Our next speaker is a specialist in the animation industry, please welcome Frank Rousseau.
So hello first of all, my name is Frank Rousseau and I'm going to introduce you to animation
movie pipelines.
So before going further into the presentations, I'm going to introduce myself a little bit.
I do web applications since 25 years and I do free software as a professional activity
since 10 years and I'm the founder too of a company named CGWire.
We are a bootstrap company, we are a team of five and we do a product that is aimed
at providing project management services for animation studios and this product is licensed
under HGPL.
So now let's talk about pipelines.
So what you have to understand first is that when you do an animation movie, you have to
follow a very industrial process but all the people working on it are creative people.
So their main focus is to make beautiful pictures and they don't really care about the rest.
So you have to deal with that two contradictory aspects and the first thing is to describe
roughly, to describe the main steps of the needed to build a movie.
So here I'm going to take a simple example that covers the main aspects of a movie but
of course there are subtleties for every movie but the main idea is that in every animation
production you have some elements named assets that will be displayed in the movie all along
the movie.
You have the shots which every time the camera frame is changed there is a new shot so the
movie is divided in many shots and the asset will be used in the shots.
So when you do, you build an asset for example a character, you have several steps.
The first one is the concept phase, it's a 2D step where you will draw your, you will
draw the idea of how the character looks, then the next step is to consist in sculpting
the character, making it in 3D.
Then you have to paint it, so you have to apply textures and physical materials.
So we name that step shading and the other important step is the rigging, basically you
add bones to your mesh, to your 3D model and you make a puppet of it.
Then once you have all your elements that are animable you are going to build your shots.
So first you need to have the animatic, the animatic is basically an animated storyboard
so it's a super rough version of the shot.
Then you go to a 3D version of the shot but it's still very rough which is named the layout.
It's more direct or thin so to check that everything is well positioned.
And the third step is to animate, the goal of the third step is to animate the shot.
So here you have the very precise animations, here your shot is almost done but you have
to render it so you add some lights and you bring all the elements you need to do the
render in the same scene and then you run the rendering.
And once you have the rendering you add some 2D effects on top of it and it's a compositing
step and after this step you have the final picture.
So now I talked about 3D animations but animations can be done in 2D, it's a very popular style
too.
So here the steps are a little bit different, we still have the concept but then we have
the design part, basically we draw exactly the elements we need in that step.
We have two main elements that are used in 2Ds are the characters and the backgrounds
because every shot has a different background almost.
And after that we have another step where every character will describe all the poses
that a character will have so it will be easier for the animations that will happen afterwards.
And when we do the shots we still have this animatic step because if you remember what
I said in the previous slide it's already a 2D operation.
Then we do a kind of rough layout and then we do the animation, the animation happens
only on the traits of the elements that are moving.
Because you know when you see a 2D movie you always have a beautiful background and
simpler elements that are moving so we animate the traits then we color them and then there
is a compositing step which assembles everything, backgrounds, traits and colors and to make
sure and then it gives you the final image.
So now that gives you the main steps needed to build a movie but now the question is how
we build the movie.
So of course we use software and in the animation industry there is a strong culture of IP,
secret and proprietary software.
So we come from very far on this aspect and because they are really using these things
that the image should not be stolen, that there is no, it's better if no one sees the
image before the images, before the movies is displayed.
And so basically they are not really friendly with everything which is open source but things
tend to change because of several phenomena.
The first one is that Python is replacing every proprietary script language.
I didn't mention it on the slide but FFMpeg is widely used to do some video operations
and the academic software foundation is maintaining many projects around pivot file formats.
So it makes it easier for studios to collaborate together.
And of course we have Blender which is getting more and more adoptions, which is getting
more and more popular and which perform always better.
So all these elements combined push the industry to change its mindset about collaborations
and open software.
Now there is another interesting actor which is Krita.
Krita currently is not widely used in the industry but we still can feel the same phenomena
as with Blender.
There are tons of tutorials.
The software works pretty well and it keeps on improving because there is a good community.
So we can guess that at some point we will have some interesting stuff that will come
from it.
Krita is mainly used for digital painting so it's more interesting to end everything
related to backgrounds or to do texture for 3D.
So if we go back to our building steps we can match our software with every step.
So for the concept we can use Krita for the modeling Blender.
As you will see Blender is widely used to manage most of the steps.
The shading is a combination of both because Blender will manage the materials, can handle
the texture drawing too but Krita is a little bit better for that.
For the rigging Blender can be used.
It's not an awesome software for that but they want to change everything for their upcoming
releases and if they are able to achieve what they want it's going to be really awesome.
For the shots we will see just right after that it could be used for the animatic.
For the layout of course animations it performs very well but there are still some steps where
it's not yet the right software.
For everything related to FX there is still a software named Udini that is widely used
by the industry and people won't change it for Blender right now.
For the rendering steps they have a very nice rendering engine but when I talk with people
from the industry who do really complex images they told me that it's not powerful enough
for the moment especially because they don't have what we name send assembly features.
The idea of a send assembly tool is to bring everything that is needed to build a scene
and add some lights and have the capability to handle a lot of vertices and animation
keys and for that there is no right software, there is no competing software to do that
with the proprietary software are much better and we have the same issue with compositing
where there is Netrun which is a very interesting software but they have governance issues
so I don't know if it's still maintained and the software currently is not as powerful
as the proprietary ones.
About 2D there is something new, it is that Blender recently introduced Green Spence
Hill so it allows to do 2D inside Blenders, it's really a huge change because prior to
that there was no software to do 2D animations in the open source world that are efficient
so now it allows to use Blender on the world pipeline of a 2D production the same way as
we use it on a 3D production.
So there are still some limitations about every vectorized picture, people still prefer
Illustrator to Wingscape, I used Wingscape personally for some design stuff, it works
pretty well but it seems that Illustrator is still better, Krita has many good things
but it's still too limited but people told me to manage big images but I'm not sure
but this is what some people from the industry told me, like I told you Netrun is nice but
not as good as the competition and there is no good software for FX and no efficiency
in assembly tools.
So now let's talk about the pipeline because I talked a lot about the building steps but
there is another important part, it is the glue between all these steps.
So first let's see this very cute rabbit because this presentation is way too serious,
I wanted to add this, it's not made with mid-journey or similar, it's with pictures
and I apologize for the author, I totally forgot to mention it and I forgot the name
so I'm really sorry for that but the rabbit is super cute.
So now we can go back to the pipeline, so the first brick that is needed to build an
efficient pipeline is the production tracker, the name is very misleading because it's
not about tracking, it's about collaborating, people use it to dispatch tasks, to ship deliveries
and then to talk around it, there are many single page applications and they have a
strong API to allow every tool to connect to it, it's very important because there is
tons of interesting data for every user in the studio and it's important to be able
to access all of them.
So basically what allows a production tracker, it's a very simplified version but production
managers dispatch tasks, artists do the work, directors review deliveries and send feedback
to artists and they iterate together and tools grab and post new data into it.
The other main element is the asset manager, so the asset manager is basically what we,
sorry I just do it the other way, you can see the animation production has a big graph,
every elements are tied together especially because when for instance you do an animation,
you will need several models to run the animations but we will need specific versions of every
models and you have to represent that way or not and every node can be considered as
the delivery and the links, it depends on how you want to represent scenes but the edges
can be either the operations or the links between the elements and of course everything
is stored, every elements are stored on the file system, object storage could be used
but in reality I've never seen any studio using object storage so everything is saved
on a shared file system but still it can be quickly messy so an abstraction is needed
to manage all these files.
So here is an example of graph, I go fast because I thought that I had 25 minutes to
do the presentation, I only have 20 so I'm going to go a little bit faster, so here are
some examples of Enforce file pass and file names and what you have to keep in mind is
that it should be configurable because every studio has a different way to store stuff
so for Asset Manager it's a real challenge to be able to manage everything and the third
part of the pipeline is made of one of the main bricks of a pipeline is the render manager
so in an animation production you have a ton of very long jobs to process and for that
you need a render farm that will manage everything properly and you have a tool to be able to
follow each task so and you have a suite of small tools that are used in the productions
to have more efficient work so now let's because the goal of this talk is to build an open
source stack for animation production so for the production tracker we use Kitsu so this
is the software we develop at CGWire so it's a web application we choose very common very
standard libraries and database to build it we rely a lot on FFMpeg to normalize all
these videos that are passed through Kitsu currently we don't do crazy stuff with it
to see only cool stuff we do is that we push every FFMpeg jobs into an AshiCorp nomad cluster
but I hope that for the future FFM editions we will be able to talk more about how we
manage everything and to show you that we do super cool stuff with it currently we use
it in a very simple way and we choose a very standard stack to ensure that everyone can
contribute and can deploy very easily the applications if they don't want to use our
services and it's licensed under AGPM so this is how it looks we have here the list of elements
to build and here we have the steps needed to build the elements so I won't go further on
this because it will require a full presentation then for the asset manager there is a new tool
that is emerging it's name is Hayon formerly it was open pipe basically it allows to do
what I talked about before it's it allows to manage all the files but in an abstract way so
artists can can just manage versions and don't think about how they how it is stored it comes
with many tools to push things to other tools so it looks a little bit like that it's a little
bit more it's a little bit less sexy but it's efficient too on the left you have the the
file hierarchy when you select a step building step you have the all the versioning of all
the files and then you have all the operation you can do on files which makes it very it's
really several of times to everyone in the studio what you have to understand is that
artists are really focused on making beautiful pictures but they don't most of if they are not
seniors they don't think about if their their production is usable by the next step so this
kind of tools we help them to do cleaner stuff that are reusable by their colleagues there is
another interesting software which is a Libreflow or Cabaret I like it especially because it's
it's really a community community thing it was done by a technical director in a studio named
super monks and another studio named Le Fais Speciale used it and together they build that
software it's fully open source and it's so it's a community led so two previous tools are
company led and this one is community led so it's very cool to see that alternative emerging for
the render farm render manager we have Flamenco by blend by the blender foundations which is
dedicated to small small teams and we have open queue which is managed by the academy
software foundation and which allows bigger studio to rely on on the first solutions here
it's an example of a full pie open source pipeline almost full open source pipeline used by Le Fais
Speciale on a feature film named Siren which will be soon in theaters and here it's almost the
conclusion but here it is how animation free and open source stack now we have it it's very new
for the industry so I'm super happy to be able to show it to you today and so to conclude now
we have an almost working farm we have an open source stack that covers almost all the use
case needed to build an animation movie of course it's mainly led by the blender foundations but
there are no much alternative to blender but in the open source world but it's great that it
exists and the work they do is really amazing the pipeline stack is covered by what I described
we tend people don't see that aspect and we said we tend to forget it and there are still some
changes in effects vectorials drawing and scene assembly but and compositing of course but yes
soon it will be fixed I hope so thank you for your attention and if you have any questions I will
be glad to answer at some point we'll be able to compete with so I don't know I know they
they do effort on that aspect they say on a regular basis they had some that features about this
the community is very active so at some point it could change but I think they their focus is not
on it right now but I cannot talk for them because I am not not part of the blender
foundation but we talk a lot with them yeah is there any other question yeah I mentioned
Rita you mean and again I mentioned Rita but not GIMP so GIMP is not as not a good reputation in
the animation industry I don't understand why because it's a very nice software but I think
that people doing very complex stuff and it can find what they want but from my experience of GIMP
is that they keep on improving it they really improved the UI so maybe at that at some point
we will see more and more usage of GIMP but I hope because I really love this software too
do we have similar stuff for sound I don't know we are only focused on images