M&E Magic in AEC

JORDAN GIBONEY: Hi, everyone, and welcome to Autodesk University 2024. This is M&E Magic in AEC. For those who are new to Autodesk acronyms, M&E stands for Media and Entertainment, which is our products that are primarily used for video-game production, film, television. Think 3D animation, special effects, color management, all that good stuff, and all done with Maya, 3ds Max, Flame, Arnold, and way more.

AEC stands for Architecture, Engineering, and Construction, which includes art, architecture and design software, Revit, AutoCAD, Docs, and way more. Those are two of our three primary pillars of industry at Autodesk. The third is design and manufacturing, which includes Fusion, Inventor and all that stuff. And of course, there are some of those products that bleed into multiple pillars. We're seeing that now more than ever, with open source projects and evolving expectations from our customers.

So my team and I here wanted to take a minute to explore that scenario, specifically between M&E and AEC, and as well as share some easy tips and tricks to leverage the open M&E artist world in the real-world applications of AEC.

To start, I want to quickly introduce myself and the squad who will be joining me in this class. My name is Jordan Giboney. I'm based out of Portland, Oregon, and I've been at Autodesk for seven years. I started in technical support, did some internal training roles as well as management, and am currently a Solutions Engineer on the Media and Entertainment team. Duane is my direct teammate. He's based out of LA. And Matt Wunch is our counterpart out of Connecticut.

When we were brainstorming some ideas for this class, one of the first concepts that came to mind was that our generation, the kids of this GIF, have become today's consumers and makers. I don't know about any of you, but this scenario of finding an N64 under the Christmas tree on Christmas morning resonated super hard. And it started the trend of us getting into tech super young. And that trend has not stopped.

With that upbringing, the standard or baseline expectation for visual experiences, whether it's movie or still images, is super high. Literal video games, filters on TikTok, you'll be hard pressed to find anyone who hasn't become accustomed to high quality visuals paired with a high level of interactivity as well as an ease of use.

That mindset extends to our users and software, as well as the customers that consume the output of that software. It's expected for all industries that processes and tools evolve to accommodate the latest and greatest capabilities. Because if a movie or an image doesn't match up to those standards, it's really easy for a consumer to zone out and focus more on what's wrong with the image rather than what the image is trying to sell to us.

We know that's especially true with movies, and even more so with M&E folks. We are the worst offenders of that overanalyzing. And I'm guilty of it for sure. I'm sure Duane is too. We'll go ahead and apologize for that now. And the rest of the world, we didn't mean to ruin your movie watching experience by being overly critical, but we promise it's just a knee jerk reaction. It's not on purpose.

Personal experience. My now fiance and I were watching one of his favorite movies, which we'll go unnamed. But it was really early on in our relationship, and it was too much for me to handle. I stood up, paused the TV, and walked through frame by frame and picked apart every little bit and piece. And he can't watch that movie anymore, which works out great for me, but not so much for him.

And we didn't really need to test that relationship at that point, but we found ourselves there. So we wanted to take that same sort of mindset, making it easier for folks to digest content by leveraging M&E tools to make sure that people stay in the zone and focused on what those images were trying to convey.

And we know you have tools like Twinmotion and AEC, and those tools are great for getting your workflows to a certain level. And it's not our goal to replace those tools. We were hoping to show you a couple of easy ways to leverage those and then jump into media and entertainment tools, specifically Maya, and take it to the next level.

Before we get started, this is our safe harbor statement. And in summary, it states that any future facing statements or claims are subject to change, and we do not encourage you to make any purchasing decisions based on those statements. For the next hour, we're going to go over a bunch of stuff, but we'll quickly cover what Maya does, and then move into some easy Maya enhancements. Duane's going to jump in and cover Maya and friends in this world building adventure, and then we'll leave some time for wrap up and Q&A at the very end.

So let's jump right in. What is Maya? Maya is the premier industry software for video games, animated films, TV series, visual effects, and it also has been applied to product visualization and advertising as well. Within Maya, there are seven major categories of toolsets. 3D modeling, which is where you build 3D props, environments and characters. Look development, where you can build custom materials for those characters, props, and environments.

Rigging and animation, where you take your character mesh, add some bones and controllers, and then key the movements that you want along a given timeline. Rendering, you can work in real time seeing changes to lighting and materials. We have included render engine Arnold in both Max and Maya. It's also available as a plugin for non Autodesk tools, and can be run as a standalone tool as well.

Within Maya, you can also run some simulations, creating physically and accurate simulations and effects like explosion and ocean. We also have our visual programming tool Bifrost, which extends beyond simulations, but works in a node based environment that is very commonly used in effects. And then lastly, we have our pipeline development tools. We have custom scripting tools, which allow for accessible plug-ins and a wide range of customization and optimizations based on the needs of your studio or project.

It's also worth mentioning that we're highly invested in open source projects, like OpenUSD, for example, and we are prioritizing initiatives in the open source space to unify our development goals with the goals of the community. If you were around at SIGGRAPH two years ago, we announced the Alliance for OpenUSD, which includes us, Pixar, Adobe, NVIDIA and others, all with a shared goal of making sure OpenUSD specifically is moving in a direction that benefits all of our customers simultaneously.

Jumping right into 3D modeling. There are four different kinds of 3D modeling within Maya. The first is polygon modeling. The second is NURBS, then sculpting and mapping UVs. I'm not going to get into each one of these in too much depth, but polygon modeling is the most commonly used form of modeling in Maya. It's based on vertexes, edges, faces. And every polygon must have at least three sides.

And when you combine multiple polygons together, it creates a polygon mesh. So when you see a face with lots of squares on it, or a car in this instance, and you see that mesh built out of a bunch of different shaped four-sided meshes, that comes together to create a single form.

A lot of folks start with a primitive in the modeling process, like a cube, or a cylinder, or a sphere, and then take the time to push and pull verts and edges around to match a given shape. In this instance, we have some technical drawings that were matching to the car. But you can also start with a custom shape by using the Create Polygon tool or Quadra tool, and extruding, adding edge loops and bevels and cuts to create the exact shape that you're looking for rather than starting with something basic.

Another really cool development that happened in our modeling group not too long ago is Smart Extrude. This tool existed in 3ds Max for some time but just made it into Maya this past year. And the reason that happened was because our development teams decided to combine forces and work together. Previously, they were two separate groups. Maya was on one side and Max was on the other. And they kind of had some redundant efforts happening. So they combined the teams together, and bringing over Smart Extrude tool from Max into Maya is our first piece of evidence that effort was worthwhile, and that we're excited to become more unified in our goals and workflows together.

The second section that I want to jump into is called Look Development. It's often shortened to Look Dev. And that's the process of developing your 3D environment, applying textures to characters, props, or the world that those assets live in, and creating iterative reviews with your teammates and multiple different departments within a production is all a part Look Development.

Autodesk has specifically leaned into Look Development as an area that we want to pursue by building our own modern material-authoring tool called LookdevX. As you can see here, it's similar to Maya's material-authoring tool, which is called the Hypershade.

But LookdevX is built to be [? DCC ?] agnostic, meaning that it's not going to work in just Maya. The materials in this tool are portable because they are built on MaterialX, which is an open-source standard for representing rich material and Look Development content in computer graphics. Additionally, it is USD compatible as well. So every development effort that we have in this space and other spaces is made with the mindset of portability and reusability.

Rigging and animation is up next. Rigging is the process of creating bones in the skeleton to attach to your mesh. So you're not going to be moving the actual mesh around in 3D space within Maya. You're going to add a formulaic locator node based skeleton to it and tell that skeleton what parts of the mesh it controls. You paint those weights on manually or through a formula.

Once the skeleton is attached to the mesh, the controllers are made and assigned to the joints that are tied to the mesh. So again, you're not keying the joints of the rig, you're keying the controllers. That protects the mesh from getting deformed and having issues and corrupting over time.

And controllers can be whatever you want. They can be circles, squares, or custom shapes. But once that's in place, all you have to do is select your controller, make your pose at one keyframe, and then move to another keyframe and make a second pose. Maya will calculate the inbetweens. Animators will often go in and adjust how those two keys talk to each other. Otherwise, Maya will just default to their automatic translation values.

One other thing would love to call out regarding the world of rigging at Autodesk is our Bifrost tool. I mentioned this as a simulation tool earlier, but we're also pursuing it as a rigging tool. We've started creating a library of rigging components that are cataloged in the Bifrost browser. And this workflow isn't intended to be an instant perfect rig system. However, it is meant to be a procedural workflow that gets you to that final rigged point faster. And these things, again, are all available in Maya as it exists today.

Bifrost and all of its form rigging and simulation is available with every single license of Maya and it's in Max as well to. Additionally, it has its own documentation library online also. But speaking of simulation, Bifrost does this as well. From simple to complex, Bifrost is another node based workflow tool that creates portable graphs for everything from modeling to animation, layout, asset distribution, and is a powerhouse for industry standard simulations.

We also recently introduced Bifrost wedging, which allows artists to create multiple versions of a single simulation and then render them all with one action. So you don't have to render, wait for it to get done, and then go back and tweak and render again. You can do a couple of variations at the same time.

Bifrost can handle simple to very complex tasks in the node graph, which can be then inserted to a scene and shared with others. The robust library of dynamic simulations include explosions, rubber and gel, which are the three simulations that you see featured on this slide. But there's many, many more that you can leverage also.

Rendering and texturing is next. We have a couple of render engines included in Maya, including Arnold, which is our primary-- our primary render engine at this point is a Monte Carlo ray tracing renderer, which can create a wide range of results. We have 2D cartoon settings, as well as realistic settings that can all be tweaked to your liking. It gives the artists full control to the user, while providing presets that function as a solid foundation to start building your materials on.

The Arnold standard surface shader, or AS standard surface has become the default shader in Maya, which immediately elevates all texture work to a higher standard. In the case of studios that don't have Arnold, they're still using the standard shader. It's just taken that Arnold wrapper off of it. But under the hood, it's all the same.

And then lastly, our pipeline tools. We have a couple of different scripting options within Maya. First, we have MEL, which is the heart of Maya, and it's what the interface is primarily created on. Everything that you do in Maya's graphical interface can be automatically extended using MEL.

For example, if you move an object a couple of units in one direction, rotate it, scale it, or apply like a bevel to it, you can go into our script editor window and see all of the MEL script that correlates to those actions. You can grab that code, transform it into shortcuts or buttons that you can use on other objects.

There's also a Python window next to the MEL window in the script editor, and it comes with its own Python interpreter, which is super useful for batch processing. Lastly, the command line at the bottom of the Maya window is a shared command line between MEL and Python. There's just a simple toggle that switches back and forth between the two.

All right. Now that level set has been done, let's jump into Maya and talk about some ways that we can give a little mini boost to a Revit scene. Matt was kind enough to provide us with a school campus dorm building to play with, and I was immediately drawn to the interior of this building that I wanted to play with.

Obviously, there's a bunch of different rooms in a dorm, all that have furniture and accessories, but I limited it to just one for the sake of this class. To start, I did a couple of operations to clean up the mesh. As expected, mesh files don't always translate as cleanly as they should between softwares. But Maya has the mesh cleanup tool, which helps identify clean up what helps identify and clean up problematic geometry.

For example, components that are directly on top of each other, two faces that exist in the same 3D space can cause a flickering effect in the viewport. Cleans those up. And then the retopologize tool is another new addition where you can apply this formula and it translates the geometric topology to quads or tris, whichever you prefer. Once that was applied, as you can see here, I'm jumping into the Sculpt tool, which is another form of 3D modeling, where you use brushes to manipulate the mesh.

It's all based on density of the mesh too. So if you need something that's finer detail, you can amp up the number of subdivisions on a given mesh and manipulate it with a variety of different brushes. The great thing about this is if you find a brush that, you like can hold down Control and it does the opposite effect of that brush. So you don't have to keep going back and forth between different brushes. It's super intuitive and translates directly to workflows in other programs like Photoshop, and it's done wonders for artists looking to have a really organic application to 3D workflows.

I applied the same strategy for the mattress too. I don't know about all of you, but I've got a decent dent in my pillow where my big head sits, and I'm confident that my mattress is no longer-- is no longer as flat as it should be. But the Sculpt tool is perfect for situations like this where we can add some organic lived in looks to two props that takes everything to the next level. It should be noted that you can work in symmetry with all of these brush tools as well. Obviously, that's not perfect for what we're looking for here, but it can be helpful in other organic forms as well.

The next thing that I wanted to tackle was the bed frame post. Those were just simple rectangles. But using NURBS, which is, again, another form of 3D modeling that we called out, I created a curve and traced out half of the bed frame object, making sure to capture all the little details. And then you'll see that I take some extra time to make sure that the start and end control points both end on that y-axis vertices.

Because what we're going to do is we're going to take that curve and revolve it around that axis. It takes very minimal time, becomes a very lightweight operation. This is in a separate scene. But you can also do this in the same scene that you're working in. But for the sake of cleanliness and making sure that I didn't mess anything up, I wanted to do it on a separate scene file.

The Revit file was also scaled up larger than what I was working with in the bedpost file. So what I did was I imported it in and then moved the pivot point down to the bottom of the bedpost so that I could snap it to the existing framework and then duplicate it to the other locations. It's super easy workflow, very easy to manipulate. And you maintain that original curve.

You can also add some adjustments to the curve after you've revolved it too. So it's a highly, highly manipulating and highly versatile tool. And then lastly, I couldn't help but put a bed frame around the bottom of the bed to help finish out the look of this piece, because yeah. I don't know what scenarios a floating bed would be relaxing, but it certainly wouldn't apply to me.

All right. Next up, we need to address the-- we need to address the bed with some blankets. First up, you take the bed and anything that you want the blanket to interact with and identify that as a collider. It was a setting that you can apply to any objects in Maya. For the blanket, I created a simple plane. And as you can see, there's no stickiness applied to it. So it falls into the abyss of Maya.

But with a little quick tweaking, I added some stickiness and roughness, so it sticks to the bed. Added it a little bit off kilter too, so it wasn't perfectly uniform. Within the Attribute Editor, where you see me adjusting the stickiness and roughness, you can also adjust the number of subdivisions and weight to make sure that the blanket falls accurately to whatever fabric you're trying to convey.

You'll see that the defaults aren't usually going to work for you. So this does require some tweaking and trial and error, but it's a super lightweight simulation that can be adjusted on the fly too. With that, I'm going to hand it over to Duane to take it to the next level on the exterior of this building.

MATT WUNCH: Jordan, Thank you so much for that very informative journey with Maya. Myself, my name is Duane Rutkowski. I'm a solutions engineer with Maya on the West Coast. I'd like to talk a little bit about worldbuilding with you. So now, world building, it's one of those more important areas in the media and entertainment room that relies heavily on all disciplines.

What we're doing in this instance is we're trying to bring everything together, everything from concept designs, layouts, storyboards, and we want to bring life to 3D models with these environments that are built from the ground up, or captured with recap or other means of photogrammetry.

So we mentioned world building. It doesn't necessarily have a specific discipline or genre. But with Maya as a DCC, you're able to create your assets from scratch. You can also get them in and take them from other programs. Or you could use different plug-ins, where you have created different pieces and assets and worlds within Maya and take them into your pipeline.

So one of those is called Cargo, and this one is based on the company KitBash. And we're able to go through, find things that will help flesh out our scene. So if you want to do something, let's say models, and we want to bring something in, we can start browsing, visually looking through these catalogs. Or if we want, we could search.

Now, let's search for something like a gate. Now, when we look up gate, we have the freedom to bring that in. So we look up gate. There's different types of things we could bring along, different types of fences. Some might be out of the style we're looking for, and then some things we could possibly edit or tweak if needed towards the style that we need.

So going further down, something that's catching my eye is this looks pretty nice, these barricades. I like these. These could be multipurposed. These D2 barriers, detours, it'll all help. So let's click on that. And it's going to want to know what texture size I would like to bring in to Maya, and click Import. And it's just a simple process. Download it. And if we look, we see it pops in on the back and on Maya.

So from there, we're able to hide that window. And we could select that barricade and we could work with it. Now, let's turn the texture on and see what we have with it. We can go in a little bit. And we need to do any types of adjustments, we can pick these vertices if need be. We can adjust size if we want. If we want to go through-- let's make it a little bit bigger.

But one of the things we should do is separate the mesh. And then let's select everything except the sign. We want to end up isolating the sign from the actual barricade. And it looks like we have a few different items as well too.

So if we look on the back, there appears to be some clips that are holding that sign. So actually, let's get those together. So we're able to isolate, select the whole barricade. And then we could combine that.

We'll use the editing types of tools that we're usually familiar with Maya. So we can combine and make this wider. And a little taller, if we'd like. Now, next thing you want to do is look at the sign. And the same process as well too. Move it up a bit. And let's go through and also combine that. So we have two separate elements, the barricade and the sign.

So everything's there for what we need. And a benefit with KitBash is we can bring in other assets. So just quickly had brought that one up, we could also go through, and let's say we could have another line up, up. We can start duplicating, and then we can start linking these barricades together. So we're building, we're doing some storytelling. We're creating an environment.

And then we have our simple building that we had brought in, and we have all these different elements. So I had just brought in one. But now once I start revealing, we see how everything's popping up, the world fleshed up. So any walkways, paths, fencing for the perimeter. We have streetlights. Also vehicles. Build a construction site. And we could use Maya to create everything in the scene and then populate it as well.

Now, next up, I want to talk a little bit about deformers. So continuing with Maya's toolset, we have different options that we can do in a few different things. We can try and start making this a little more realistic, bringing in different assets like I had shown before, kind of increase the visual fidelity of the scene we're working on. A lot of stuff that we can bring in that's created by ourselves or stuff that's, of course, intaked.

So like I had shown before, we have this piece of ground, which was also from KitBash as well too. So it's a little chunk of sidewalk. Turning on the texture, we see the alignment of the brick and then the concrete pattern. But let's see how we can take advantage of Maya's toolset and then round things out a little bit more.

So ideally, we would like to first create a sidewalk if we can. Few different ways to do this. One of the quick ways I want to show you is we want to first move the pivot. So hitting the Insert key, we are moving the pivot to the lower left. Now, what we'll be doing with this, and we'll use this for snapping purposes.

So if you hold down V, you can snap it to other objects that are in your scene. So what we want to do is duplicate it. And then holding down V, we snap it. So this is tangent and it's aligned perfectly with the previous one. And again, duplicate. Move it over, and duplicate another one.

Now, what I'm doing is I'm going through and I'm going to be combining this. So instead of working with one element, I'm going to have four of them that are combined. So this will be quicker in the process. So it's akin to working with LEGO pieces.

So I'm going to be duplicating this section of four, as opposed to a single one. And going to build this out just a little bit more. Do another one. And let's just say maybe two more. So again, I'm going to go through the same process where I select all of the objects in the scene and I go to create them into one, and that's through mesh and then combine. Let me bring that fourth one back in.

OK, so now we have our sidewalk, all those combined objects right there. But let's say I want to do something a little more with it, maybe have a bit of curvature going around some type of objects. This is where the power of Maya comes in. So what we want to do is we want to head over to the rigging module and then deform nonlinear. And we're going to be looking at the bend.

First, I got to select it. So let me go through that process again. Go through the form. And then bend. All right. So we have our line that's going to be dictating how and where our object bends. So I'm going to rotate that 90 degrees so it's lying along within the sidewalk. And then we'll go to the channel box and get that exact measurement. And then I'm going to roll it the opposite way too, so I can get a bend going towards the interior.

Now, what we want to do is we want to take the bend. And we could move it. And we can start conforming our geometry, our sidewalk along that curve. I mean, if we take a look, we see that the textures are holding up well. And everything's scaling accordingly. So what I can also do is start moving the effector. And I'm starting to get different areas of effect on this sidewalk.

So if there's a certain type of curvature that I'm trying to get here, I have the flexibility to do that. So if I want to go in and nuance it a little bit more, and let's type in 90. I get that. Have it balled up a bit. I could go in a different view. Let me check out how this is looking. Needs to be a little bit straight, so I can get that one a little straight.

And if we're happy with it, we can go through and delete the history. So the construction history on objects, it takes away any type of inputs in them, so then they can be manipulated without having any clashes or instances where there's issues with their construction history.

So we like that. Let's go ahead and duplicate it. We like that side. So Control D, like we were doing with the initial piece. And then we can go through and mirror it as well. And then we can combine those together. Same process. Going through, combine. And then we can have a horseshoe. So this could be a walkway. Anything else? Get them close together. And then combine.

Now, another thing we could start looking at is facade. So with the facade, this is something that's going to be closer to the building, towards the front. And there's some good tools here in case anything needs to be concepted out, if there's multiple variations or instances. This can be done to help the creative process after the building has essentially been designed with the interior.

So looking at our Revit file that we have in Maya and the building that we want. And let's take advantage of Maya's tools and see how we can use this to make geometry a little more fluid, and also, like I'd mentioned, use those different iterations with Maya's quick tool sets.

One of the things we want to look at is that front and how we can't necessarily slap on a bunch of deformers or anything else, because all these windows that we're looking at, framing everything else. It needs to be precise because this is what came out of Revit and this is the blueprint we need to work around. But we will be able to use Maya's toolset to work around this.

First thing you want to do is take the initial shape of the facade. So all the different items that we're seeing here for the windows, everything like that. These are snapping to the front of the building. So what this is going to do is it's going to give us a front piece to work with.

And this is important because the building is off a little kilter too. So right when I have that basic polygon set, what I want to do is give it a little bit of thickness. So move it out a bit. Got to move it two units, just in case I need to move it specifically back. And I'm going to run a command, which is the extrusion, where I'm going to be pulling the face out and giving it a little bit of thickness here. So we have that out.

And essentially, this is what will be our front facade. Now, looking around, let's say we want to look at other areas that we may have to go along. So looking at those guidelines of windows, doors, and everything, I had gone through and just created simple blackouts. So what these blackouts are doing is they are honoring the dimensions of all windows and doorways.

And I have a template set up with that one piece that's created. So moving that piece I had created towards the front, this will help with our Boolean operations. So we want to make sure that everything for either side of this operation, we have those pieces sticking through. And the big reason we're doing this is we want to be able to manipulate it. Of course, we want to do a few different things. So let's give a little more geometry to the pieces, because we see we don't have a lot happening between spans.

So let's go. We're going to add more edges. So using the Insert Edge Loop tool, I'm going to give more spans across. And let's give some more spans going downward as well to. Let's crank this number up a little bit.

So instead of four, let's take this up a little bit. We'll go to 10. And then this will give us a little more flexibility with the geometry going across. And then we'll pick the number and then do the same thing. Let's do 8 going tile wise.

And then more geometry. And we'll just do a single cut in the middle. So we kind of have a midpoint. So with that taken care of, the next thing we want to do is set up a lattice. With this lattice, and this one can be found in the animation modules and the form. And then we'll create the lattice.

Now, when I mentioned that the top is a little off, that we can see, we need to adjust our lattice, because we want to have equal transformations. So best way we can fix this is if we go, we can pick both parts of those components of the lattice. I'll select those.

And then if we look, we could start rotating it how it needs to be. So it is a little off. Do the rotation. So that way, when it's taking in the points, and for editing, it'll take into account that angular fashion. So let's talk a little bit how this lattice works. So if we pick a lattice point, we see what's being affected is happening from the point to the nearest point, which is pretty far.

So we need a little more data if we want to have a little more precise and do a little more interesting edits and tweaks to this. So if we go over to the S divisions, I'm middle mousing to the right. And let's get a little more geometry. So now, when we grab a lattice point, we can see that it's going to the second one. And if I want to pick the two, we see that's affecting to the three. So we have some geometry in the lattice here. Let's add a little more-- a few more spans.

So you add a little more. Do about five going across, maybe. And we have this all built up. And then just one going across. So now we could start having a little bit of fun of things. We can go through and start iterating some designs.

So grabbing a chunk of these points, moving them up, moving them around. Start having some interesting shapes for this facade that will sit outside the building. So we're manipulating the geometry, but we're doing this through a lattice.

So picking these random groups of lattice points, we could start doing some unique shapes, moving things around. If you want to start blowing things, having things come up a little bit. Working with this conceptual process, we're able to do different shapes with the lattice, which is in turn affecting the geometry over here.

Something different. And then if we want, we can even go through and then have a wave happening through this as well too. So it's just not a boring flat surface. So it's interesting as we can get it. Now, since we're going to be doing other operations on this, one thing we want to do is to make sure we get rid of the history.

So when we get rid of the history, we're going to ensure that there won't be any issues with our further editing and further modeling in this process. So we want to go to Edit, delete by type, and then history, and then we'll see our lattice disappear. Nope. Got to select everything first.

OK, so we see our lattice is gone, and we have a shape that we want to use. Now, the next step is you want to go to and start using our Boolean command. So we have a few different options, but there's a few. Difference, A minus B, or B minus A. And we want to subtract where those placeholders for the windows and doors would be from this front piece. So we'll go through what the operation. And subtract those.

And then we see we have a perfect cutout, where all the windows and the doors and any other items that need to be there from the Revit drawing are intact. And then we'll go through delete by type history. And since we have the location in space, we can push the object back. But we got to remember, it is a little off kilter coming from a different angle. So the cuts were made precisely, but just moving, we could snap it so we have the windows and everything else correctly aligned.

Go through. We can move it a little bit. Maybe move it up just a little tad. You can scale it down a little. And then upon moving, we'll see that we have alignment with the windows. A little bit of intersecting geometry, but we can adjust for that.

And we have our facade. Now, using all those tools that Jordan had talked about and then myself, kind of bringing in different elements, not only from third party solutions, but also things that are created within Maya, we could come to a full fleshed out scene. So starting with just a basic building in Revit, we're able to take it to the next level. We have different elements to storytell over here. Dining area for students, some construction, some kiosks for information, and also streets with vehicles and such going about.

Now, to wrap up, we're coming to the end of this talk and we want to take a step back just out of M&E and make sure that we're giving the more wider view of Autodesk. So storytelling. Storytelling, It's what brings us all to the same table. What we were going through before, talking about storytelling for just a simple building. We started with a simple building.

Jordan going through her portions as well too, with building out rooms, blankets, pillows. She had noticed that the pillows had to have a little bit of use in them and everything. So a user, whether it's being in a walk through or doing a screen render, they're able to see that this pillow and blanket and bed were used. And there's a story behind that.

We're not trying to replace tools or workflows, but we want to do is we want to give the artist the designer more options. And we want to empower you to take your storytelling to the next level. So M&E and other industry pillars, we're all moving towards platform vision. M&E will have the Flow platform. D&M will have Fusion. And AC will have Forma.

The platform mission across the board has a few shared goals. Now, because content creation processes are still highly efficient, we're going to have an industry that's still functions in silos. And with different teams working on the same project, they may be unable to share key information or assets, or it may become extremely difficult.

Production complexity continues to grow, and studios must continue to work at a greater scale. Leveraging a platform is about having the right data, at the right place, and when it's needed. All in a open platform-- can be tooled to how studios and companies want to work together. We are connecting workflows between industries in all stages of the production life cycle. Teams within a single studio, global teams, and any combination of those scenarios.

Data and how data can travel is the primary challenge when working with an intersecting silo. Simplifying asset management with a common data model is a foundational change that will take Autodesk tools into the future with simplicity and efficiency with its core principles. So the platform mission will get us there, and we need case studies like this where we can push tools to new areas.

If you are considering bringing M&E tools into your workflow, please do not hesitate to reach out to any of us. We have teammates in every industry, expertise, and we are not afraid to combine superpowers and come up with some really cool solutions for you.

If you want to do some learning and exploring on your own before contacting us, please take a look at the handout you have. It's full of a list of Autodesk resources that will get you started with M&E, as well as other industry resources. Jordan's a big proponent of LinkedIn Learning courses for Maya and Max.

So if you prefer a structured, guided learning experience, check that one out at about $35 a month. And you get the LinkedIn certificate for your profile at the end of it all. There's also an endless amount of free content on YouTube, as well as sites with free for all sale assets compatible with a variety of CAD software.

Please don't shy away from joining online communities to share your resources and build networks. Like we said earlier, the expectation for visual experiences is evolving and elevating. It only makes sense for us to join forces and use the best parts of all these tools to make magic happen. Thank you.