Automating Motion Graphics with Blender

a template mosha graphics template marketplace actually a library subscription-based which allows allows our users to log into our platform pick a template they like video templates like blogger Stingers intros outros transitions stuff like that and they can get it rendered out with their settings their log with their color their text within four to five minutes so I'm just going to show you how it looks in the action so they just log into our platform they pick a template they like they can upload the logo so here I upload it blender logo then type you type in some text pick a color to match the logo name the video and click render and in about four to five minutes they will have a download link for mp4 file that they can play and put in front of their video their YouTube clip their show whatever so as you might have guessed a lot of these templates all of these these templates are blender files dot blend files ready for animation bit placeholder logos text and colors and blender does all the heavy lifting in the background so as you can see a lot of stuff that we have like we currently have I'm just going to skip this so we have a sixty thousand users 800 hundred thousand videos rendered now my I met with my colleagues yesterday and they corrected me this was two months old it's 75 thousand users and a million videos rendered yeah two and a half two and a half thousand videos rendered each day that's amazing and we have 700 plus templates which the library that's increasing every day this is not the template marketplaces are not new thing you have your video hive like in vatos videohive in 47,000 After Effects templates and 4000 cinema 4d templates you have pond5 with a huge selection of After Effects templates and even binder market has things that could be considered motion graphics template this is actually a preset but but what's common for all of these is that user needs to have have access to an app like After Effects or blender and needs to know how to use that app to get his final result now for blender owning an app is not a problem for After Effects it's a big problem for a lot of people and even though these templates are super easy to customize sometimes some people really need to hire a freelance animator to customize the template they do they already purchased so I'm going to talk about some challenges of creating this fully automated solution keep in mind that anything that anyone uploads needs to work out correctly without any user input so pick a logo any logo and it's going to work on our platform so as you can see in this image there's a lot of different logos out there different colors different shapes most importantly different aspect ratios there are wide logos tall logos and kind of square round ones like Apple here so let's say one day coca-cola wants to use our art template and here's coca-cola logo in blender and they're super happy and they call NBA and they say you should use these guys and NBA uploads their logo it's now completely different like it's no longer vertical it's squished because this plane was ubian wrapped and created for coca-cola logo for a wide Laura and now human input is required animator needs to go in and reshape this plane or UV unwrap it differently Apple would not be happy either so we don't have two and a half thousand animators on standby to do this so this needs to work out of the boxes whatever they upload so just by looking at just by looking at UVA image editor in blender when there's nothing loaded in it the solution presented itself like blender really likes it when images square especially if it's 1024 or 2048 so use the external app to conform any logo to the square texture but no matter what our users upload it will be placed on a square transparent texture so we don't care if half of it is empty we care about how the parts of the texture that's not empty and if that's visible it's gonna work and we always know what we're working on it's always square so they can the animator can just put it on on a single plane and do something around it you can separate it into pieces explode it twist it around or project that texture onto moving pieces or what not so that's all the issue of aspect ratio we're really happy with this solution we never needed to look back what about colors so when we started working with videos we had zero customers we didn't know who's gonna be using this so we the only thing we could look at with this big brands with their brand books and they have huge brand books all available online these from McDonald's available online we saw how they use their logos and colors and a lot of these brands have what's called logo negative that's the last one here on the blue Blue Square brands like certain colors they dislike other colors like McDonald's here decided that their logo looks good on red and green and if you go into their restaurants you'll see like wood and dark greens and stuff but if it's on blue and sometimes they can't control what they're gonna need to put their log on if their branding sundew they're gonna opt out for logo negative which is completely white logo just a logo so it pure white so we figured out why not help out these people with just make it look good from the start and make logo negative really easy to use so we could just use logo alpha whatever they upload we can take alpha isn't silhouette and just colorize it that's right so we made these templates that have pure white logo right like here and this is like an 8-bit gaming template and his blue sky what if their logo is blue it's not gonna look good and they're gonna complain so we made it white it's always gonna be white and then we wrote that down like your logo is gonna be pure white this one as well we just liked how it looked like code for contrast between white Lachman and red color now I'm gonna stop at this template because this is this was a breaking point for me because we received a ticket from a user who complained that their image came out like this like it was just square so immediately I know I knew what was going on her logo didn't have Alpha Channel so it's just fully opaque nothing to see there but before I wrote back to her I asked for an image I wanted to double check and I got something like this weird logo right so turns out it wasn't this is not the actual photo I'm not using people's personal stuff but turns out it was all lady and it was her granddaughter's graduation she wants to do something special for her so she decided to export her face in the million pieces in this template so not wasn't my job to judge the template choice for this particular event but it was my job to figure out what our users want what their cost where their needs are what whether what they're expecting to get so I went back and so all the other tickets that for and there were a lot of tickets supporting it's not talking about support supporting it's about this same issue people were just not uploading logos with transparency they will upload whatever you know and that really helped us understand what sort of customers are used users are these were not huge brands like like what I have coca-cola and whatever these were small businesses they didn't have brand books they had one logo that someone made for them ages ago and they lost all their work files and this is all they have or families families don't have brand books either definitely they don't have logo negatives so we stopped the whole load or negative thing and we started focusing more on we started testing our templates so it works with everything black white all the colors everything needs to work out fine with alpha without alpha and we started making more templates that have photos in them not just logos so as you can see here it's no longer just upload your Lord will upload your photo so stuff like that yeah next point of our customization story I'm done with images is restaurant like blenders text now this image sums up the whole section right we really hate blenders text because it's really sorry guys it's really bad so why is it bad it can either be a flat extruded or with a little bit bell on it and that's it for animation there's not many options that we can do without converting it to mesh and once we convert it to mesh we can no longer influence that text object it can be changed to whatever users want so we're stuck with these basic blender options with text we had some limited success with font objects I don't know if people know about font objects in blender they allow you to create objects for each character in the alphabet and it would be instanced instead of that that character when you type in text and it's awesome but it requires you to painstakingly recreate each letter of the alphabet along with all the punctuation special characters and in case of videos and all extra languages like Latin extended and Cyrillic if possible so huge amount of work to get one template to work now also alignment alignment is horrible in blender like left right and centered is fine this works as expected but this is top base where vertical alignment this is top base this is top it's not the top it's all the way down there and this is centered you can see where the origin is that's not a center and I tried tried a lot of variations and it just doesn't work so that's a huge problem for us because we don't know what our users are gonna input so and we can manually just shift it around it needs to work by the way also text scaling is a huge issue because if you have a template that has something like this it has it says your text here and if you type in something of similar length it's gonna work fine but some people decide to put their life story in this in this in this text field so as you can see there's a problem it goes off screen both ways so with our team of scientists we created a formula a formula that scales the text down the more characters are entered so short text longer text here much longer text here it just scales down more characters inputs more the text size now it usually works but sometimes it doesn't because 10 double use is not same as 10 eyes character count is same but in text scale is same but 10 double users will just go off screen so we're kind of counting on our users to input reasonable mix of not wide and narrow letters also known as words instead of just typing www so yeah also we tried all various other solutions and we failed like you can't get text to behave and scale down because it operates in this weird shade the area between objects scale and font scale font size so you can mess with these around and get the same looking object total different values so I'm gonna skip colors because colors are very straightforward you just change color too but I'm gonna talk about speed so as you could see it's all rendered on our servers so speed is important also we want it means higher price of course if it renders slow its higher price and also we want our users to get their videos really really fast like four minutes tops so how do we achieve that in blender if you go online and you check for speed up speed up tips for binary you'll see cycle stuff you'll see reduce number of bounces reduce the reduced number of samples you'll use clipping and stuff like that we all know that but there's no way to get it as fast as we need it we need it in 20 seconds per frame on a desktop computer so on the busiest frame over the animation needs to render in 20 seconds on your average desktop so no way to get a noiseless result even with the noiser on on in cycles so we don't render in cycles render in blender eternal I know shocking right but we don't have to render it completely this is a cycle stamp this is a five cycles animation this is not one of our best ones but the good one to explain how we do it how we speed up things so some spheres go around this logo and it appears if you could you take a look at this is the busiest frame of this animation like there's some emissive material which illuminates the whole scene with global illumination there's some ambient occlusion there and high quality motion blur this is all cycles right everyone recognizes that you can't do that in blender internal so the trick is it to figure out what what will change in between these renders you only need to render the things that change the things that change its logo in this template and color so when you think color you say okay we need to red rerender all these spheres going around but you don't let's start we start with the background we use heavy compositing here we start with the background which is simple blend color blend and then we pre render the first material there are two material two colored materials and emissive one we just pre-render the first one is pure white and then we colorize it with mix no mix color node set to multiply like this and then we add another one and colorize that one as well it's all pre-rendered takes a second to composite emissive material color eyes that as well almost they are not quite yet and now we change the scene we said the white missing material to pure white and everything else to pure black and we get to see where the light goes in this scene because there's this one missing material and we get to see see what it influences so we colorized that too and we add it on top of the previous template and here we go it has lighting it's called it's called this missing material is colorizing all this other others other other stuff also logo is peeking into in somewhere in between these these spheres so we render out of mask for logo we will just render logo as a shadeless material takes half a second to render and use its alpha and this self in this mask this is shading on logo and there it is a logo in between these spheres so some post-processing and this is a node tree for this for this compositing we just changed these three colors that's all we do and this is under internal now pretty much the same and it's rather super fast so cycles render 1 minute 25 seconds then their eternal render 3 seconds that's a huge improvement in speed now are they identical no no they're not but you wouldn't have known that if I haven't shown you cycles in Butner eternal you wouldn't know that know that and I would even argue that this blender internal version is better for color customization because in cycles much more stuff is happening around and this missing material is colorizing everything you can see individual colors this and this is another example this is a great scale render of these pins they're moving up and down and then we colorize it it's pre-rendered colorize it and then we recycle the scene we load it in blender eternal we just project we already have these pins where they were in cycles render right and we project logo on top of it using shadeless material and mask transparency so if there's a pin covering logo it's going to mask it and it's exactly where it would be in cycles and we just use that as influence and with some post-processing and some lens flares on top of it you've got a pretty nice looking template technically it's blender internal but it's not right so very fast super fast of course we are very excited about Eva render engine and ever since last conference we funded the development of armory 3d render engine lubis was presenting here it's also super super cool real-time render engine this one single frame illustrates its power so we're ready to use that in our workflow as well now when we were sure that we knew what we were doing with this automation stuff we started experimenting and doing other stuff as well we started making live-action templates we started filming live footage and combining it with CGI elements elements scenes inside blender and it worked out pretty fine we used blenders motion capture object camera tracking compositing keying masking a rotoscoping everything inside binder and we were quite happy with it you can sit here like so pretty much blender is a viable solution for this sort of stuff happen okay moving on so once I told you about how we automate stuff and we want blender to be awesome we want to be better in motion graphics more so I'm gonna use the privilege of standing here than a conference to offer some suggestions for some things that could be changed maybe in blender that make it really really better for motion graphics artists artists out there so it's better non-destructive text objects workflow scenes as compositions I'm gonna get to each one of this grouped animation interesting and image texture image effects and textures so non-destructive text I already started talking about it when I spoke about text basically when she how much these these are modifiers for mesh objects these are modifiers for text objects much less and even the ones there on this list don't really work as expected not much you can do with text right now if you want to reveal text is some interesting weight this is the only thing we can do we can slide it in from the side scale it up maybe play with some character spacing and rotate it into view we need to be able to do more stuff like this this animation nodes go top examples for animation nodes we can't emit particles from text did you know that for this I had to convert it into mesh and this may be too much so text needs to be non-destructive we need to be able to work with text do something awesome with it and be able to go back and change the text it's not just important for us it's fully automated solution this is important for everyone imagine you have your motion graphics artist and you have a client and you finalize your great video and they say this is it this is 100 percent done oh it just wanted one thing can you just change the text to something else you can't you just have to go back and do everything again so since it's compositions for motion graphics it's very important to be able to do something very complex somewhere else and then place that in your main scene and instance it in space and time as well and scale it up down and do that you immediately reach a lot of complexity like that so if you take a look at After Effects this is how it works like this is a composition where you set up this complex high-tech ring animation and then you just instance it in your main scene and offset it scale it up put it in depth of field stuff and you offset it in time so they don't all play at the same time and immediately we have futuristic odd-looking thing we can't do that in London right now not easily done but blender has scenes that not many people use and scenes could be our compositions right it's not really possible now but with the rise of eveer androgen real-time rendering couldn't we have a feed from camera and scene to pointing out itself something awesome we made be a texture in scene one that we can then offset in time and do whatever with it it would speed up the process immensely proofed animation is the same similar thing like I have a simple motion graphics element here like I want to do something with this so it's just the curve that loops and I can instance it that's not a problem well all 2d right scale it up and if I want to offset it in time so it's not boring is this I don't need to click here in NLA editor review all this stuff reveal actions and move action around and now they fire fire off in sequence it's much more interesting right but what if I do I can also make copies of this object and offset their curves but now there are no longer instances if I want to go back and change my mind no way to do it but would i if I'd do something more complex not a single object but a group of objects doing something interesting and I want to do the same thing with them I can instance them that's not a problem at all but there there's no way to offset it in time this is boring this is nothing right we need to be able to do this so some sort of group animation that groups the actions grouped action groups actions of all the child objects will allow us to easily create rich and complex motion graphics with ease in blender for this I had to again convert them to separate objects and look at the mess that was made in the curves there's not 50 objects busier curve 50 so it's a mess if I want to change something later on and texture effects finally wouldn't it be awesome if we had we can do stuff two images in compositor but we need to be able to influence textures while their textures on or on an object so here let's say we have this texture why shouldn't we have like a pixelate or find edges or blur on the texture and easily you could create something like this like logo being formed from the drawing first and pixelization effect getting gaining resolution as it forms and stuff like that so yeah that's it and finally this is the end of this presentation so I keep seeing a lot of great motion graphics artists out there posting their amazing work on Twitter with comments such as I'm testing animation notes on testing sphere or something with squeezed spheres what do you guys think I'm testing this testing they're trying out this trying out that no one says I did this for a client or I got paid to do this you know and for for us to grow with community of motion graphic artists using blender we need professionals and what we hope to do is convert videos into true mark marketplace where anyone with skills in motion graphics in blender can upload their template and learn percentage of each sale on our platform so we would immediately turn a lot of hobbyists into professionals we already developed an add-on that simplifies the upload of a motion graphic tablet or to our platform you just basically set up everything in quick publish you get the finished zip file that you upload to our tour platform and if it all checks out on the platform that's it you're done so it's called videos creators work title we're not married to it so that's pretty much the end of this presentation feel free to drag me away from free coffee and shuttle there in Lobby to discuss anything I just said about said talked about the ribbon and wonderful audience keep blending and I'll see you around thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: Blender

Views: 59,820

Rating: 4.9448276 out of 5

Keywords: amsterdam, bcon17, 2017, open source, blender 3d, conference, 3d, de balie, blender, science, presentation, talk, vfx, education, bcon, academic

Id: u970I0GNCGk

Length: 23min 15sec (1395 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 13 2017