Engage in Real Time: Merging Media Outputs from Multiple Sources

[AUDIO LOGO]

YAN: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

DIETER: Yeah.

YAN: All right. Good morning, San Diego. Welcome. My name is Yan I'm one of the founders of The Pack and also CEO of SYNK. And with me is my colleague.

DIETER: I'm Dieter. I'm the R&D lead of The Pack and Sync. And we are live from Brussels.

YAN: Indeed. So for us, it's already a little bit later in the evening, but we'll try to keep the energy up. And so today, we want to give a product demo of Sync and tell you how it enabled us to produce real-time content. Because here at The Pack, we think we're riding the wave of the third digital image revolution, meaning everything becomes 3D and everything becomes real time.

We just had a little hiccup on the reel. Because aside from real-time productions, we also do offline rendering, high-end visual effects. So I'll run it again also for those joining in the session a little bit later. There we go.

[AUDIO LOGO]

[MUSIC ENDS]

OK. So we are The Pack. We are a digital production studio. And for us, it's very important that storytelling actually meets technology. I think that's for a lot of you attending the session the same. We're all artists working with digital tools. And in the end, the goal is to tell stories. And we do that in a specific way.

Just a little bit. What do we have inside The Pack? We're really a diverse studio. We do post-production. We do visual effects. We do VR. We do even games, animation. We have the development team, which is de-testing, DIT, and even virtual production.

And how do we do that? For that, we have quite a big infrastructure, and that actually enables us as well to immediately check when we test out new technologies. Like today, we're going to talk a lot about real-time, how to get things into a real-time engine. But it's very important to check that in a true post-production environment.

And that enables us actually to become the world's first studio to produce a real-time rendered animation feature film. And this film was released in the cinemas in 2022 as a 4K DCP. And I'll also run the trailer of that film, and it's important just to have a look at it because we're going to show a bit of the technology that we use behind the scenes to do this.

[MOVIE TRAILER]

- Eww.

[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]

- Ricky, look, there's something out there.

[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]

- Dad, we have an emergency.

- If we don't finish our mission soon, the whole of your land is going to dry up and freeze over.

- What's the plan? Should I tell them about you?

- [INAUDIBLE] lab, here for you and you for us.

- Look.

- Hey, hey, hey. Weather's going crazy today.

- This is Spitfish,

- The heart of the tower has been stolen.

- [WHISTLING] To the tower.

- [CHUCKLE] Who's scared now? I love you too.

- It's all going to be fine.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

[END OF TRAILER]

YAN: So that's the trailer of the animation film, fully rendered in game engine, released in the cinema in 2022. And how did we actually do that? Well, by developing a novel software platform that we called SYNK. And SYNK allows us to output to many different platforms or many different devices, from cinema projectors over TVs, or even iPad, mobile, VR, et cetera.

Because if you put your content in a game engine, from there on, you can make it both linear or interactive. And that's something that we truly like. And we want to talk about this a bit more, give you a demo of that product today. And I want to stress, I mean, if you have any questions at any time, don't hesitate to raise your hand and ask the question so that we will just let you interact with us. It's no problem.

We don't want to only to be this ex-cathedra, we're going to go a little bit crazy. We're even going to go into a live demo. Now just to see what the output is, if we put stuff in the game engine. I'm going to run, a very quick clip where you will see on one hand the cinema output, on the other hand, the VR. And I just can tell you that we reused all of these assets one-on-one.

So let's have a look at that. So again, from SYNK going to these multiple outputs. So on the left-hand, shots from the film. On the right-hand side some shots from the VR. And as you can see, SYNK allows you to produce content for any audience on any platform or device as I would like to say.

A little bit on the technical side. This is graphically represented how it works. On the left-hand, you get your asset creation. On the right-hand, we put the shot creation. You have the DCCs Digital Content Creation tools where you make your assets. They get all into the sync database managed.

It's-- technically speaking, a lot of metadata management. And then on the right-side, we can output stuff in WebGL. We can output stuff to Unity and even Unreal Engine. So as an artist or as a technical person, you can configure the platform having some plugins for the multiple DCCs.

As an artist, you're going to get your task list and you can actually quickly open DCC straight in that window. And in an upcoming release, we also plan on giving you a nodal view of your production or your library, where our assets, where do they live within the production.

Let's say you have a character. In which shot will that character be? You'll be able to visualize that in a nodal view. So what is SYNK? For us, it's really a toolbox. It's full of tools that are actually designed by our artists for other artists.

So the whole system came to life basically by having a lot of back and forth happening and people quickly take it up. Here we have some students in Germany playing around with our VR camera layout tools. After a couple of minutes, people get used to it and they can start using it. It's a very funny way to do layout, for example.

Now when you start up a project, we-- since our background is partially editorial post-production, we think this is a very important thing to do, getting your edit inside the system. So at all times you know what the length of a shot is or a sequence. So here we will showcase that based on some edits that we have of a storyboard in Adobe Premiere.

We also have the sound. So we'll get that data out through a standard Edl or XML and put that in the system. Also showcasing a bridge that we wrote with the arrow tool from the Foundry, where you can then pick up that information. Basically, we're going to start it up, it will know the context we are in within the film. And we rebuilt the timeline in that software.

A lot of people like to use it to do their reviews on shots, reviews on VFX, or reviews on an animation product. So that for us is quite important to start it off, get that editorial data into the system. Up until now, we were, let's say, running offline. We were running some videos. Now let's be crazy. Bear with us. We're going to do a live demo. All right.

DIETER: And we're going to cut between two workstations. Because we also have Kevin on the site who will be representing our Maya artists. We will first start with Unity.

YAN: Yes. So we're going to showcase especially for you, we made this nice environment here. It's what we call our demo scene running live from Unity. However, it has a little bit of a Christmas feel. So even though we like you, welcome Autodesk University 2024. Just to showcase that we're really live here.

Are going to take off that title, bring maybe back our original one that we had there. Happy holidays a bit early, but anyway let's go for it. So when we inspect the scene, something pops to mind. It looks like we have a little hiccup here. Somebody decided to make our Christmas trees purple. So that obviously asks for a correction.

So the first thing that we want to do is actually get a texture update and make some new texture assignments. Before we jump into that, maybe come back one second, Dieter. As you can see here, when I was talking, we see the whole timeline here down here. So that's actually that timeline that you saw in the Premier. It's not the same one, but I mean, it's the same ID.

So SYNK also builds automatically within Unity that timeline, and you have all the lengths of the shots. If you would decide later on, and we will showcase the VR camera layout tools that a shot should be longer, et cetera. We can push that data through and adapt the next stages. Let's say your Maya animation file will be adapted. Even if we move the sound, we'll make sure that comes across to Maya and keeps your animation in SYNK.

We have a lot of tools here, indeed that are not typically present in a game engine. We have a storyboard overlay that you can see here. We also have the black bars. Within these black bars we added information about the reel, the sequence, the shot. Which department are we currently working on. We are in the layout here.

And we have, of course, a shot and frame counts. We have some rule of thirds to help you make your shot or your framing a bit more correct. We even also have a presets for the focal lengths of the camera. Because you want to be more cinematic. Game engines-- you can just choose whatever format that you want in terms of the camera.

But if you want to get a cinematic feel, better to narrow down. And also we bring that artist friendly to the front so you don't have to go into all these hierarchies of the project to find actually your layout tools that you need. But I think now we can jump to Kevin and see if he can help us actually fix these trees. All right, Kevin. So you're going to load in a different texture I think. So--

DIETER: It will fix this texture issue.

YAN: It will fix the texture issue that is a little bit ugly with these purple pine trees that we have here. Again guys, don't hesitate to ask any questions. If you raise the hand, feel free to jump in at any point and ask a question or--

DIETER: This is to classic, standard some sanity checks. We run on every asset. We're going to make now a small turntable for this. We will speed it up and only do a few frames.

YAN: Exactly.

DIETER: Which is now making us a preview.

YAN: Let's have a look if that looks better. Seems to be good. All right. I think you can publish that one again, Kevin.

DIETER: This can be done from multiple locations. You normally don't need to be in one studio. You can be like in a different country in San Diego or in Brussels. It doesn't matter.

YAN: Yeah, we used it extensively in the multi-studio collaborative setup. So it's really meant to be. That's also why we showcase it today from different workstations and show you live how that actually works. I think that publish is done. Let's see if we get something in the production tracker.

DIETER: We are cutting back to our Unity workstation and we have Ftech open. Let's refresh--

YAN: Let's refresh and see what we get coming in.

DIETER: Just to be sure. But I think we already have it.

YAN: Yeah.

DIETER: Let's see a nice tree. Let's see our preview again.

YAN: That looks--

DIETER: So--

YAN: Pretty nice.

DIETER: We have a video of what Kevin's work is done with his feedback on it.

YAN: Yeah.

DIETER: That is a nice tree.

YAN: All right. Cool

DIETER: Thank you, Kevin.

YAN: I'll do that. Thank you. All right. Good. Now, once we have this, let's have a look. Once we have this, how will we bring that back in? When I actually come back in the real-time engine and still have my purple trees. However, here on the top, we get a asset update notification.

So when I click on that, I can see that there is a new version available from within the Unity interface. [INAUDIBLE] going to get that coming in. And let's see what's going to happen. So there we are. As easy as this. It looks great. I think we fixed this.

DIETER: Wonderful. Are you sure? [CHUCKLE]

YAN: Yeah, I think it's OK. Don't you think?

DIETER: Yeah.

YAN: Seems totally fine to me. At least in terms of the textures. right. Good. So shall we actually, maybe now go and do some cameras, Dieter? What do you think about--

DIETER: Yeah, we can do that.

YAN: Yeah.

DIETER: Let's do some VR.

YAN: Let's do some VR. Let's get into some VR. So one of the things of using real-time engines is that they are real-time, obviously. But it has-- again, a lot of artistic freedom for the artists. So I'm going to go sideboard mode and get into this VR. Now get my controllers. Thank you so much. And moving up, maybe.

DIETER: Yeah. We need to move up.

YAN: We need to move up. Yeah. So what this gives you actually is a view on a nice old school camera. We even put some film stock in there. You got a fairly modern LCD screen attached to it.

And again, it's all about the metadata. So within the tools, I have access to actually all of the shots that are lined up in my sequence. And I can freely move around within the environment. So there we are up. And now I need to find a position. Or maybe I should first have a look at my storyboard.

Hmm. Doesn't give me a lot of clues here. I think a little bit uninspired storyboard artist. But anyway, let's find a position and change maybe this shot that we have here. So also nice thing if you have already animations and that's funny about the real-time workflow. You can throw things a little bit around in terms of the usual waterfall workflow that we always have to work with.

So even if the animations are already there, we can still kind of adapt the camera. So let me see and choose maybe a focal length for this as well. Up, there we go. And then make a shot. So I just simply hit the Record button and now I'm recording that shot.

We can also make a variant. Here we go, up a little bit and come down like this. Nice. Got these Christmas presents there. OK. Well, maybe just for the fun of it, I'm going to take another shot. Go to shot 30. And why not move up into the sky and look down at my scene? Maybe record it like this. Here we go. Cool. OK.

DIETER: You're happy?

YAN: I'm happy.

DIETER: OK.

YAN: Good. So let's get out of the VR session and see--

DIETER: If you can see here, we have some takes we made. So we have the first shot we did. It's here. I won't do that.

YAN: Yep.

DIETER: And I will first play my first shot so that everyone can see it. This is where we started. This is the original. And now I will load what we did. All right. Let's see what happened.

YAN: Yeah.

DIETER: Completely different shot. If you can see, we are doing it live. Let's see what our other tech did. Let's integrate that one. OK, cool. Oh, this one is--

YAN: Oh.

DIETER: Yeah. Maybe it's a bit weird. Let's go back, I suggest.

YAN: Yeah. Let's keep it simple. Nice.

DIETER: Yeah.

YAN: All right.

DIETER: Let's see. Huh, this works well. Let's see what we did on 30, how that went through. 30 looks like this now.

YAN: And maybe put back the blackboards so we know which shots we're talking about.

DIETER: Yeah. Put the burn in on.

YAN: Yeah.

DIETER: 30, we are here.

YAN: Yes.

DIETER: And Let's see-- Oh, this is something completely different. Let's see what our tech did. Let's select.

YAN: Now what is that going to give us?

DIETER: Oh, it's a completely different perspective. Now we have basically a small overview shot of the action to come.

YAN: Great.

DIETER: Are you happy?

YAN: I'm happy. Let's keep this. Yeah I already feel my little Peter Jackson in me coming up. Now what. I suggest maybe we export these cameras for future reference--

DIETER: Yeah.

YAN: Dieter. But there is one thing--

DIETER: I don't like this hole here.

YAN: Exactly. So what-- exactly.

DIETER: Maybe we need to use Kevin again to fix this hole. Because it's a bit ridiculous that there is no trees here.

YAN: Yeah.

DIETER: It looks a bit unfinished. So let's go back to Kevin.

YAN: Yeah, let's go back to Kevin. Kevin, could you basically for us, do a update of that environment and fix that hole? Put like two or three trees there-- small one, a big one. As ever your artistic heart desires.

And then we can show that we can still-- wherever we are in the production update that. Meanwhile off-screen we will-- shall we export the cameras for later reference, maybe?

DIETER: Yeah, I will export the cameras.

YAN: Great. OK. So you can see now Kevin is bringing in some additional trees to enhance that environment and make sure that we don't really shoot out of the environment later on. So that's typically some set dressing.

Well, the reason some of you might say, yeah, but you can do set dressing perfectly in the game engine. That's all true. But don't forget, when you work in larger teams, you don't always have the artists at hand that know Unreal or Unity.

And a lot of the modeling obviously is done in DCCs like Maya. So it's easier. People are familiar with the tool. Let them work in the tools that they're familiar with, and just fix that set dressing within the DCC itself.

I think we got-- he's really fast, Kevin.

DIETER: Is he?

YAN: I think he already finished this up. That's great.

DIETER: I think he-- yeah. He still needs to publish. Let him publish.

YAN: OK. Let him publish. And I think-- did you meanwhile publish your cameras?

DIETER: I didn't publish my cameras, I exported them.

YAN: OK. Well, we will still have to publish them as well, actually So to get them going through the flow,

DIETER: But Kevin is so fast in Maya. I'm going to wait a bit for him.

YAN: Are you going to wait? Yeah. Again guys, anybody has some questions at any point don't hesitate. We also have some polls running that you should probably see in the Zoom. So answer these ones. They're quite interesting for us to get--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

DIETER: --getting back to us. And I'm going to check if Kevin did his work to review it first of all. So I'm going to see what did Kevin do. Oh, I like it Kevin. It's a bit fast, but--

YAN: [CHUCKLE]

DIETER: I really like what you did.

YAN: Yeah, nicely closed there. Great. OK. Cool. OK, so now that we have this, why don't we jump back into--

DIETER: Yes.

YAN: Unity?

DIETER: Let me check. Ah, I have a red button. So I have a small reminder that I'm doing something.

YAN: Hey, why don't you go a bit closer to--

DIETER: Let me go closer. Yeah, let me turn this off. So can everybody see this big, empty nothing? Let's update our dressing. Let's see how quick it goes here. And let's see if we like [INAUDIBLE] it.

YAN: Oh. No, OK.

DIETER: So we're just rearranging everything.

YAN: Cool, rebuilding.

DIETER: Let's check it out. All right. Everything--

YAN: Can you play that back right now? Oh,

[HAZARD NOISE]

DIETER: Great. Somebody needs to go home. [CHUCKLE] So I will go to my game view. Let's play it one more time. Op, that I don't need. Let's see how it looks now.

YAN: Yeah, we see these trees nicely covering the open space. So whatever action is going to play later on will not be bothered by that. Oh, we got a new camera.

DIETER: I love my shot.

[CHUCKLE] .

YAN: Great. This one as well.

DIETER: An establishing shot. I think that all-- looks good for this part of our demo. So I think I will go for some publishing.

YAN: Yeah. Yeah. Bring these cameras out for future reference. I think we need to go version 30.

DIETER: I will give it back to Kevin. OK.

YAN: Hi, Kevin. We got some camera updates. Because I mean, obviously we already have animation in this demo project, but usually you do your dressing, then you do your layout, and then you basically move it on to the animators. So what we're going to actually show you as well is having updated this camera and bringing that back into Maya. So once we're done with that, we should have--

DIETER: Let's go back to Kevin.

YAN: Let's go back. I think he should now have our updated camera. Let's see. Kevin, did you get that?

DIETER: And Paul is looking good. We see a lot of people want to see some Unreal. 66% apparently.

YAN: All right. Should we get to that?

DIETER: Getting worried?

YAN: Yeah, we should get worried.

[LAUGHING]

Now we're talking a lot right now about moving back and forth between Maya and Unity. 66% people want to see some Unreal in action. Well, we might be able to cover that, Dieter.

DIETER: Yeah, I think we can do that in a bit when Kevin is happy with what we did on our side of the job.

YAN: Yeah.

DIETER: I think we had more fun because we did it in VR and in real-time. And Kevin is looking at Maya in some gray, but I hope he's happy with our work. Are you?

YAN: Yeah, so

KEVIN: I think so.

YAN: OK, great. He's happy. So let's say you need to animate that shot. So we just brought that camera from Unity VR layout tools back to Maya so you can start reanimating the shot, adjusting the shot according to that camera. Or if-- of course, normally animation wouldn't have been done yet. You can start up your animation with that updated camera that came from Unity. All right. Great

So we covered that as well. The Maya camera looks fine. What are we going to show next basically? The dressing is fine.

DIETER: Yeah.

YAN: Yeah. We did that as well. Very cool. Since we seem to have a lot of people in the poll wanting to see something in terms of Unreal.

DIETER: Should we do some unreal? I think we can do some Unreal.

YAN: I think we should do some Unreal. All right. So opening up Unreal Engine. As you can see,

DIETER: We have a--

YAN: This scene--

DIETER: An empty level.

YAN: --is an empty level.

DIETER: Let's open some tools that are familiar. We have the same looking tools like we have in Unity and/or in Maya. We're going to start with bringing back the amazing dressing work that Kevin did. So let's build an environment, which he pressed.

It's quite funny because sometimes we call this a new Render Pipeline for Unity, because we actually made most of the caches, and all the stuff in Unity, and now we just all rebuilding it in Unreal. After-- yeah, we did it in Unity with VR layout tools. So all the cams are done.

YAN: Yeah. So--

DIETER: In unity.

YAN: I mean, one of the other poll questions that we had is like, how do you usually transfer your assets from a DCC into the game engine? I know that's also often something that people get really, really frustrated by because it's a lot of manual work.

However, what you just saw happening here live is that we rebuilt that entire environment that we had in Unity as well in Unreal. So right now our environment is there. That's pretty nice.

DIETER: You have some lighting, Kevin?

YAN: Looks pretty good. And I mean, even these trees that you just added there are actually--

DIETER: All there.

YAN: Yeah, all there. Great. Yeah. Maybe we should pimp a little bit the lighting. That's another thing I love about working in game engines myself. We can rebuild it from scratch, keep that lighting there and--

DIETER: Get a different mood completely.

YAN: Yeah. Interactively on the fly. It's quite nice to be able to do that. So here we are. Our environment in Unreal Engine. Bear in mind we go the difficult route. A lot of these transfers that we do with sync are based on FBX data. The reason why is like if you want to go interactive, you want to keep as much as possible of the real-time.

DIETER: We really like to build the content universe in our game engines so that the environments are ones built. So basically your film based off the environment work for your VR or game so that everything has a better look. And you can be more creative with the storytelling itself.

YAN: And the projects themselves, they stay light because if we would like also for the feature film we worked on previously, do all this in Alembic, obviously, that would be possible. But game engines have this one annoying thing. They import everything within the project, so that starts to become bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.

So there where we can, we will use as much as possible. FBX. Also, in terms of when you really want to be real-time, when you want to port it to a VR or something, you will still be able to do that. If it's all full of [INAUDIBLE], it's going to really slow down and it might not give you the performance at all that you're looking for a real, real-time project.

DIETER: Don't we need some shots? I think we need to rebuild our sequence timeline and add our cameras that we lawfully created in VR. Let's bring it back here to Unreal.

YAN: Again, I mean, as I told you, I'm a fan of timeline data.

DIETER: Yeah.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

YAN: I want my shot--

DIETER: --timeline part. So we like to have shots, to edit them, to sync them between different DCCs and that's why we in general do. Kevin is now just putting everything ready.

YAN: All right.

DIETER: Let's show our shots. Looks quite familiar.

YAN: Yeah, exactly.

DIETER: But we are missing something. It's a bit more sinister, but we are missing our animation caches and the interactive part. So, Kevin, let's do a final button click and bring in what we created earlier.

YAN: Yep.

DIETER: So the poll two was most people-- 57% does it manually. 11% are a bit braver and does it scripted. And then 32% does it via an asset management system.

YAN: OK. Cool. So as you can see here with SYNK, we basically also do it through an asset management system. But it's not only just about the assets. It's not only about your models. It's not only about your textures, it's about the whole thing. It's about timelines. It's about cameras. It's about really bringing this back and forth between--

DIETER: Assetising all the departments. Our editorial departments is on the same asset management system as us, and it all talks together between the very traditional post-production tools and suites we have with the newer world of the game engines that the kids like Kevin.

YAN: I wouldn't call him a kid.

DIETER: [CHUCKLE]

YAN: Anyway. So seeing life coming in-- all these animations again in Unreal. OK, maybe Kevin just wind it back to the start. Play--

DIETER: [INAUDIBLE] our fantastic show 20 and 30.

YAN: Yeah. I want to see how creative we were this morning in San Diego and evening in Brussels. Let's go and have a look at how that looks. Fantastic. I already start to feel this Christmas vibe coming up.

[LAUGHING]

Great. Look, what I love is doing VR layout in Unity, moving it seamlessly to Unreal. Having a bit of play in both. Obviously as you can see, our tools in Unreal is slightly less elaborate at this point than we have in Unity. But I think we covered the basics. We covered the most important stuff. And we can see that we entirely run this whole animation demo project from Unity to Unreal.

Now, maybe I think we covered this-- one additional thing we can show that we're also quite a fan of-- while working, you saw a lot of play blocks being rendered out during this presentation. However, we're also a fan of taking things really into the real-time space.

And so one of the things that we decided to build is also having WebGL previewers directly connected to your output in the project,

DIETER: Especially as a creative person or a director. I'd love to see what my team or artist created in Maya and that I just can't review it in my browser or from my phone, wherever I am.

YAN: Yeah, this runs actually pretty nicely on an iPhone. And not a 16, I think even a 12, 11.

DIETER: Now we are running it for the last five years on all the basic iPhones, and it really works well. And these are some assets of different projects we did, ranging from film to VR experiences. Shout out to the Werewolf experience.

YAN: Yeah, shout out to the Werewolf experience, indeed. And then, yeah. It's a nice way of reviewing, avoiding turntable rendering, et cetera, et cetera. We're going to probably keep on developing this, having some better shade control or light control on this as well.

And integrating it in the desktop app of SYNK as well, so that you as an artist can immediately on your desktop when you finish work or when you make a deliverable, have a review of these assets right away. Do we have any other results of polls coming in, Dieter?

DIETER: I don't see a new poll. I am still at poll two.

YAN: But, great. I think basically we did the round trip. We covered more or less what we wanted to cover. So I think as I said, I would like this to become a little bit interactive. I would like you guys to be able to ask us questions. As you can see, we have all the tools at hand.

So if you want to we can dive into one of the elements a little bit more deeper or answer some of your questions. So basically for us, I think it is now time for a Q&A.

DIETER: Yeah, go.

YAN: There we go. OK. So that concludes a little bit the product overview. I'm happy to answer any questions that come from the audience or something that you want us to elaborate on, something that you want us to see demo to you again. Or if there are any other questions regarding parts of this whole process that you would like to see, that we maybe went a little bit too fast and you have questions around. Anybody's daring to raise a hand?

DIETER: Or we need to do another poll? Or I will say the poll results. Apparently some people don't have issues. I'm happy for them. Some have sometimes issues. And a few of them, 13% have all the time issues that I feel sorry for you guys.

[CHUCKLE]

YAN: Yeah. So obviously, as you can see, we tried to take away a lot of these issues. You saw it working live here. So we tried to take away a lot of the annoying-- the nuisance, the little hiccups that you have working within the game engines.

DIETER: Yes. And also we try to bring the creativity back by enabling the storytelling tools like being in your content universe in VR. Make the shots. Find new ways to tell your story the way you want, instead of being busy with fixing pipeline stuff, which is annoying and boring. It's more fun to just be creative and tell it.

YAN: Yeah, exactly. All right. Good. I hope in any case, you enjoyed the session. We're still going to hang in a little bit. If anybody comes up with a question, feel free. Of course, this session is being recorded. So you'll have the chance to review it later on.

DIETER: So feel free to reach out to us. We are on the interwebs. You can ask us questions, email, or just-- yeah. If you want more info, feel free.

YAN: Yeah, feel free to reach out. What I might maybe do is quickly bring up the website of the product as well, in case you want to browse around a little bit. But this was a quite comprehensive demo that we were giving here. And--

DIETER: And for everyone in school, feel free to let your teachers reach out. We have some educational promos as well.

YAN: Absolutely, we do. And yeah, there we go.

DIETER: And we have the great honor to enroll it now in one of the Belgium schools near to us. So we are quite happy with that. And we are having a lot of fun with it because we are doing it now for the second year.

YAN: Absolutely. Really quite happy about that. So www.synk.cloud. If you want to reach out to us, you can find us there or through the back website. That's a possibility as well.

DIETER: Do we have another poll or not?

YAN: No, we had three polls.

DIETER: OK, Cool.

YAN: We had three polls, Dieter. And I think everybody was so nice to answer these polls.

DIETER: Thank you all for participating.

YAN: Thank you all for participating. And again, don't be afraid to ask any questions. Or we were extremely clear today.

DIETER: Come, Kevin, Let's see them.

YAN: Thank our artist that was working behind the scenes. Thank you so much, Kevin for joining us and doing all the work. All right.

DIETER: Cool. I think it's done now.

HOST: All right. If anyone has any questions, you can enter it in the Q&A box, or you can raise your hand in Zoom. Otherwise, thank you.

AUDIENCE: There will be any place that we can see this presentation again?

HOST: Yes. This presentation will be posted with the recording on Autodesk University within this week. And you will be able to access it throughout the year from the Autodesk University website.

AUDIENCE: OK. Fantastic.

HOST: Thank you. Thank you.

DIETER: And if there are any questions popping up in the near future, reach out. We can do another demo again or tailor a demo to the subjects you want. We are willing to do that and

YAN: Absolutely.

DIETER: We're excited about doing that.

YAN: Yeah, we got all the gear set up right here. So whenever you want to dive into one of the subjects or see something specific, we try to tackle some of the most recurring topics that we see throughout the productions. But we could deep dive a little bit more in some other aspects if you want to.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, fantastic.

HOST: Any other questions from anyone?

AUDIENCE: I just come a bit late. I just want to ask, it's about D5 render. It was already presenting something before, from the beginning or in the middle of the presentation?

YAN: Sorry, could you repeat that?

AUDIENCE: I just want to ask regarding the D5 Render.

YAN: D5 Render?

HOST: It was mentioned-- yeah. It was mentioned on this presentation.

YAN: No. No. So we showcased that you can either render out from Unity or from Unreal.

DIETER: Yeah. And both are traditional post-production cinema compliant AOVs, EXR fully tested in our grading facility. It's one of the things we do. Because we have the benefit that we have-- full grading suite, other two locations in Belgium. We can test everything that comes out of a game engine and guarantee that it works and plays on cinema.

YAN: Yeah. So-- and obviously all of this what we do, we can come up with the most funny workflows. So you could just use Unity with a VR camera layout tools to go very quick. Do like a first draft of your layout sequence, and then you can still port all that back to Maya.

So if you say like, oh no, I want to do traditional offline rendering, that's all fine. You can do that as well. So you can pick a little bit of the tools that we came up with and then combine it either real-time rendering, traditional offline rendering. That's also a possibility.

And that's a funny thing that we now saw, bringing that project from Maya to Unity. From Unity back to Maya. From Maya to Unreal Engine. And so you can actually even choose to-- as Dieter said, use Unreal Engine as a renderer for things you did in Unity and whatever you want to choose, basically. You can start really combining the toolboxes as you please. So yeah.

DIETER: So you dream the story and we will help you build it.

YAN: Exactly. And so this whole thing is really specializing on if you want to extend your IP going from not just purely linear, but also making it interactive. It's one of the things that we like to do as well.

DIETER: Yeah.

YAN: Yeah. But then again, as we said in the start of the presentation, this system allowed us to be the first studio in the world to render a full feature animation film with a 4K DCP output in the cinemas straight from the Unity engine.

We started all that up in 2017-18. The film was released in 2022. So that's all possible. So doesn't need to be interactive. You see the use of Unreal a lot more. Not a lot of people are that familiar with doing these things with Unity, but it's still-- especially in the cartoon rendering, it holds up very well. You can get very decent results out of that. But then again, if you decide to go in real, fine as well.

DIETER: Yeah. And we are now developing in closed beta flow integration as well. Currently, we heavily integrate with Ftrack, but we are transitioning to a multi post-production tracker output. So flow or Ftrack doesn't matter. And coming somewhere next year.

YAN: Coming somewhere next year. Probably throughout the year or by the end of the year. We'll also release support for Flow.

DIETER: Also, small side note. We are on the two European popular festivals. We will be attending EverMix again in Annecy next year. If you want to have an in-person demo or catch-up or have a beer, feel free to come pass by our booth. Both of us will be there.

YAN: Yeah, EverMix, Annecy, we might pick another festival in the US next year. Probably SIGGRAPH. One of our colleagues tool builders. We might be busy. We might be present at SIGGRAPH as well, next year.

HOST: Any other questions from anyone? All right. Well, thank you, Yan and Dieter and Kevin for demoing and presenting to everyone. Thank you everyone for joining us. We hope you enjoy the rest of Autodesk University experience and we will be in touch. Thanks, everyone.

KEVIN: Thank you. Bye-Bye.

DIETER: Bye-Bye.

YAN: Thank you. Have fun,

HOST: Bye.

KEVIN: Have fun. Bye-Bye.