The Blender Conference 2024

 I'm heading to Amsterdam next week to participate in:

Blender Conference 2024

It is the next level to be part of the community, to get know people in person. Also, not to forget the mission to extent the VFX capabilities of Blender, in connection with developing, producing my first live action feature film featuring a CG Polar Bear as the protagonist. It is made with Blender (2D painting of the briefcase in Krita).

Pipeline Movies

The pipeline is always with us. Even if we don't think about it, because it is different from studio to studio, it is exciting to see how they deal with it.

Old but gold (actually, Rhythm & Hues no longer exists, which is the most depressing story of all time in the industry).

Rhythm & Hues - A Framework for Global Visual Effects Production Pipelines - SIGGRAPH 2014 from Murali Anagani on Vimeo.

Since the ShotGun Software has been renamed to ShotGrid, which is a more PC name for a production tracking system :)

Tony Barbieri and Don Parker; The Shotgun Pipeline at PSYOP from Autodesk Media and Entertainment on Vimeo.

The best pipeline presentation(s) of all time (still ancient which is a bit of a sign that nowadays there are less intersting talk on that field).

Not soo long time ago there was a discussion hosted by Side Effects Software at Siggraph.

Or I'm just getting old and only have good memories from the far past—cinesite's presentation about generalizing pipeline and implementing fTrack.

Last but not least: if we are talking about the pipeline, it's unavoidable to talk about Katana. The exciting part is that people may think that Katana is a lighting & rendering tool. Actually, it is a pipeline tool because of the nature of rendering. If you want to render anything, you must create a complex system to flow the data from DCCs (digital content creation tools) to the render engine. That's where Katana comes in. So here is a brilliant presentation about Katana deployment.

Facial enchancement in Blender

 I've just run into this article in Blenderstation. Pretty awsome.

Hot in CG - fall of 2020

 I think the current trend is to more and more people gravitates to Blender, Unreal Engine and Houdini. Why? Because these softwares are awesome. It is hard to imagine that big VFX facilities like ILM, MPC, Weta Digital changes there platform softwares which are Maya and Nuke in the first place. But more and more people uses BUEH (stand for Blender, Unreal Engine and Houdini) means the industry will change slowly but surely. Speaking about myself: at home I only use Blender, Krita and Gimp (and Inkscape and Audacity (and 4K Video Downloader of course 😄))

And the platform for share information is youtube so there are couple of links I think worth to watch.

So many spectacular features in Blender 2.9. For me how is a part time animation filmmaker it is the ultimate best ever choice.

Because Virtual Production is also a very HOT topic Unreal Engine is now kind of a game changer in the VFX industry. Hard to summarize in couple of world so check this demo out:

And of course this:

So last but definitely not least Houdini I think is beyond...okay it is not the latest thing, but as I wrote before the PDG is new frontiers for a VFX studio. Because VFX generally speaking is about the mass production of shots, and we tend to automatize thing if it is possible. 

And Solaris is and another milestone, because basically it is the implementation of the USD into Houdini. So it is a formalized way to build up light and render complex scenes.

AI and CGI

We have to talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI) in connection with CGI. I think usage of AI can affect a lot of things we can't imagine right now. What we are talking about here? For eg. there is subset of AI the so called Machine Learning (ML). It allows us to solve problems much quicker because the computers basically have steeper learning curve. Of course we have to provide large data sets to learn from. It seems more and more things can be optimized with AI or ML.

Character Animation On A Higher Level

Impressive presentation at Siggraph 2019 about an animation system called “ephemeral” rigging.

SideFX Procedural Dependency Graph

I think it is huge! 
I try to imagine how it will affect on the VFX intustry. I have to look closer, but I think it is a step toward a procedural pipeline and task management which is basically project-asset management from a bird's eye view.


All the details are here:
Side FX PDG

(updated on 2023-06-20 the link was broken so it turned out that PDG is now under Houdini which soft of a admission of that PDG is not software agnostic solution sadly)