nothing else on it. So we had to build everything else around it So bunch of cars like that that we did like that that we did It's really really difficult to make a Photorealistic car I don't know if you ever tried and now we had to deal with cars at night and in a foggy environment And in a foggy environment, it's complicated because all the reflections becomes dull and you make your car and doesn't look real It looks like a cheap CG car, but there's something that helps a lot. It's called Compositing so you can do all your Reflections and everything you output the glossy part and in comp they can use a crypto mat to just isolate like the Body the paint job not the paint job, but the painted parts and blurred them to try to match the plate Because sometimes we would have the real cars and the CG cars together. So they had to match So motorcycle We have a drone here. We bought the drone. We just added the the gun under it into bang bang bang This movie is like a diehard on a bridge So yeah, it is. That's how it's it was sold. It's diehard on a bridge So Like this police truck here, you can see there's some dirt on the side We took pictures of the real truck and we just mapped it on the side to make sure that we have the same same dirt The characters that we had some CG characters for CG takeovers they look kind of a game ish Game, you know video game ish that's because Usually they are like far away and in the dark in the fog and everything we don't see all the details So we're not gonna waste time doing stuff that we don't need to see this one is the main character This this guy has more details on him And the bad guys all that all that mask. So why they all the same mask just different paint paint job Okay, let's start with some shots. So this is a very boring shot here You can see there's a little bush right there here And I don't really need my laser pointer But I just wanted to show off that it's blue and not green and red. So yeah now But what I want to show you is that Little branches here, you will see they removed that bush But they kept the branch just to keep the depth and everything so they just a roto these little branches So this is what we did with it So we added the Tobin bridge board The the there's a building on the left and the bridge in the back in the city And you see the bush is gone, but the little branches are still there Then we get into something more complicated. This shot was obviously shot in a studio You can see the crew and the panels reflecting on the car So there's no way we could keep the pickup truck We had to change the entire thing and the shot is actually much longer than this So we needed to to elongate it so we had to track the shot and then continue extend the camera to make it longer This is the layout. I'm not gonna show you 600 shots like this. Don't worry This is the light pass and if you look at it, it doesn't look that realistic I mean it looks looks okay, but it's not for a real But it's okay because Compositing is your friend and when you do CG starts 50% of the shot is compositing 50% is CG You will never get something that looks photo real straight from CG Compositing changes everything and this is what I mean and This is a you know, I told you about the drone shot that we did in the background We did it at different time of day so that we could have like this is just before Becomes completely dark and now we have the fog So this is a shot in the studio doesn't have any VFX in it I just wanted to show you how much fog they put when they shot it So it's a way for them to just okay. We don't need to do the blue screen on this one We're gonna save money. We're just gonna put a lot of fog But not all the shots were equal because it's a fog machine So sometimes you have a lot of fog sometimes you don't have enough So we had to adjust for every shot to have a continuity that would work And we got some shots like this also where the the car lights are off, but they're supposed to be on So we add like the first the first day they shot all the lights were off and then they were on for the rest So we had to turn them on and that was not done in the in the CG Actually, it's just done in comp but we needed to track the car and add little fog in it and you know cloudy stuff That's the typical shot that we had here. So it's a drone shot now this Bridge has been blown up in the center and we need to replace the bridge So what are we gonna do paint it out? We're gonna keep the real bridge paint on the cars No, no, no, we need to replace the entire thing. It's much easier than trying to fix what's already there And it's a long shot So the first thing you need to do is to get a track you need to get a perfect track So you need to un-distort the plate track it make sure it's okay You do your CG stuff and then you re-distort it. So we have a very very very tight track This is the layout And you can see the bottom part. That's the plate we kept this part. It's good We don't need to change it what we need to change is what's behind the bridge So we need to make sure that you won't be able to tell the difference between what's behind the bridge and what's under the bridge Little occlusion occlusion some animation and some effects. Yeah, the effects were done in another software Excuse me and This is the final shot So it's completely seamless you cannot tell that the background is replaced and the mix between the plate and the background that we shot with a drone So it works perfectly Sometimes we get some shots. Oh, that's another one. I won't show you that's In this case the camera was going one way this what they shot But you know when you do show The shots keeps evolving and changing and changing and at the end. Well, the shot is going the other way It's full CG so the camera is moving the other direction So it was just something to put as placeholder for the editing and then we had to change everything So that's the lighting pass And the comp Again with that foggy environment So now we're getting pretty close and they're realistic in the photo real stuff And you have to remember also that all the shots that I'm showing you they're gonna go through color grading after this So this is what's coming out from the CG So we have the plate and they give us a lot of whatever and we need to match what they do But they will make another pass after this But that's not we don't do that's not our department we don't do the color grading So that's the beauty of going CG here So we can do any camera movement that we want so if the director wants this angle this angle this angle We can do it. No problem. We have the entire bridge. We have all the cars. We can do whatever they request So I'm just gonna show you some bridge shot and it's gonna get more interesting later But these are interesting because they have a lot of like big camera movement and we had to keep the background and everything And so I will show you this shot later where we added some people in this helicopter shot and I added this one just because I liked it. I thought it looks it looked pretty cool I should have put the the original the plate so that you could see it's just a little part of the bridge And everything else is a CG around it, but yeah, I didn't have time Okay, now we have some VFX some explosions so on set they did an explosion It's not supposed to be the real explosion because it's way bigger in real life Wow, not in real life But what they expect but we wanted to get some interactive light so reflections on the car and everything and this is what we did So we added some cars in the back We added the explosion and we made the bridge longer added the background the shot here this is the lighting pass here and We see it better with the occlusion because it's kind of dark and we always like to watch an occlusion pass because it always looks good I wouldn't make an entire movie just an occlusion. I Think I would call it occlusion and this is with the comp so they added a lot of particles So we don't necessarily need to do particles in CG They have a lot of elements that they can use in comp and it's from different libraries and stuff And you just bring it and they just render it straight into the into the compositing so Same thing with this and you look at this doesn't look like a cool movie shot But after the compositing then yay cool shot Now I talk about compositing if you look at this one it looks like super boring and this is what they did in compositing So you see it's day and night. It doesn't even look like the same shot That's how much they will push some stuff and all these little particles and stuff It probably from a bank of the just some FX bank and you just added it in the shot So another nice shot of the bridge here Helicopter shots All right now Some action We have two people on a bicycle They're on a rig the rig moves the camera moves and they're supposed to move on the bridge So we needed to do a track So that's the tracking shot and it's really hard to track because they didn't necessarily put trackers everywhere There's nothing to give us debt So they should have put some you know other things Unset just poles and stuff a light stand whatever so that we have something to track but we don't always have it so we have to deal with it and This is the lower the low res bridge that we had before you can see the flip the plate So the girl is looking on the other side and that at the beginning when we're using the 20 ad graphics card We had to use a lower lower resolution bridge. That was the bridge We gave it to compositing because you don't want to bring a 15 million polygon model into nuke. It's just gonna choke That's the lighting pass and you can see that we have the Two people in in the shot That's just an image plane in a background image that we put in front Compositing would give us they would do the blue screen for us They will do the the keying give it to us so that we can adjust the lighting with the plate to make sure that it's gonna Match and the final shot looks like this So we prefer to make the shots lighter and income They can make it darker and keep the details they want and play with the contrast and everything So that's why our shots when you look at them sometimes they look like Could have worked more. I don't know look at the final shot So another shot like this and you can see her hair is flip free flowing in the air That's really hard to to key and they didn't increase them incredible job We're very good at keying stuff at real by fake So this one at a plate the other one was full cheesy with this one at a plate So we had to track it and make sure that our vehicles are vehicles are at the right place And this is the lighting shot while it looks like crap because you have the cheap blue screen on top So on the edges it looks kind of funky, but that's the final shot here and goes super fast in the movie So there's a lot of action going on and This one is full CG so we have two characters in there. We don't see anything Okay, it looks nice on my screen, but this movie is called charcoal Okay, yeah, that's better. Okay, so we'll start from the beginning That's just Yeah, just I just want to show you. Oh my voice is better now. I got my FM radio voice Hey, it looks much better like this Okay This one was complicated because we went from a CG shot to mix with a plate If you look at this at the end the camera is kind of moving and kind of shaky and you may think like well Why did it like this? It's it's a CG shot. No, that's because when we get inside the truck. It's It's a plate actually so we need to track the the plate and reverse engineer it I should make it like backwards to make the movement a complete movement with it So that's the lighting pass So we put some some stuff in it, but that's not what's going to be used Occlusion pass And this is the final shot with the smoke added in another magician software And you can see the transition you cannot tell when it happens that it happens in the smoke, of course But we did the transition from the plate to the CG Wow Wow Wow, okay And that's the real shots actually shorter, but you see all the debris is they added in company. It's insane Another shot that looks kind of boring the guy's just on the ground like this and he's looking at this bright light source Tracking again. This is almost a node lock. So it's really hard to track and this is the layout shot and This is a lighting shot and again, we have the character in the foreground I didn't remove the big light so it looks kind of weird to have this big light there But and then you look at the asphalt on the ground It doesn't look real at all, but we don't care because we use a real one So it's just we just crossfade at somewhere in the plate And here we go. That's the final shot. So it's much cheaper than destroying a broad bridge Okay, now, let me tell you about videogrammetry Because we use videogrammetry on this or you can keep the light down The lights down So before I tell you about videogrammetry, I need to tell you about photogrammetry So video photogrammetry if you don't know what it is as you take an object and you take pictures from every possible angles And then you bring it into a software like in this case It's reality capture and it's gonna recreate an object in 3d that you can bring into your favorite 3d software Blender here. So you get a shaded model and it's pretty cool Now somebody thought hey, what if we try it at 24 frames per second and this is what videogrammetry is and To our knowledge the first movie that use this was skyfall and it's called a skyfall because they're falling from the sky and they use they use videogrammetry for this and Dave Stump who works with us at Real by Fake was on this team when they did this so some of these shots are videogrammetry and 10 meters before they hit the ground pull the parachute Come on pull. All right, and of course, they're okay because you know, it's James Bond and this is how it was made So Dave is the guy in the in the center. So they were in this wind tunnel here They used I think they were 4k cameras. The they were 14 4k cameras and they were the only ones available on the market at the time So they took them all to do this to do this job here So it was really innovative at the time. Nobody has done this before Which is pretty cool when you do something that never body Nobody ever did before and this is what it looked like. It's very boxy But then you have this algorithm that tries to make it, you know better, but it's still, you know, very very basic compared to what I will show you So if you want to do this, you need a fixed camera system So you need your cameras always be at the exact same place because they are calibrated and since it's a bit complicated You want a constant uniform lighting because the lighting will be done in CG Okay, and you need to an automatic way to cut out the background because you don't want to process everything that you don't need When you do this So this is our studio actually it could be one of our studios because this stuff we can move it anywhere we want We can box it we can easily move it and bring it somewhere else So if we need to shoot something in Amsterdam, we put it on a plane We bring the system here we set it up and we're good to go in about a date to set it up And that's what the studio looks like We are the only one in Canada that has this system and there's just like six in North America that includes United States You know Hollywood this is the capture area the red circle So it's it's from three to five meters the bigger we get it the less resolution we get So if we need something just somebody going like this for for a crowd. We're gonna go with a smaller circle and this out how it works. So first you shoot a Background a clean plate. So that's the first image. Nobody's in there Then you have the person who goes in there to does to do a stuff and the software will mask everything around the person in This case, it's represented in blue here And the software also knows that there are stuff that will be blocked automatically like the lights and the cameras Which are represented in green here So let me show you what a better explanation maybe of what it is So I got this camera here and imagine you have a volume everything That's blue is the volume for the videogrammetry and what you want to do is cut everything around the character So you just cut this part. So what do you get if you change the camera angle? Well, you get You get this Now you do this from another camera starting from this geometry here and you cut from another camera and You get this so you do this with all the cameras and at the end You get a pretty good shape of what the model is gonna look like but this is not the entire way to this not the entire process It's just gonna give you like a boxy result that later will be the software will make it more accurate The good the bad and the ugly well It's very good for mid to background characters You don't want to go too close because the textures are not high res enough and the geometry in a way will not be higher Resolution enough. It's awesome for crowds. I will show you some examples For extras you shoot something and then you don't have you need more extras in your shot and it's too late You already filmed everything. Well, that's the easiest way to add people. That's the way to do it We can shoot props so we can have people with the swords or for weapons And it could be while we do the videogrammetry or it could be later. We can add it later So we have a way to track You can have somebody with just a little stick and we have a way to track the stick so we can replace the thing We have motion blur motion blur is our friend. Okay, if you work in vfx, you know that and there's a lot of video re-metry system out there, but Arts can do motion blur and there's not that many of them that can do this because most of them are developed for VR And in VR, they don't care about about motion blur vfx can be good for vfx I'll show you an example if you want somebody for example on fire Well, you can have a stun guy with a mask And then you throw gas on him and you light him up and you have like three seconds of running and then you you know Exinguish the guy well with this you can have the guy burn forever We can also generate a skeleton so if you had a shot for somebody transforming into a monster for example Well, you could track the person in videogrammetry and you could have a skeleton at the same time that you can apply on your Monster and then you know income to the transition the morph So I could be using gaming also there's a plug-in that comes with the system for unreal So you can bring your stuff. It's a lower resolution, but you can you can do it. It's affordable By affordable, I will show you examples on why it's affordable No DOP you don't need your director of photography there because the lighting is constant You do the lighting when you do the 3d no permits again I will show you an example what I mean by no permits and we can move it to different locations like I said This is an example where we added the hats on their characters Now you may think okay Well, that's easy you just take a vertex and you parent something on it, right? But you need to understand that when you do videogrammetry the geometry changes every frame It's not a rig model every frame is different because it captures everything it captures a performance So if I move it's gonna capture the folds in my clothes If my hands are like this and they touch then the hands are just gonna merge together They're not gonna be separate geometry anymore. So the geometry changes every frame So if this is vertex 1000 maybe next frame vertex 1000 is here and then it's here So the hat would move all the way around. So how do you do this? Well, we have a secret recipe for that And I'm not gonna tell you Okay, so this shot here, this is a full CG shot. This is the Dakota building in New York And this is where John Lennon was shot in the 80s. So imagine you need to do a shot That's that happens there. So you want to shoot in New York? You need to close the street. You need to get the full crew there. You need security You need insurance you need permits. You need all this stuff. It's gonna cost you a fortune That is if they let you shoot there when this case, it's a full CG shot And if one more characters, it's just a slider, right one more characters. Yes characters How many do you want, you know, we can do we have no limits and the cool thing is We could do the same shot at night Same price so we can do any environment that we want So that's why I say it's affordable because you can do shots like this at our full CG and it's gonna be much cheaper Than filming in New York. That's for sure And you can see the light beam of the car. They light up the policeman and everything. That's pretty cool That's that's the cool stuff about video geometry Now this is me getting into a box, this is Ember-Gen and you can see I flicker from time to time That's because that's because Ember-Gen doesn't really support geometry That's changing every frame for Olympics. It kind of works, but it flickers But it still works for the simulation and now I'm catching on fire and I'm burning Now this is a typical example where you would need video geometry because this is just like rig models that you can buy online From libraries and you never see anybody's face because their faces are not animated So it would look very boring. So everybody is you know, nobody's looking forward No, they're all from the back Except for this guy here in front and he's super blurry because they want to hide that he doesn't have any expressions So if you want to make something more realistic, you need to do a presentation for a tram that's gonna cost 13 billion dollars. Well, why don't you spend a little bit of money on your presentation and use video geometry instead of these cheap characters The bad, okay, so it doesn't support transparent objects Because if you have like a water bottle, it's not gonna work for the for the video geometry It's not gonna work. Fine details. We cannot capture anything smaller than six millimeters So if you have a cigarette, it's probably gonna fade in and out sometimes it's gonna work Sometimes it won't so it's a bit complicated free flowing hair not gonna work because it's smaller than six millimeter Reflective material if you did any Photogrammetry, you know that anything metallic is not gonna work well because when you move the camera angle The reflections are different so not working and green cloth because we're shooting on a green screen If you have army people that works khaki colors works But if too if it's too close to the green screen we run into issues The ugly okay, so the geometry changes every frame as I said the textures change every frame also So if you want to paint out a logo on someone's shirt, you would have to do it for every single frame So if you have a 500 frame 500 frame sequence good luck painting it out and that it doesn't show Size of the volume will limit it to five meters as I said We can't change the shader much because it's just one surface and one texture So how do you isolate a leather coat from the skin? There are ways to do it But you need the leather coat to be blue and I will show you later Not with a leather coat, but what we can do to change some some stuff The amount of people that you can capture at the same time of it's a camera system that captures from 32 different angles So if you have too many people you get some occlusions occlusions Different kind of occlusions and then you lose details. There are sometimes there are no cameras that can see a specific point So it's not gonna work. Well also each character has 65,000 polys But if you have 10 people it's gonna divide this 65,000 polys to the 10 people So you will lose a lot of resolution doing this and the processing time is not a real-time thing Definitely not a real-time thing This is an example of the texture So you see try to paint out something. It's just not possible We created an add-on to empower stuff to make it easier So here I can select my thing and I will decide how many variations that I want so in a sequence it's just gonna take different ones here and Different parts in the sequence and here have the blue key texture This is something that I created so that we could key the characters So if they have a blue shirt, I could key them in blender and change the colors So you see when I import them, they all have a different Different colors the distribute thing is an add-on that I created go check my blender channel Thank you chat GPT Yeah, I don't code Chat GPT does all my add-ons So here if I select for example the face you can see I can key any color on my characters You can see she was wearing a blue shirt So I will go back to the blue and that's pretty cool And we have a lot of settings that you can play with Of course, everybody will have a different shade of blue so you can play with the hue the Saturation and the value for the blue to get the exact blue that you need for for the keying and Then all the settings under are for tweaking So I can change the seed The hue variations if I lower it everybody will get kind of this similar tone of colors And the more you make it more variation you will get and we have four different algorithms to create the different colors So some will have a more realistic look some will have more like Kind of the same colors or anyway, yeah, I'm not gonna show you them all but So yeah, we can you know change the saturation. I should have made this shorter Okay, so I will show you my blue laser pointer and no, okay Now the cool thing about this is that if I copy all these women and I copy them even as instances They will all get different colors So that's pretty cool. It works with instances too So I can fill out an entire stadium and will not see these repeat repeating patterns That is the same thing I just showed you We also have another way to change the colors, but this one They're not dressed in blue But there's still some stuff that we can do with the shaders without affecting too much the skin tone So even the jeans change color. So that's another method that we have The cool thing is because it's full 3d we can put the camera any way we want So we don't we're not limited like if you shoot on a green screen You're stuck with that angle that you shot with this. You don't have any limits So this is an example with six people at the same time and if you look at the ground, you can see there's some flickering That's because there's not enough cameras that can see the detail to create their videogrammetry But once they start moving defeat are fine. It works well on the ground And this is what I was telling you the woman doing the credit kid thing This is the full 65,000 polys, but with the six girls it's spread it on all of them So you can see the loss of resolution that we have and this is a bridge the bridge shot I was telling you at the beginning. So we added these policemen here and once it's come it's done like this now imagine in You're the director the shot is done and it's a real shot for example It's shot outside and says oh, I want to add some people there and you want to shoot this on green screen How are you gonna do this? You will need to track the shot You will need to get the data from the camera bring it to a motion control system a big robot That will redo the camera movement We have this system that will buy fake by the way and Then you would you would have to shoot on a green screen But what about all the lights the car lights and everything? How do you are how are you gonna match the light if you shot shoot this on a green screen? It's a nightmare. This is an easy solution Not a case here So you cannot tell that these are not real people and we can add as many people as we want Same thing here, you know if you if you had to shoot this on a green screen Imagine you have the light you have the shadows So you would have like a double shadow from the characters and the real shadows from the plate And you would have to income make sure that the shadows match and they don't overlap and And you have the lights also from the car and that lies the policeman if you have to do it And on a green screen will forget it and you also have the camera movement too So getting a motion control at that height forget it's not gonna happen and The last shot with the video geometry now. Let's talk about crowds The usual way to do crowd the old way to do crowd was to use in this case It's a motion control camera So it's a robot that does the same movement again and again and again And you shoot different people at different places and then you come them together That's how you can feel the entire room with just a few people That's how stadiums were done a long time ago on on rocket man. They use cards on green screen So a lot of cards a lot of people and That's how they filled up the stadium They did the same thing for Bohemian Rhapsody, so here these are all cards in there in the back There's a problem with cards Problem is that if you move the camera too much Well, they become flat because there are cards So you cannot you have a limit on how much you can move the camera But if there are 3d people you can do whatever you want Also because there are 3d characters you can relight the scene is gonna work if you use a card You cannot rely the card to a certain limit, but you cannot like a big light coming from the side It's not gonna happen. It's a flat surface So this is a test shot that we did here So it's all done in cycles I'm losing my voice so in this case we have about 18 people different people in there, so they all have set they all have different colors of clothes So it's you know, you would need to stop it. Whoops You would need to go back. You will need to stop it somewhere I don't know how to stop it in there. Anyway, you would have to stop it and try to see which people is the same You know which one correspond to So that's a that's it's just a test shot so Imagine if we take time and we spend more time on it what we could do we could fill out fill up a stadium like this very easily And this is how I did it when I bought the stadium All the seats were combined into one big group. So we have a 180,000 seats So what I did was to select some polygons and go co-planar to select just the top of the seats I Inverted the selection deleted everything then I took all the stuff and I separated into loose parts. So now I have A little plane for every seat there, but I don't need to carry all that geometry What I need is a single vertex to instant in stands it. So I will create a single verte here That's with the extra object add-on that comes with blender Select all these objects and just link the camera link the object data. So now they are all single dots I don't need this one anymore can select all these vertices Pick one of them and I combine them and that's how I get one geometry for every seat in there and Then I use a very very simple geometry node script and What it does is it actually checks the orientation of the character so that it will follow a singer or leader or whatever Follow an object and there's a collection for the crowd So you can put any object that you want in the collection is going to update automatically So that's my crowd collection here a bunch of Suzanne and The sphere here. That's my my singer for example. So if the singer moves on stage Well, all the everybody in the crowd will look so I can have my entire stadium filled with people and they will all look at the same place That's pretty cool. So I had the setup here where I made this eye low Definition so I can say like zero. I don't say anything One is just bonding box wireframe The other one is just box and then I see the full geometry because if you want to show the entire stadium with all the characters It becomes really really heavy. So sometimes you just want to make it You know work. It's easier to work with the bonding boxes instead and I can play with the density also So I feel a slider I can move the density So that's when I move around. So this is with a 4090. So you can see it's having a hard time with a 4090 because there's 230,000 people I think so that's a lot of stuff to manipulate So we use this back to one now the all bonding box and it goes super fast Now when I render this it's all in different layers all the layers that you can see there But now I turned on all the lights just to show you how long it takes to render something like this So this in real time Now for every frame it needs to reload all the textures for all the characters because it changes every frame and here we go So now I'm doing 256 samples and you see it's still going pretty fast And you know when you render it always goes faster at the end So 112 128 and this time for me to drink water and To 40 256 so it took one minute 36 seconds to render this in Full HD, which is not bad, huh with all the lights all the lights at the same time, which is a lot of lights The fog that's another that's another story Actually when I did the fog and the first time I did the stadium shot I did the fog in Evie because it was impossible to render in and Cycles help me please and Yeah, this is with everything rendered when I try to move the camera It's too slow But with the with the 4090 we can render the fog directly in cycle and we can have our characters to the wave if want to So I will finish with this shot here. You can see the wireframe here That's actually from Google Earth We extracted the data from Google Earth to make sure that we're in the right position at the right scale and everything We never use the Google Earth stuff for rendering. It's just for placement to make sure that everything fits This is the lighting shot Yeah, don't ask about the simulation and This is the final shot So it took us a year to do this movie The CG team is about 10 people who worked on this. It was a lot of work. It was the biggest project we ever made We had a lot of issues that we had to work with What to deal with and we've been through it and we finished in time and on budget, which is pretty cool Thank you so much and now go on YouTube and check Blender Bob. Thank you