Motion Design Hotline - Real Time, Real talk with Jonathan Winbush

[Music] you [Music] hello everybody hello and welcome welcome to another friday here on the motion design hotline thanks for coming and hanging out this is gonna be another another great exciting episode um all this month we've been we've been having interviews with um mostly people who both have more awards than i do and who know more things than me so i am thrilled today to bring another another i have to say a pioneer in the field someone who uh has a very long list of credits on imdb look him up and uh i don't know he's one of the most prolific i think motion designers uh working today who's worked with just about every piece of kit possible and these days is is really on the cutting edge of real-time technology something that holds a lot of promise i think for a lot of us it is jonathan winbush hello hello sir hey how you doing love the intro i appreciate it put a lot of pressure on me i don't know about that i we only we only have the mildest takes the least controversial uh takes on things on this show so everything we say it's true and like just to get off the jump for people who may not know you or or maybe not familiar with your work uh you know in your own words i suppose how would you how would you tell people what you're doing these days yeah it's kind of it's kind of crazy like you know i'm a motion graphics artist but i consider myself just like uh i guess a new age renaissance man because much graphics is so generic in the term it's kind of like i like to dabble in all types of different things like i started off in art school learning like 3d max and combustion and doing vfx and then jumping into after effects and cinema 4d and xsi and like uh i've been doing it since like 2006 so it's just kind of like my brain is just kind of scattered like oh what's this program oh what's this program so i kind of jump all over the place but at the end of the day my bread and butter is doing motion graphics for television and movies doing title sequences and cg explainer graphics and you know anything of the sort so if it has a screen on it i'm designing and animating for it that's right i mean even if the screen is right in front of your eyeballs because i i think you you were one of the first people to do virtual reality music videos is that your that was on you um and so i guess the first thing i kind of want to talk about uh if if we may is i would love to kind of talk about sort of how you how you got to where you're at in your career we've talked a little bit before about how you grew up in pittsburgh and there wasn't so much of like an art scene out there but how did you how do you go from from a small kid in in pittsburgh in to i don't know living it up in california you're living living the dream out there now yeah i mean as we were saying before i've always grown up just kind of geeky like even before comic books were cool i was hanging out at comic book shops i have like the entire first two seasons of the tops collection when i did like the marvel cards back in the day like that's how geeky was like i collected all of them i have all the holograms all the special glitched editions and everything but then from there you know go to magic the gathering and then after playing that stuff i would have to go to football and basketball practice so i was just again like scattered all over the place but i've always had a love for the arts like i wish i could draw that's something that i've never been able to do and so just you know growing up and seeing like all these leaps in technology like seeing toy story first and never seeing anything like that before and then seeing the matrix when i'm in high school and i'm just like this stuff is crazy and then once i'm trying to figure out what i wanted to do post high school i was at itt tech as a programmer and just programming just didn't really jab with me at all but then someone was like why don't you look at the art institute of pittsburgh and so i started to look into it i went down there for game art initially but since i can't draw they wouldn't accept me into the program but that um the tour guide was like you know we're starting up a motion graphics um course down here this is like the very first semester can i take you like a tour of like some of the stuff we're building in the basement so you know i took the tour and they built like this giant green screen facility down underneath the building and they were like trying to simulate some of the stuff they were doing in the matrix like they had someone hanging on ropes and the rafters and kids are running along the walls and i'm like what are they doing here and they're like oh yeah they're trying to recreate the matrix and i'm like we could do that and they're like yeah you know we have the programs to do it so i immediately jumped on board um went full steam ahead at the art institute like no days off i got my bachelor's degree in three years instead of four just because i was having so much fun there and eager to work and then um long story short i was sending out my real back in the day after i graduated and this is back when you burn it to a dvd and mellow to the facility like there was no vimeo and right you have to physically send it somewhere yeah so i'm mailing out my disk to everywhere on the west coast just because like i've never been there before and i didn't really like the the only two places really the work back then was new york and la and so i didn't like new york too much just because i'm claustrophobic so i'm like let me give la a try so i sent my disc out to every company that i could find online somebody at happy madison happy to be from pittsburgh when the assistant's there and i saw it in my pittsburgh address on there so they just randomly opened up the envelope saw my demo reel gave me a call and they're like you know if you're ever in town we'd love to talk to you we like your work and i'm just like shoot i could be there tomorrow and they're like why aren't you in pittsburgh and i was like yeah but i'll be there tomorrow and they're like no no no you know if you're ever in town just look us up so i think it was around tax return time and i just got my tax return checked so i spent my entire check on the overnight flight to la showed up at the happy medicine doorstep the next day just asking for that person that saw my stuff finally ran into her they gave me an interview and i guess they were impressed because they gave me an internship right off the bat and then yeah from there the rest is history i interned with sandler for six months and then they brought me on staff for another three three years from there and yeah i got to work on a whole lot of stuff there that was a great place to work at that's crazy that is a that is one of those stories that like that that itself turns into a movie man like it's it's wild that kind of perseverance you know it it's it's really interesting that you know i think a lot of people's careers there's someone who like gives you a break and then you're in the door and that's that's how it goes but like man you you have such a work ethic and i want to kind of drill down that a bit because you have like your body of work is so broad in terms of all the projects you've worked on like i saw you you have a lot of things on your on your reel and and on your credit on the discovery channel right like there's a lot of discovery channel stuff on there like when i think about the volume of of work that entails like how many hours a day are you working on these things um well it used to be a lot right because a lot of the stuff that i was doing for discovery they um they do a lot of shows up in alaska like i work on the deadliest catch alaska last frontier alaskan bush people just a lot of stuff in alaska right so a lot of times like um like if you watch any of these shows you know these people are kind of like old school pioneers like to have these big plots and lanes and they're always like building these crazy contraptions just for whatever they're trying to do up there whether it's like fishing or building an outhouse or something crazy and so what the episodes usually are like they usually find like a thing like okay we want to build this outhouse because our old one is all shot down or whatever we need to move a new location and so it'll hit me up and say like hey we want to show like a cg representation of what they're trying to build and then throughout the episode it's going to show what they actually build and so they'll send me kind of like a bunch of shots of them like putting this stuff together and then for me i'm putting together just like maybe like a 10 to 15 second like cg explainer like hey here's the outhouse and this is what they're hoping it's gonna look like and then you know i'm doing a lot of those type of graphics there and just um yeah i put a lot of hours into those because of render times alone like you're building big wilderness scenes so a lot of pine trees a lot of snow a lot of you know just foliage and rocks and soil and stuff there and those render times could get pretty extensive so i actually had like four machines here that i'm rendering i started with octane i moved to ridge shift and then um yeah most recently moved to unreal engine which kind of saved my sanity because it's now i can render this stuff for the fly but you know before i would have to render overnight wake up in the morning praying that my renders were perfect because if they weren't it's like man i have to band-aid this somehow so i can hit my delivery today so yeah a lot of a lot of stressful years about working on this stuff but it's a lot of fun as well well it's it's really interesting like i remember back in the day you know because starting out like i never had powerful computers i was working off a laptop when i started and like okay i'm going to set this laptop now if it goes ding at night i'm going to wake up and i'm going to do something about it like well what a horrible thing to do with your time yeah yeah exactly i don't know it because you i know we've talked a little bit about uh real-time technology and i know that's that's what you're you're jumping into now with unreal engine this is this is a buzzword right i was it i was at nab last year when there was an nab um and just a heads up uh uh mash bebot in the chat um next time next time he sees you at nab he'd like to challenge you to a magic the gathering game so just heads up on that i'm a little rusty but i'm playing on xbox maybe like a year ago and it's just getting smashed i'm like i'm not what i used to be look there there are too many new mechanics okay i'm even i am not going to pick up a deck again i'm i've given it up cold turkey i'll never split open a booster pack but um i remember last year i guess it was last year the time is slipping away but uh that that was the buzzword around the entire convention it was all about real time in production real time in rendering real time kind of broadcast this would have been when the mandalorian was in production yeah so everybody was going nuts about that stuff and for me personally i was like well i don't really get it what am i missing here what am i missing with this interesting i get vr i get this so maybe for those out there who are maybe not already on board or are not familiar maybe just could you tell them a little bit about like when we're talking about real time what do we mean when we're using these buzzwords yeah so it's a bit crazy because yeah i was at nab last year as well you see like the big ross stations and they're broadcasting live i think around that time more people are using it for like um like new segments or like espn things of that nature like you built like a virtual set and then you just have your talent on green screen and like i saw like these crazy arm cranes that were able to like track everything in real time so it looks like they're in a set that they're not actually in they're just in like a green screen and so i know a lot of people are looking for it like for that type of stuff and then like you said the mandalorian stuff came out and then instead of using green screens they were actually using like led walls which are essentially just you know like big monitors or big screens is so you're able to put your environment on these screens and then have your talent in front of it then you would just kind of like set dress your set just to kind of blend everything in but then it's like you don't have to do any type of keying and post anymore like what you're seeing is what you're getting because the background is actually able to track to your camera because everything's running in real time and unreal and so i know a lot of virtual production stuff like that it was getting really big in but for us and motion graphics it you know it was kind of just like us on the outside looking in but then when i was at siggraph last year they um epic made the announcement that they were upgrading their data smith plug-in to allow seamless integration between cinema 4d and unreal so when i saw that and then i saw one of the guys from capacity their studio here in la they actually been using unreal engine for a lot of their stuff because they did a lot of gaming trailers like rocket league and um i want to say hearthstone and stuff like that so they're already using gaming elements that they're getting from the studios i guess and instead of bringing that into like cinema it's like they're just bringing over stuff from cinema that they need it but they're doing most of their production and unreal and when i saw their talk i'm like that makes total sense like why are more people using like this real-time technology because they're talking about like you know their clients had notes and they're able to show them like the adjustments that they're making on the fly and stuff like that like they don't have to say like oh yeah we'll take down all your notes and we'll get back to you know like it there too because we have to re-render this it's like oh you want this moved over here okay no problem here you go and they're just like you know so it's those type of leaps and it allows you to be a lot more creative because you don't have to worry about like time restraints or rendering and things of that nature but i took that all just with you know i'm like i'm a big tech nerd and so once i saw that i ran home immediately downloaded unreal started playing with my own test i finally figured it out because there was no documentation on it so i put up a tutorial on it and it kind of just steamrolled from there because people were asked like i went to cigarette the very next day and i'm talking to paul from maxon and he's like dude you're quick i'm like what do you mean he's like how the heck did you figure that stuff out because maxwell didn't even know about it like this is something that epic put out and so um it just been kind of like that kind of helped build our relationship there and i guess you could say i've been kind of like the um the guy spreading the gospel motion graphics just kind of organically but it's um it's been definitely a strange one because like i think like a lot of motion graphics artists did at first like hey i'm going to take my scene from cinema 4d just bring it into unreal and just render it and be good to go but that wasn't the case everything doesn't translate one to one because they're different applications and so over the past year i just had to start really like training my brain to think differently like i've been watching a lot of seminars from unreal themselves and they always have like game artists on there and stuff and once i started thinking like a game developer it just kind of like clicked for me and then i'm like oh okay this is how i should be working and so that's kind of like um i know that's one of the big hurdles that a lot of motion graphics artists are kind of trying to figure out right now because everybody just wants to take their scene utilize real time and go home but we're we're not to that point yet [Laughter] but well it's it's funny that you say like needing to reformat like people's thinking right that that if you don't think the way the software wants you to think of course that's going to be frustrating right like i don't know i think i think a lot of your your success in this stuff is that like you really seem to like spend your time and and have that that i don't know what we're talking about like uh i think the band uh weezer it's like we call it shed time like this when we go we produce the album we isolate with this technology or this this concept and then we come out we have the we have the product right right oh boy you know if i could think of any weezer albums that sounded significantly different than other weezer albums um but but it's it's kind of that interesting thing where if deep knowledge of the technology really rewarding to to the process so you know i think i think some of the gripes i was hearing people say is that they needed to bake their scene in order to put it into um into the unreal engine right um like is that is that like a reasonable expectation for people i would just say this because like we were saying think like a game person like what does that sort of mean when you're gonna when you're gonna think more more when you want to work real time what does it mean to think real time i guess yeah i i did answer another tweet that you're talking about i did a calm response to it i did um because i got i mean it was total um it was misinformation i guess yeah but um like you don't yeah i said i understood it because you think that you need to um i'm not sure what he meant by bake everything like i don't know if he meant like the lighting or his keyframes or whatever like i know that from coming from cinema 4d some of this stuff doesn't translate one to one so sometimes like if you're doing something special you might need to bake your key frames just to bring it into unreal because unreal will take everything literally like okay this keyframe this keyframe this keyframe i understand what this is but if you only have something animating with just like two keyframes you know it's not going to know what's going in between because it's coming from a different system so it's going to translate it the best way that it knows how and so like my latest tutorial that i did with epic that kind of showed how i had to bake out some of the dynamics and stuff like that but it's really not as crazy as he's making it out to be and then the lighting you only have to bake your lighting if you have like a really old system so like so unreal is a game engine and these things are used to working for like playstations and xboxes and nintendos and things of that nature so sometimes as a game developer you have to kind of pick and choose where you want to kind of have like your most performance at and so like if you have like a lot of geometry in your scene that might not play well on like an xbox so one way to kind of boost that performance is to bake your lighting in your scene which basically means you have static lighting so your shadows aren't going to be like dynamically moving and things of that nature but with um the stuff that we're doing for motion graphics we're not worried about those like hardware limitations so everything that i do is all dynamic like i don't do any bacon or anything like i bring in my lights i make them dynamic and then whatever is happening on the screen is moving as they're supposed to move and so yeah there is some misinformation there but you know i think it's one of those things where people they spend their whole lifetime like mastering one thing and then they see something else coming and so it's kind of like you know you don't want to well it's an interesting it's an interesting mentality right because i i think everybody knows that i mostly use after effects and and sometimes i dip in other things but you know using a tool does format you to think in terms of that tool but also to try to defend territory or to try to i don't know uh to like new information is coming in i'm not gonna listen to it in the way that it's it's intended right like that's that's definitely i think like a big hamper hampering to people's kind of careers um i i always think uh about like anytime new technology shows up right you think you really need to to absorb it and try to see what is there for me right yeah like how can you use this to your advantage like uh if you want to wait two days for a render that's perfectly fine with me like i wanted you know like i like instantly so i just have more time to be creative and so i mean i get frustration sometimes like i would love to learn houdini like i see some of the stuff that you do so going with like fluids and you know just like destruction simulations and i open it and i'm just like man i like i don't know what's going on here it's like i tinker with it and get frustrated and just close it but i'm not going to say like uh houdini that's you know that's for such and such like that's never going to take off type thing it's just like i couldn't make it work for me but the people that are using it i mean they're great with it so you know more power to them but yeah i would never you know i guess for say like try to damp like you said damper on any new technologies coming out i'm always just like how can i make this work for me to help me with my workflow and allow me to work faster so that i can spend more time outside and not in front of the computer well so one thing i wanted to ask you about because i know like in in your stuff it really seems like you're you're early to to get into things in early to to jump on stuff right like you you have such an enthusiasm for newness yeah you know in a way that i personally have a trepidation about newness right like new things are kind of scary to me sometimes like okay so the example i have is remember like the first editions of google glass yes yeah right like i got really excited about that and then i was made very sad uh when that really didn't pan out man i want to be in star trek so bad i wanna i want a holodeck i want those things to happen but i for me it there is kind of like an investment right an investment not only in time but in sometimes technology right like if you want to play in the oculus rift you're gonna you won't play in vr you're gonna need to get some hardware right like how do you how do you kind of balance some of those forces when new things are coming out like it one thing that i would say is like like someone was saying to me that they had to choose at one point whether they were gonna go for the unreal engine or whether they're gonna go for like what was the other one that they were they were talking about it was for because they were doing vr at the time right so they had midi yeah they had they had to pick a side right because like we can only really invest in one of these like when when those kinds of decisions come up or when new things come up like how do you evaluate whether that's something that you want to jump on yeah so when the vr stuff like i was working on that 2015 2016 just when like the infancy of like the oculus dk2 was coming out and stuff like that and so um yeah i was faced with that dilemma as well and back then the game engines were really hardcore like they weren't as friendly as they are now so unreal unity you really had to know what you're doing it's like a coder and you have to really be in that gaming ecosystem to understand it and be able to utilize it for vr and excuse me the funny thing is my friend he used to work for oculus like they were literally like 10 minutes away from me before they got bought out by facebook and so he invited my son and i have to come check out some prototype stuff they were working on and it's one of those things where it's like you had to see it to believe it because i was always skeptical about vr2 until i put it on and then we were like man this is amazing and that first thing i was thinking is how can i start creating stuff like this and my friend told me he's like yeah this is more for game developers and not really for motion graphics artists like the toys aren't there and nobody you know nobody's gonna pick it up in your scene so i kind of took that as a personal challenge and i downloaded unity i tried to learn it got frustrated threw it to the side but then i'm just like i know 3d i know the concepts of 3d i'm good at 3d how can i take my knowledge of 3d and everything that i've learned over the years and utilize it for this cool platform and so i um i there was um oh octane yeah octane and 740 at the time which would allow you to render out like a 360 sphere from um unreal not unreal from cinema 4d and then you could take that 360 sphere and then you could bring that into like a 360 player that would work on the oculus and so this is what they call passive vr but it was just my footstep into vr at least and so i started like trying to manipulate the tools to work in my favor and at the time um after effects didn't really have any vr tools there and so i was just kind of making it work to the like i was bending the way that i was thinking because you have like this equitangular thing that's like all fish lens then warped and i'm just taking like the stuff i'm trying to composite and just trying to manually bend it make it work and then i put on the headset and i'm just like oh man that's working so that's kind of like how i did my first vr experience and then um i came across this guy's metal chris and a metal that were making vr stuff for after effects so i linked up with them i showed them what i was working on and they sent me the tools and that made it a lot easier and then from there it's like i'm doing a lot of 360 work and after effects and just showing people like hey you can do this stuff as a motion graphics artist and i feel like that was a challenge that i completed because you know i was um all my vr films went on the cans film festival i went out to beijing china to headline the vr festival out there and things of that nature and i'm not doing gaming vr like i'm doing passive vr so it was just kind of a testament to if you you know if when there's a will there's a way kind of so i made it work with after effects even that wasn't really supposed to but yeah we already made it happen man i love that like that is that is sort of um i hope i hope for the good people who are watching that this is sort of helping them kind of get past some of their their own perhaps trepidations as well like it it's i don't know i and people of the chat i would encourage you because this is a live show if you have any questions for our our esteemed guests do let us know we want to get your questions in the chat so if people have any questions about about uh about workflows about unreal about real time then i would love to know and in fact i would love it if we could jump in and just have a little look at i know you've got a lot of tutorials out there uh you've got uh you've got an excellent youtube channel full of things you've been doing a series recently of animating the unreal logo right you've been doing you've been going through those and the variety of things you could do in the engine i think is really interesting because i've got to love with you a lot of a lot of times i see third-party rendering a lot of the stuff kind of looks the same so like i i know that like that's how design trends work right that that well this person is doing volumetric lights and that's pretty cool so everyone's going to do some volumetric lights right um but it's really great to see kind of how how the system flexes so i'd love to know a little bit more about kind of that series and kind of what you're what you're doing with the good people of of unreal uh these days the people go check out yeah so a couple of months ago like it was something in the works that people at epic they saw what i was doing on youtube and things like that i think it started during nab they saw i did the um c4d live intro for max on and i did all that with a combination of cinema 4d and unreal and one of the guys from epic was actually on the show with me he spoke i think like right before me and we kind of just chopped it up from there because he saw me utilizing the two platforms together and so we were kind of just um you know like gradually talking throughout the months and then i was i brought it to him i was like you know what it'd be cool if i can officially animate the unreal engine logo because that'd be something cool to have at least on my portfolio on my resume and i could show like the process of how i made this and try to get you know the word out for more motion graphics artists because that's a big push that they're trying to make especially with the latest versions of unreal like you'll notice when you go into like the template section they actually have one now called film and television because they're really trying to you know think outside the box on like other artists that can utilize with technology and so he talked to his um his boss over there and they thought it was a great idea so i signed up to be a epic partner and i have a series with them now so it's a five um a five video deal and so i'm already in two videos in basically i take the unreal engine logo and then i just kind of animate it in like a variety of different type of things like the first one i call naturalistic then the second one i call geometric and i can show you guys guys um i can show you that here let me bring up my screen share yeah let's let's share it up let's see what people uh can enjoy here let's see i'm gonna guess go ahead and uh toggle us over to screen town um so this is so what are we looking at here we got cinema 4d up we got we got uh unreal up what do we have yeah the um let me show you i can show you these first couple of bumpers so this is the geometric one the one i showed at ibc so this just kind of took me out of my comfort zone like i really never designed with like bright colors and just like random shapes before so i kind of took that as a challenge to myself to kind of just think outside my normal box and come up with some cool abstract animations here and the people at unreal loved it so this was a really cool one to work on and then this is the very first one that i put out this one is called naturalistic and basically this one i was thinking would showcase more of the mega scans assets and just kind of give like a really easy breakdown of how we can bring our stuff from cinema into unreal and think like a gamer like this is like really inspired by like tomb raider or indiana jones i was trying to get those type of vibes in there for this and so if i close this down i can actually show you my project file here live so this is that natural lipstick project and this is just inside of cinema 4d and so if you notice i just have a really simple camera move in here like i have the unreal engine logo spinning there i have these um these rock holders here these are more just for like blocking out my scene because the way that game engine people work is they kind of like to build out their scenes like a lot of them are coming from houdini and maya so they'll they call it like grade level boxing and they'll just use like really really basic geometry in their scene kind of just gesture um i guess you could call it sketching but like in 3d and then they bring that from the 3d application into unreal and that's really where they start putting in the fine details and so i'm starting to try to think a little bit more like that so i'm just putting like real basic stuff in here like i have these rock clips they're in here from mega scans which if i open this up this is mega skins which if you have an epic account you have all this stuff absolutely free this is all photogrammetry stuff that the people at quixote have been making so there's like thousands and thousands of these really cool 3d assets and they're all photoreal like usually if you just scroll through here they'll show you the most recent stuff to put up but like this stuff is cool right here like industrial barrels basically they take like thousands of photos around the barrel then they use their software to make a photogrammetry photoreal object based off of all those photos and they're pretty detailed in there so i mean you can get as detailed as you want like if you want to bring in like a low poly version you have that or if you want to bring in a really high like film quality asset like they use this stuff for the jungle book and call of duty and things of that nature so it's like you have all the same assets that big hollywood films are using at your disposal as well which i think is really cool but um it's really interesting like because this is the kind of thing that that i talk about with pre-production all the time is that well let's let's get a rough look at it let's get a look at what the composition is going to be from like just a design perspective because it works right like your camera movement is great the the movement of resolving things is flawless like it's those things are not going to change right and between like and you can you can nail them down quite quickly i think in when you're able to like be looser about about your design i don't know it's yeah it's really interesting you don't have to lock anything in you just get a loose idea of what you want to accomplish and that's something that comes with experience too like i've been working in the cinema since 2006 so it's kind of like i know the camera in there better so i do my camera moves in cinema i just like i'm able to navigate a lot better so i'll do as much as i can in cinema and then once i get into unreal it's kind of just like i'm populating around my skeleton like this is what the final resolve looks like and then this is the cliff that i originally brought in from cinema and then all i did was take and duplicate it a bunch of times in here and then if i break out on my camera i kind of came over and i built some just some like atmospheric effects stuff so i have like a little candle lit here with a little bit of foliage and just kind of like set decorating i guess you could say at that point yeah the tools inside of unreal are crazy like here let me let me see if i have this set up because this is my favorite one yeah here we go so this is the foliage tool so let's say like i have these ferns right here if i activate these ferns you can see right here i have like this dome which is my arch so i just click and i'm dragging and i'm painting these ferns on my geometry which is perfect which is crazy because it's like i'm used to doing this stuff manually at cinema and it's just like i'll pick out like i'll go to mega scans and let's say to search for like grass or something i had to prevent myself from cussing on this program which i so it's like i look up grass they have all these different type of grass in here it's like i could kind of just pick it export it throw it into that foliage tool and then just start painting away which is ridiculous because i could spend a whole day and just like you know picking out the polygons that i want to put the grass on and trying to use the mograph cloner to try to manipulate that but i come here and it's just like oh just click and drag there you go so that's like something crazy there that i love showing people and then you pull back to my so i guess yeah i think the interesting thing is that if someone was trying to do all that in cinema 4d and then bring it into unreal that would that would be upsetting but yeah yeah having the basic structure and then painting on it in unreal like that looks so nice yeah it's crazy and it's very intuitive like i don't have to select this geometry like say i want to come over here and it automatically knows so i'll just start clicking and dragging and boom it's painting on that surface there so it's pretty crazy how intuitive this stuff is and it's like i don't really know the particle system in unreal that great but you can see like i have these real-time fireflies flying around my scene here so it was basically as easy as going to the epic games launcher and then just coming over to the marketplace if it's going to work here and then basically like the thing i've been finding is if i have an idea then i usually come to the marketplace and just search for it because more than likely somebody made it so if i come to here and type in particle system you see a bunch of stuff here that you can buy but there's also this free tab here so if i click on free boom we have a bunch of actually this is the one i used here but it's like we have all these particle systems already built out that we could just take this like let me say if i click on this here basically just click add the project and it's drag and drop from there like we were saying like um how we built with legos earlier is literally like that like it works for particles it works with geometry textures i mean they have like crazy free stuff in here like if i come to permanent collection you can see we have like all this foliage stuff in here we have lighting kits i mean it's pretty crazy like you don't have to know like if you came in just as like not knowing any type of 3d it's like you can still get started like you can pull from a variety of these assets here and just start building away yeah i'm thinking like for for students who are just starting out like you can't do better than free for exactly for learning for learning resources like granted there's a lot of really interesting like kit bash stuff there's a look there's a lot there's a lot of great paid things that support a lot of artists however i will say that that when you're starting out and i know a lot of people who watch this channel are also very budget-conscious people um i really am just blown away by by not only the quantity of things but like the quality of stuff yeah i'm still thinking about those ferns too that's i mean this is 4k wood from um what they'll do is they actually pay the artist here so like this is made by this guy named carol detroit they found some high quality assets and they're like hey we like this stuff we think our community can use it can we buy this from you and i'm not sure if it's royalties or what or how these guys are compensated but i definitely know that they're compensated for bringing their stuff to the marketplace and then also you'll see a tab here free for the month and so this stuff is up for just a month but like if you like if you put it into your shopping cart then it's 100 yours to use forever so i think it's every first tuesday of the month they usually switch this stuff out but as long as you catch it before the month is out it's like you have all these free assets which if you look at my library i mean i've been collecting stuff since last year so i have like lip packs in here which is crazy we could use lutson unreal i have tornado effects materials i mean it's pretty wild like huh let me show you this if i come over to not to turn this into like an unreal party here but oh no please yeah if i um this is called the post process volume which is really powerful so you can see we have a type here called color grading which if i pull this down i can actually start pulling up color scopes and i can actually do color grading within unreal engine here which is pretty well and not only that like i was saying we have the lut pack like this is let me see if i can find it and this was all on the marketplace so if i come down here to here it is amplified let's we have like a it's almost like magic bullet looks for afterwards so if i come down to popular looks we have like blockbuster looks and sometimes they take them like based off of movies and stuff like this one world war one if i click and drag it in here you can see it change the dynamic of my scene so i'm just you know clicking and dragging these luts into my scene here and and all these different type of looks like now it looks like it's underwater or something crazy so it's just pretty crazy like how powerful this system is and well the other thing is like how quickly this is happening like i i don't know like what people are probably gonna ask what kind of hardware are we dealing with okay so this system i'm using it is actually a um third ripper three the top of the line one um shout outs to amd i've done a lot of sponsor stuff with them but you know i speak a lot at their booths and stuff so they did gift that to me but then um i do have a 2080 ti in here which i purchased myself but this system is just one gpu like i'm used to using multiple gpus like i actually just sold my old system i had um four 1080 ti's in it and that was all for because i was using redshift and stuff but since i switched over to unreal it's like unreal doesn't utilize multiple gpus because it doesn't really have to like i'm able to use like one gpu and be able to use all this power in it and i know a lot of people say like well that's a really high-end system but i do have my laptop here from when i first started doing vr like i needed a laptop so i could travel around and do demos and stuff and it has a mobile 1070 in it which is about four years old now and i run a roll on that with no problem so of course it doesn't run as fast as this system but it's still capable of doing um you know i got a bit like i could pretty much run this scene off of my laptop and be perfectly fine man that is that is pretty wild um because i know that there's been a lot of buzz recently um and i'd love to get your thoughts on this because i know nvidia just came out with their with their um their wonderful you know 30 30 xx whatever the 3080s the 3090s people are people are losing their beans about these things about just voraciously wanting to acquire more power right more more gpus more cuda cores whatever um it really sounds like that this is just doing more with less right like it it feels very efficient like yeah how do you feel about this kind of x like i would say like an exponential curve of hardware requirements for people coming in i can't say the 30 series will be utilized because like those cards along with the 20 series they're ray tracing capable like my 1080 ti i couldn't do any type of ray tracing stuff with it but with the 20 and the 30s actually the 30s are a lot better now you could do you have full capabilities of using ray tracing in there which gives you a lot more realistic shadows and reflections and it's just overall good plus you have more vram in there so your scene can handle a lot more geometry without being bogged down so i do see a plus side to the new um gpus that are out there but not for the prices that i've been seeing going on ebay lately definitely gonna hold out a little bit yeah well it's so it's so interesting like this kind of thing is is neat that that to i think to get really jazzed for a new gpu card but to be less jazzed for what is essentially a new direction in in in creation i think is an interesting paradigm to see um to see what's getting more buzz right yeah like we said before a lot of people they spend a lot of time mastering these programs i mean i see some really talented artists using octane a red shift and so when you spend a lot of time finally perfecting it i can see why you wouldn't want to automatically jump into the next thing because you have to learn everything all over again like you still have basic concepts of composition and how lighting works is not going to be as baby step-ish you know it's not like you're just coming in completely in the dark but i can see where people are like well if i jump into octane i know exactly where all the little tricks and levers are and everything to get the look that i want but if i go into unreal i'm completely lost and so yeah i get what people are they're like they're happy to have more power because they can still use their traditional workflow and work a little bit more faster awesome well hey let's uh i mean this this is making me need to download unreal so let's get off of the screen sharing can i show one more thing please okay one one more thing my favorite thing to show people real time rendering and so i'm gonna take this scene real quick here this is i want to say about 600 frames so i'll just do a jpeg for now just for time's sake okay fine i'll just download this to my desktop here let's say render there we go so i'm just going to render out the scene i'm at 1080 at 60 fps and i want to say it's 500 to 600 frames let me check yeah it's about 500 frames so i have everything set up i just hit render local here and give it a second to calculate and you can see it's counting the frames but in front of our eyes here so this is the amount of time it takes to watch it is how long it takes to render well yes it's only get you know with the better cards i can only imagine it's going to get faster if that you know if that's something you can wrap your head around but i literally just rendered out 500 frames at 1080 60 fps in under 30 seconds which at the end of the day it's just like why why not well and it looks great also like when i think about when i think about maybe the kind of content or maybe the way that in which people are sort of consuming or distributing content um you know it uh so few people are actually watching on 4k monitors 8k monitors right and we're putting so much time and energy not just human energy but like electricity energy it does stuff like how much of it is finally appreciated but i just i think the ability to iterate and to alter your scene so much i just think like well i don't like those ferns there could you just uh fewer ferns smaller ferns okay now put them over there oh yeah that's that's crazy i love how that's you can really bob ross your scene there right like if you want if you just want want a little bit of a little bit of lighting over here we'll just paint that here you touched on a great point there too because my electricity bill is coming down a lot because i don't have to fire up all the systems for the render farm when i'm ready to render it's kind of like i just render and then send it off the client and shut down so i don't have to worry about like four to five machines running overnight driving up the cost of my electric bill it's kind of like you know render call it a day and save on energy so it's also environmentally friendly if you're into that type of stuff yeah yeah well i mean that i was building a new system around here right well in a couple years i'm gonna have to probably get off a mac and probably to in order to do more advanced 3d things right so i was thinking like how many cards do i need to jam into this thing if i really want to do the things that i expect to do so this is i gotta say this has actually inspired me a lot to look in different directions so this has been a kind of an eye-opening eye-opening experience here yeah even my like i've not touched blender before but i have a friend he has a youtube channel too and he's been um just cranking out some crazy blender stuff this year and that's running in real time as well so you know unreal isn't your cup of tea i mean there's still blender they're still doing some amazing stuff over there with the ev render and stuff as well which i know a lot of cinema artists have been saying with the rewrite of blender it's almost really similar in the way that they work now i guess they redid their entire ui or something like i'm not a hunger guy so i don't really know but it's been um picking out a lot of wave since last year yeah i've uh i mean i i used blender in its early days and that bounced me off of blender pretty hard um because because it was just so unpleasant to to move around to do things um which is why i'm i've been afraid to touch it again right you get there is like a real emotional connection to that tool um in a lot of ways um but but because i because i know we've only got you for a little bit a little bit more time i want to talk about you're doing courses for mograph.com coming up um uh what what's going to be going on over there what can people uh i'm going to drop a link there's a link in the description if you want to get notified but what are you what are you doing over there what's what's going on in your in your upcoming courses yeah so it's one of those things that um there was a lot of buzz coming into this year about unreal but a lot of people didn't know exactly where to start instead of guys at mograph they approached me on creating like a bit like a beginner's course for motion graphics artists that want to dive into unreal so i've been spending a good part of the year just um it even helped me just working my workflow as well so as i'm developing the course i was also getting better myself so i was able to go back and rework some things just to be a little bit more efficient but hopefully this will be a good course for anybody that you know especially coming from cinema 4d like i use a lot of cinema in this course and so if you're a c4d artist and you're curious about unreal or you don't know where to start i try to take it in a step-by-step approach just kind of explaining how at least how i work from cinema to unreal and i know a lot of the beta testers have been saying it's been helping them out a lot so i think i'm accomplishing what i'm about to do you know so yeah if you if you're interested in unreal it's going to be up there in maybe a week or two like i just finished it last week and it's in beta testing phase right now so we're hoping to put that out pretty soon here awesome well there's a link there's a link in the chat for everyone hanging out there's a link in the description for folks who are watching this later on to get notified um so you can you can get some of that in your life um also if you want to learn more about people want to learn more about unreal drop drop a link in here for that uh the link to that in the description as well so definitely check that out go go deep into that stuff um now i have a list of other questions for you that i've that i've built up uh over a little time yeah okay here we go number one you you have i could open notice you'll see some of the best uh merch you are wearing some of it on your head right now where look i i have very few merch things that i enjoy in life one of them is snap back hats the other one is socks um who makes these things and how can i also get stuff yes this is something that i need to work on next as soon as i get done with this client project i just um not too long ago i crossed the 10 000 mark on my youtube channel so i can actually have like the merch tab underneath the videos now so i signed up for a teespring to be able to make that happen i'm going to try to put the hats and the shirts and the stuff up on there i just haven't had time to but yeah this was one of the samples that i got from teespring a little while ago just to kind of see the quality of it and everything so i'm going to put that up available soon and then i'm still trying to figure out how to make a what up what up t-shirt just because i've had that requested a few times i can't mess that up i have to i might have to tap you for that i need to well get some good designs there for that look all i can say is you should definitely crowdsource it from people that's the way to go um i i'm i don't know i so look this is my latest hat acquisition this is for the hamilton honey badgers i i only buy for teams that are also memes so this is my favorite one of my new favorite objects that i've that i've picked up um anyway this is for the canadian elite basketball league if anybody's wondering what the hell where a honey badger plays it's some it's some decent basketball i'm not gonna lie um but but my butt um some other thing though you've got in all of your all the shots of your office we see two things often one is a giant stack of hardware over on the one side of you uh so many awards that you've won over the years are there any what would you say is kind of one of your favorites out of those i would love to know you have so many achievements you know and like you're we're catching you in the middle of the ride here right so but so far what are some of the ones that really stand out for you my favorite one i have to say is at the art institute during graduation we have portfolio day and that's where potential clients and stuff can come look at your booth and they can pick up interns or hires or whatever they're but the one thing that they do do is for each program i got like i said i was in the motion graphics and vfx program and in our little category they have the best of show award and so like i know pittsburgh isn't known for motion graphics so i didn't think like a lot of potential employers would become looking at our booth for that but i worked my butt off just to have the best booth that i can so that i could win that best of show award which i ended up winning and um yeah that was probably my proudest moment because like a lot of the people my counterparts there they just had the work that we did in school on their demo reel and i came in with this giant monitor this giant crt monitor that weighed like two tons i almost broke the table and i had a little dvd player hooked up to it like i had to order like these crazy um rigs to be able to get the dvd the portable dvd player to hook up to the crt but i had my real playing on this giant crt that's like pretty much like pushing the table down so it's already catching a lot of eyeballs but um i had work on there that none of my other classmates had because you know i used to hang out in creative cow a lot and so i used to you know take a lot of tips and tricks from there and apply it to my own work so i was doing a lot of personal work and um i reached out like you were just talking about like your local sports team there like i actually reached out to the local that nfl team that is i think it was called cfl it's like a minor league for the nfl but they didn't have a lot of press so i was like hey can i do some logo animations for you guys and they jumped all over it so i had like that type of stuff on my reel and you know i'm just like all these different local businesses i was just going in there like hey i'm just looking to get experience and build up my portfolio and you know back then i was just like i just wanted for my portfolio so no one's going to pass up free stuff but i had some really cool stuff on my real that nobody else had so i took the best of show award long story short and yeah that was probably my my that's my first award and the one i'm most proud of just because of all the hard work that i put into it man it's so good like it i'll say this like ev everything in your career like i i hope you're i hope you're really proud of everything you do because like you're one of the hardest working people and like it you're such an example i think to a lot of maybe young people out there who like if you work hard good things happen like it's not it's not magic right no no i definitely didn't dive into like i made it seem easy like i just got a job at happy medicine but there is definitely some bumps in between there like i thought i had a job in la and i went to i drove across country went to the job that they were supposed to open and the business went under that that weekend before so i'm knocking on the door no one's answering and i'm just like in panic because i've never been to la before no one's given me an answer and it's like i had to go back to the drawing board so yeah definitely had some hiccups there this is before cell phones were normal things cell phones and gps man yeah it's you've got your you've got a map of ellie or tourist map of la in one hand your zack morris phone in the other hand walking around oh man that's that's crazy now the last thing i want to talk about on the other side of you that we see on almost every video is an arcade machine back there uh right now you got simpsons going on there which is like oh man just i i i threw a lot of quarters into that and if you have turtles in time i would love to uh i did i've had that on something yeah i didn't have both original turtles the simpsons the x-men yeah otter classics oh my god so yeah tell me a little about that bit of kit back there um and the other thing i want to talk to if you wouldn't mind like i would love to know because i feel like you were growing up in an age when when technology like could like this is like nes is coming into the home and virtual boy is coming into the home like yes i feel like you're you're kind of like at that age where like you're hitting all of these kind of technological bangers that are coming on to people that are like well here's check this out this is a great new thing what do you think or like science fiction was was like a an evolving thing like you know how how that kind of played into into where you're at like i'd love to know love to know more about that also if you're a star trek or star wars person um yeah i'll get to that later okay but um yeah the first one the arcade machine i'm really proud of my son and i built that together it's um it's all handcrafted and it's running a pc in there that we kind of frankenstein together so like i was telling you earlier like i'm kind of a hoarder like whenever well a hoarder with pc stuff so whenever like new tech comes out i never threaded otec away i usually just put it in the garage and so i was cleaning out the garage one day i had all these pc cases these old cpus these old gpus and we were kind of like why don't we just put it together and because you know like the emulators and the games and stuff don't really take that much to run especially for like these type of games so we just put something together and um yeah we just do all the classics on there and it even got to a point to where we started manipulating it a little bit like after we had it fully built we actually got like a wii sensor and we started putting like gun games on there so we hacked the lead controller so that we could start doing the gun games like the time crisis and yes stuff like that so it has it's fully functional for that stuff as well but um which time crisis are we talking about do you have the pedal down there as well it didn't go that far i did see that on ebay you just got it you got to grab like um like a guitar pedal and then uh you'd be good to go right yeah i saw people hack like the steering wheel the pedals for the steering wheels and stuff i've seen people do that but yeah i'm like i'm not going to go that far the gun was the gun's good enough because it has buttons on there that you could just kind of map out but yeah no i'm excited to go try to build one i'll send you some links uh definitely i learned some stuff along the way oh man i mean i i mean i'll probably end up getting divorced but it's fine this is fine this is okay and yeah so yeah i guess the one last thing i had was was because for me a lot of my interest in technology stems from spending too much time watching science fiction after school right like that's kind of where my my love of like graphics and stuff all came from watching these these things and thinking oh how did how does that get done or just hoping one day to just stand in a holodeck right like that was kind of where where i was at like i'm really wondering kind of what were the what were some of the forces that really drew you into like drew you into this world like it's it's i know it's really easy for a lot of people um to be kind of like i don't know stereotyped or to be to be pushed in certain directions like man if i had to listen to the people around me i would have probably ended up uh being a bricklayer of some kind right like that's that's where that's where my path was hand headed because i'm a large person with with large hands right so but i don't know i'd love to know i'd love to know like what what brought you down this path and not other paths i guess yeah it's definitely interesting i mean it's a story in itself like you you like you said it's easy to get typecast especially growing up in the midwest as you know just african-american youth most people geared me more towards football and basketball so i played it because i thought i had to because i was supposed to but in my heart of hearts like i'm hanging out at the comic book store like you're saying where like when pokemon first came out i was playing pokemon playing magic just collecting like the tops marvel series i still have them here just like all the geeky stuff that you weren't really supposed to be into even though um steve urkel kind of made it a little bit easier growing up sean like julia white was also he's the voice of sonic right like it's it's hard to it's hard not to think i don't know he's i mean he's also kind of a cool guy so i don't know steve arkell stephen or kell is more where you want to be yeah i mean i was him many years for halloween just because couldn't afford gifts and i had the glasses already because like i wear contacts now but my eyesight is so bad i had like these big coke bottle glasses like the lens actually used to touch my eyelids and so i kind of looked like urkel back then so it's kind of like throwing some suspenders get a trick-or-treating bag and you're off to the races so yeah eric will definitely play a big part of my life growing up but um yeah i mean like i was like you're saying it's on a tech bubble like my first system i had was a tandy 1000 because my uncle used to build those down in virginia then my aunt used to work at nasa down there in newport news so i had that science background just growing up just because my family was already working in the field and i kind of like really really just engaged them because i thought that stuff was cool like i love space and everything about it my aunt used to always send me stuff from nasa like little postcards or whatever just kind of showing me stuff they're working on so that's stuff that definitely helped mold me as a youth and then getting into like the atari 2600 and then the nes and getting a duck hunt and stuff like that like just being able to see this technology grow what like with us i mean i think that played a major part of it as well which is why i still get excited about new tech because we grew up in the age where new tech was just like always coming out so i mean it's just like i remember the lump or the leap from nes to sega genesis and you're seeing sonic flying off the screen and me as a kid i'm just like wow mario stays in the middle of the screen the entire game and now we have a character that's off the screen yeah still playing the game so it's just like that stuff was just mind-boggling and then playing or trying to play the virtual boy and they give me a seizure as a kid yeah but nothing'll mess you up man don't i remember trying it at toys r us and i came out of there just really sick like i was shaking and everything i played mario tennis on that for all of two minutes before i had to get away yeah in yeah that weird red and black screen mine for me well man like look look at it now like it's it's so great like i'm so i'm so glad that you kind of you kind of followed your own path right and i hope that i hope that for anyone who's who's listening out there or who watches this later it's like you know what if you it is cool to be into the things you're into you know i think that's like i don't know i i really wish that that like in the 90s it wasn't cool to be into stuff right not at all which is why it's crazy now because like especially when the black panther came out everybody was just into superhero movies and i'm like i've been into this stuff since i was like like i used to like kids used to like chase me for this type of stuff now everybody's out there loving the avengers and black panthers spider-man so i'm just like i mean it's good that it's happening like then they're finally having their day but i'm like man i tell my kids like this is stuff that kids used to try to beat you up for just being nancy it's kind of crazy how that big turnaround happened but well i don't know i i think i think as long as people are happy being being enthusiastic about what they're into and like if people want to pursue whatever they're passionate about so anyway i hope i hope that uh as it continues you stay passionate because i love what you're doing and i hope we see more of it um we're coming into the end of the show now so i want to thank you for for hanging out uh before you go uh you know we know you've got the youtube channel uh we we know you've got courses coming up links to all that stuff is in the description but maybe uh tell the folks where they can find you on the internet if they want more win bush in their life uh which they definitely should yeah as you said youtube is the best place to find me and then i'm on twitter and instagram i should know these links by now but i think they are just slash jonathan winbush i'm really bad with this i think you've got i think you've got the branding uh unified across the cross i know one of them is just slash win bush but i can't remember which one but usually if you type in jonathan one boy shall pop up on that platform and then as i was saying to you earlier i'm gonna start trying to do stuff on twitch i mean you kind of i've been seeing the stuff that you've been live streaming which has been something i've been terrified of doing before like just live streaming your art live but i've seen you do it week after week on twitch and behance so i'm gonna give it a shot i have a twitch channel so why not we'll see how it goes so you might see me streaming here very very soon and then um yeah just if you guys see me online just give me a shout i mean i'm usually pretty active online i have a discord channel as well if you guys want to join that i have to um i don't know did i send you the link for that because discord's a little bit i think it's all in the description yeah i think right there yeah i know sometimes i try to send people links and it like changes it it's like your old link is expired i'm just like oh no i have all my discord stuff linked to my videos so it's like i have to go back and switch a lot of this out but yeah if you find me on discord yeah yeah if you can manage to make discord work get on yeah we have a good group on there um a lot of cool people that especially beginners and cinema and unreal so even um dead mouse of all people jumped in there he just like he was on lockdown had no more concerts going on this year so he's like i'm gonna learn unreal so i could do my own virtual concerts and he actually jumped in our discord and has been learning unreal and stuff that's been pretty crazy well you know probably saw that he already did work for mix master mike so he doesn't want to get left behind he did a test the other night it was pretty crazy i think he's leaps and bounds over like he had a mocap suit on dead mouse avatar and he's djing live in his own virtual set on the internet like i think like fortnight but did mouse doing it from his house but like he said you just have you could pay five bucks to watch dead mouse live and yeah it's just crazy what he's doing over there but hmm he must be very fit you're telling me that the mocap suit is very sweaty yeah it's funny because i watched it at the event he had me join in and um at the end there he's like man i gotta take this off he's like i'm like burning up it's like a sonic why is it why is it like why is it like a scuba thing i i guess uh mocap artists are very agile so i guess it's a way for them to burn more calories as they're working that's right it's important to look good you want something really skin tight when you're doing mocap but why can't it be made out of like look look i've got like i've got like a rash guard from jiu jitsu here sweat just comes out of it it's climate controlled get the technology people sound good anyway anyway i digress thank you again so much for coming out uh if people want to find more evan abrams stuff at ec abrams everywhere on the internet subscribe to this channel um if you want more of this stuff do let me know i love doing interviews i love meeting and speaking with people who are uh well who know more stuff about about new things than i do and uh so i get to learn something the audience gets to learn something it's it's great uh anyway thank you so much man we're gonna we're gonna sign it off from there thank you everyone for hanging out in the chat and uh yeah we'll see you uh maybe not next week cause i didn't call anybody to get a guest on next week so uh we'll we'll figure it out after that yeah i'll come back it's now probably yeah yeah it'd be the ec rooms and win bush time yeah i'll do it in a mocap suit this time i was busy today i couldn't jump into it but we only get yeah yeah we'll get you in virtual though we'll we'll have you join in as an avatar that'll be uh yeah that'd be crazy awesome well i'll no i'll load up character animator so i'll be a cartoon also then we'll be we'll really do it up let's figure it out together yeah awesome all right bye for now every

Channel: ECAbrams

Views: 2,008

Keywords: Motion design, motion, design, vfx, visual fx, adobe, after, effect, after effects, effects, interview, live, call in, guest, talk, chat, creative, create, videos, video, advice, tips, help, augmented, reality, virtual, ar, vr, winbush, unreal, real time

Id: UpLeWltiSvk

Length: 67min 49sec (4069 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 18 2020