Welcome back to the final episode of a four-part mini-series on mergers and acquisitions with Steven, our director of corporate finance here, AmplifyMe. And today, we're going to talk about a couple of different things related to M&A, the buy and build type of strategies. So we're going to talk about RSK acquiring DWD. You might not have heard of those, but Steven will explain. And then I'll talk a little hotel shock a lot as well to just throw in the mix, given it's almost Christmas, and I'm sure they'll be making a little extra boost over that period. Then we'll talk about buying back core assets. There's big headlines this week about McDonald's and China and a big private equity name. And then we'll talk about vertical integrations as well. So Steven, firstly, how are you? I'm pretty good. Thank you, Ant. I'm looking forward to this final part. We've been through three episodes now talking about why companies buy other companies. And I've been trying my best to fit some textbook knowledge around deals that have happened in the last week. So sometimes I've had to scrape through the smaller deals. Again, RSK acquiring DWD probably didn't hit the top of your deal feed, but it's certainly a really interesting one. Obviously, it's always good to talk about Mars and McDonald's and all of the fatty stuff. Yeah. So maybe to kick things off then, I mean, who are RSK and who are DWD? Yeah. So RSK, it's an environmental consulting services business. You know what I'm saying? Particularly interesting. But what I want to really highlight is called RSK Group. And the group part is quite important because RSK has built its company through acquisition. I'm just going to land a couple of stats and think about this. RSK in 2022 alone completed 36 acquisitions, 36. Think about integration, think about standardization, think about the cost of acquisition. These are obviously small acquisitions. We're not talking division style acquisition, but 36 is still a big number, right? And overall, if you look on their website and look at RSK Group's businesses, there's over 170 separate businesses that sit below RSK Group. Now these businesses all operate in the same kinds of spaces, the environmental, energy and power, buildings, infrastructure, consultancy type space, but they all offer slightly different things to slightly different clients. So the announcement of the acquisition of DWD, which is a UK-based company of property advisors, valuation experts and planning consultants, now this is just part of RSK Group's buy and build strategy. The buy and build strategy is a relatively common use of acquisitions, reason for acquisitions, and that's basically, instead of growing organically, which is growing without acquisition, growing slowly, you have a specific strategy to grow inorganically by making multiple, multiple, multiple acquisitions every single year, and then creating a company as the sum of all of the acquisitions and all of the separate entities and all of the separate groups that sit below that master group, which in this case is RSK Group. So buy and build strategies are certainly something that we need to be aware of when we're thinking about reasons for acquisitions. So a company with that type of strategy, would they have a slightly different makeup in terms of the advisory side internally in order to just keep costs efficient rather than going through the full service kind of process with the bank, for example? Yeah, it's a really good question. I was actually looking at the management team of RSK trying to figure out whether they have a head of corporate finance or whatever it might be. And in their senior management team, they have three job titles that I would suggest are pretty much focused on buying and integrating. Now, they may have a M&A advisor on retainer for some of the bigger deals. They probably have an accountant that's got really, really good experience in integrating M&A deals, but they would definitely have a corporate structure where the senior management of RSK Group are exceptionally good at finding, acquiring and integrating these companies. And when I say integrating, by the way, these companies probably still operate. You know, they've got 70, 170 separate businesses. These companies probably operate relatively autonomously, but will benefit from centralized curements, will benefit potentially from centralized marketing. There might be some, yeah, cost synergies, something that we spoke about in previous episodes, there might be some cost synergies. You know, it's better to be part of a bigger group because you benefit from all of these different things. And that's the reason why you do a buy and build strategy. Yeah, and that's a perfect kind of segue into the confectionary giant Mars announcing in the last week that they're going to buy hotel Chocolat for five hundred and thirty four million pounds. The shares in the Chocolatier actually jumps. I didn't even realize they were listed, to be honest. They jumped 160 percent. I just had a look actually on their chart and I was interested, like, I haven't really heard a lot since the announcement. Given that they're a smaller company, the share price, what you typically see from a trading perspective is there's just not a lot of activity in that in that company in terms of buying and selling. It's not like with Apple, you could be, you could come in and what an Apple share trades at, let's say, three hundred bucks, you know, Joe down the street might buy five shares, you could even come in and buy five thousand shares of Apple and it probably wouldn't even blink a blink an eye.  There's just not a lot of buying and selling day today. So I looked at it. They jump the company trading around three pound sixty six at the moment. And I was like, when you look at it on a six month chart, you're like, wow, that's impressive. It's like doubled from where it was at the beginning of the year. But then I was like, I always do this. You've got to look in context of like what's the lifetime performance of this company and you look back and you go to like late twenty twenty one when they were trading at over five pounds. So they were a lot higher than even after the pop. And the interesting thing there is the share price declined quite dramatically through the beginning and middle of twenty twenty two. And if you remember what happened in twenty twenty two is interest rates started to go up for the first time and they didn't just start to go up. They went up sharply and kind of fitting that macro environment into this story. What happened was Hotel Chocolat were trying to aggressively borrow to build and expand overseas at the exact time then the interest rates were starting to explode and whilst they were trying to build out the operations in the US and Japan, these inflationary pressures requiring higher interest rates weakening consumer sentiment and therefore demand for these types of products. Chocolates meant that their business just got slammed basically. So they lost a heck of a lot of money and their share price was very suppressed ahead of this deal. So they got it wrong, essentially the timing definitely. So they were found in in 2004. They swung to a loss in the year to July falling from a pre-tax profit of around twenty two million pounds. Their last was a loss of a million. So they've gone from like making twenty million pre-tax profit to losing money. So one of the things here and I guess this is kind of a little bit like you were saying at the end of that last deal, which I wanted to kind of ask you about, is this more, as you say, buying build or is this more economies of scale? Which I think was our first episode, which was Mars, on the other hand, is an absolute giant. And what are the benefits of teaming up with someone like Mars? Like you said, you can use marketing departments, you can use global supply chains, for example, commercial relationships, all these different things. You know, if you think about Mars, they exist in North America. They exist in all over around the world. It's just a matter of deploying the product into an already world oiled machine. So that's definitely makes sense, I think, from from that side. And then from Mars's side, why would Mars want this, I guess? And from what I was reading, it was more about an opportunity, as I said, at a good price, given the fairly precarious situation they found themselves in to move into higher value premium chocolate categories, so just expanding their product offering, I guess. Yeah, so you've you've you've you've mentioned a couple of interesting things. I think the first thing that's really interesting is when looking at valuations on deals, we're going back into kind of M&A 101 here, when looking at valuations of deals, one of the ways that you can obviously put a value on a deal is by looking at a company's market cap and then applying a premium. And in this case, the premium was massive, you say, 150 percent, something like that. But it's really important not just to look at the last six months or 12 months. You've really got to look at the steady state of that particular share price and often what we do when we're looking at whether whether there's a premium or what the valuation should be is we will take the highest share price from the last 52 weeks or something like that instead of the stable share price from the last week before, because you never know what will happen, what happens in the short term. It's better to look at the long term. But just in terms of looking at the rationale for Mars, just going to quote Andrew Clarke is the global president of Mars's snacking division. He says that Hotel Chocolat fills a gap in our portfolio. So they do not have a premium grant, you know, they do not have a lint or an equivalent. Their stock and trade is from a snacking perspective, M&Ms and Mars and Snickers and Twix and things like that. So firstly, this is just filling a premiumization gap in their portfolio, which makes total sense. I wouldn't call this a buy and build. I just call this a strategic acquisition. And I think the second thing to mention with regards to Hotel Chocolat is they are pretty well known for their sustainability credentials. They give 10 percent of their tax profit back to farmers in cocoa growing regions. They say that they pay more than any other chocolate company and things like that. And you must have seen the increase in chocolate. It's like Tony's Chocoloney, I don't know if you've come across Chocolat. You know, that's now front and centre of every confectionary aisle. That's only been the case for the last couple of years. And if I'm Mars and I'm seeing Tony's Chocoloney, which are a benefit corporation of the corporation and are growing incredibly quickly from a relatively low base, I'm going to be thinking, all right, I need to get in on the sustainability push because when I think about when the average consumer thinks about Mars or thinks about Snickers or thinks about Twix, they probably don't go, oh, gosh, that's sustainable. That's ethical. But when they think about Tony's Chocoloney and to an extent, Hotel Chocolat, they think, all right, you know, well, that's pretty ethical. I'm pretty happy to be buying that. So there's a couple of really good strategic reasons why Mars is doing this deal. Yes, it's really interesting, actually, when you break it down like that. All right, well, let's move on. And so after we've kind of filled our boots with Snickers and Mars bars, let's get a McDonald's. What's going on at McDonald's? Yeah, so this is the story. This is a really interesting one. I think we did a LinkedIn post about this earlier this week. This is McDonald's buying back Carl Isle, the private equity firm's minority stake in its China unit. So let's let's try and unpack this a little bit. We'll go back to the beginning. So McDonald's 95 percent of McDonald's stores are franchises. So McDonald's is the franchisor and individual companies, individuals, individual owners are franchisees. They pay McDonald's a franchise fee in order to benefit from the McDonald's logo and the products and the processes and things like that. And to be a McDonald's franchisee is incredibly expensive. It's one of the most expensive franchises you can possibly buy. Just a question. Do you have any idea because I always go to McDonald's and without fail, I will always always ask myself, I'll look around and I'll go, it's just bonkers in here, how busy it is. And I always think to myself, I've gone in the wrong profession, like I should have just been, I should have just owned a chain of McDonald's. And what's the average profit that one of those I'd love to know as a franchisee? What type of money can you make out of a store, for example? Well, so a franchise, so I don't know the specifics, but I know that a franchise license in the UK, depending on the area, franchisee's license might be anything from the million to 2.5 million. To franchise McDonald's, yet to buy the franchise for a particular store on the outskirts of wherever it might be. But as you say, it's always so busy. Just as an aside, an average franchisee license for Subway is about a tenth of that, right? That's why there's so many subways there. Exactly. You can pick up a subway franchise for under 100 grand, but McDonald's, because it has got this amazing, amazing brand reputation, consistency of products. It's a franchise, but you are going to get 99.9 percent similar products wherever you go. It's quite an amazing business. And obviously from McDonald's perspective, it's a great business because I can expand without having to put up the capital to lease the properties, to retrofit the buildings, et cetera, et cetera. So the franchise model is very, very popular. Now, the reason why I say this is because when McDonald's back in 1992 decided to enter China, it didn't and couldn't franchise. It operated through a joint venture where on the ground, the subsidiary or the JV company were the operator and owner of all of the McDonald's branches, McDonald's restaurants in China. And that was necessary in 1992 due to the regulatory situation. Now, fast forward to twenty seventeen and McDonald's was under quite a lot of pressure, actually. There was an activist investor saying that they need to focus more on their franchise business. They need to trim down their number of stores. It's a difficult. There was a lot of difficulty managing the relationship with the China JV partner. They wanted to free up some capital. So in 2017, they sold 80 percent of their operations in China, their subsidiary in China that runs all of the businesses. Remember, it's not a franchise. And that 80 percent got bought by CITIC consortium. There's a Chinese conglomerate and private equity investor and Carlisle, who bought 28 percent.  And that left McDonald's with just 20 percent of the China business. Now, fast forward again, five or six years to today, that sell-off of 80 percent of McDonald's has started to reconsider. They bought back the 28 percent from Carlisle. And the reason behind it is because they want to take more control of their fastest growing area in the world. So the number of stores in China, the number of restaurants in China, has increased from about 2,000 in 2017 to about 6,500 today. And they're going to try and increase it again to 10,000. So rationale for deals. All right, back in 2017, I needed to free up some capital. I needed to shed some pretty stodgy assets. 2023, wait a second, this thing is growing and I actually want a bigger piece of this, Carlisle's up for selling. So let's regain and take back control of an area that we now want to get involved in. When you were putting out those numbers of stores, I was like, OK, 10,000 restaurants by 2028. I was like, OK, I wonder how many restaurants are in the UK. So what do you what do you reckon? I just had a quick look how many McDonald's are there in the UK. All right, this is this is this is McKinsey consultancy question time.  OK, all right, so my process. So there are 40,000. I know that there are 40,000 franchised restaurants, McDonald's have 45,000 franchise restaurants around the world. Right. I would say that the US is its biggest market, I reckon 20,000 of those 40,000 are going to be in the US. Now, the US has got 350 million people. The UK's got 65. So let's cut that down by a sixth. So let's say 3,000 restaurants. And then it may be because the US just loves McDonald's and we don't like McDonald's quite as much. It's got 2,500, 2,000, 2,000. How close am I? Yeah, it's all about the process. Everyone, whenever you get this question, it's about the process, not the end answer. The answer is 1,270. I'm not that far off. I'm not far off. To be fair, I liked it. I liked your method. I'll advance through to the next round, thanks very much. Yeah, it's kind of crazy. And therefore, yeah, as you say, 10,000 is a chunky number. And this is one thing that I want to say, not necessarily on the acquisition rationale, but I'm just going to take this from a Carlisle perspective very quickly. Now, Carlisle, they bought in to the McDonald's operations in China in 2017. It's an enterprise value, an ideal value of 2.1 billion. That's what the value of this company was. And now it's expected that they're going to sell their 28 percent at a deal value, an enterprise value of 6.4 billion. Now, with leverage, with debt, it is expected that Carlisle from 2017 to 2023 are going to make six times their money, six times their original investment on McDonald's operations, holding it for six years and selling it. That's not a bad piece of business from the Asian Carlisle team. Oh, so someone like Carlisle, they're US based, is that right? Yes, so how much deal activity would be Asia for someone like a Carlisle? I mean, it depends what year you talk about. So the private equity films went massive, went very long on Asia over the last kind of 10 to 15 years. But I don't know if you've been reading the headlines about board bankers in Hong Kong, desperate for a deal, twiddling their thumbs. So there's massive retreat across China from a private equity perspective and from an M&A perspective as well. So this might actually just be a strategic move from Carlisle to get out of certain positions that they've got in Asia, due to, again, just the macroeconomic climate, increased difficulty of doing business in Hong Kong and China and maybe a repivot back towards the US, which is going gangbusters from an economic perspective. Cool. All right. Well, look, last one, vertical integrations in this Broadcom VMware deal. Yeah, I want to talk about this deal for a couple of reasons. The first, because it's massive, it's a deal that was announced back in, I think, May 2022, a long time ago. Sixty one billion dollars. So Broadcom, I'm going to call it a chip maker. It's a hardware, ostensibly a hardware business that services basically the infrastructure of computing and the infrastructure of data. And VMware, which is the software layer that goes on top of the hardware. So again, translating the data that you're getting out of these of these data centers and things like that and turning it into something that's actionable. I want to talk about this deal because, one, it's massive. Two, it's extremely. Boring. You know, I cannot find a way to make Broadcom or VMware sound remotely sexy. We're not throwing AI somewhere in there. I'm sure I'm actually looking at their website at the moment. And I'm sure the guy has probably mentioned. But look, it is what they do does power a lot of the artificial intelligence world. It's not an interesting business. It's Hicks and shovels, it's infrastructure, it's hard stuff. But just as a kind of note to any would be founder who's listening, my gosh, these infrastructure businesses are insanely valuable. Sixty one billion for VMware is a fair reflection. And the multiples are pretty high. But if you think about these infrastructure businesses, they're called infrastructure and that's because they are necessary for a whole industry. So they are sticky revenue streams. Just imagine taking Broadcom out of a particular process. It's going to be almost impossible. So these are brilliant companies to found, even if they're not the most attractive, sexy, exciting companies that you really want to talk to people about at a dinner party. But also this acquisition is a great example of vertical integration. So vertical integration classically is taking margin from different parts of a supply chain. Oil and gas companies are vertically integrated because they own the exploration, the extraction, the transportation, the refining and the selling. So they take margin, they take profit margin at each stage. And they also make themselves more defensible because they know what's coming through the pipes, they know what's coming through the supply chain. And if you think about that from a technology perspective, if Broadcom is the hardware to use a very simplistic rendering of this story, if Broadcom is the hardware, they have just bought the software layer. So if I'm and they are becoming vertically integrated. So if I'm a client that really wants access to data centres, but also wants access to the software that allows me to understand my usage and optimising things like that, I can now go to Broadcom plus VMware and get it as a bundle. And suddenly Broadcom's owning the margin from both the hardware and the software and being able to bundle in a kind of revenue synergy environment. So it's a really lovely example of vertical integration, which is a brilliant textbook case of why one company requires another. So is that why it was a waiting regulatory approval for the reason you just described? Yeah, it's a really good point. It was announced in May 2022 and it's just been completed this week. In fact, if you look at the VMware website, it says VMware by Broadcom. So it's actually happened now. Often we talk about deals that have been announced, but haven't yet happened. But this has finally happened. But yes, there was a huge regulatory hold up. I think Japan, the US, the UK and the EU and China had to opine and had to clear the deal. And actually, I think it was China that said, look, all right, we will allow this deal as long as VMware server software, stay with me, as long as VMware server software because it stays interoperable with Broadcom's competitors hardware. So it's basically saying, look, you can own VMware, but VMware still needs to be available on top of other hardware solutions. So you can't just corner off a whole market yourself. Now, I don't know whether there's a time limit on that. I don't know whether that's five years or 10 years and then maybe it can properly consolidate. But again, yes, vertical integration is potentially quite monopolistic or at least potentially quite anti-competitive. So yeah, definitely worth a really good case study, much like the Microsoft and Activision case study that we spent a lot of time talking about. OK, before we wrap up, you did have a note about a quick update on something we spoke about a few episodes back earlier in the mini series about the Telegraph Media Group. So anything going on there that we should be aware of? So Telegraph, as it just is a very quick reminder, they were they are now owned by Lloyds Banking Group because the Barclay brothers couldn't pay and service the debt that they took out as part of their ownership of the Telegraph and now Lloyds Banking Group don't want to own the Telegraph and they put the company up for sale. Again, Telegraph, UK Broadsheet Newspaper Spectator, which is also a UK political magazine. When we spoke about this a few weeks ago, we were naming a bunch of different. Remind me, who did we think could be up for this? There was one person that I think would be interesting because there's been a few other developments is Ken Griffin, who's the founder and CEO of the most profitable hedge fund in history, Citadel. And what's interesting there is that obviously we were talking about soft power and influence and the media and these financed people getting involved. He's also he must have been. He must have got the the textbook from the Saudi fund about utilising sports because I think he's also sniffing around the Miami Dolphins or something like that, the football team. So he's he's looking to branch out at a time when that company is making record profits, you would think he would be all focused on business. And yet he's focused more on being a capturing a dominant voice in the media and then also in the sports arena as well. But yeah, absolutely. And a very I know that we don't really deal in book recommendations on this podcast, but there's a very, very good book. There's just been there's just been put out by I think it's Robert Copeland, which is called The Fund, which is all about Ray Dalio and Bridgewater. And I guess in the sense that Dalio has become bigger than the firm and has tried to, you know, it hasn't really cared about the investment operations for the last 20 or 30 years and is busy pumping his principles and being a kind of big wig on the on the Davos stage. So he sounds like the world's worst boss. Some of the stories that have come out of that book, you're like, wow. Honestly, read read this book. I read it last week and it's just yeah, it's it is an expanse into the world's yeah, as you say, the world's worst boss and a complete narcissist. And I definitely read it here, but let's go back to the telegraph. So the reason why I just wanted to give you a quick update is because the front runner to buy the telegraph is the Abu Dhabi Sovereign Well Fund. So Redbird IMI, which is a fund, an investment fund owned by Abu Dhabi and Sheikh Mansour, they said that they're going to support the acquisition and take the debt off of Lloyd's hands. But the issue there is that the UK government's getting involved. They're saying, oh, do we want one of our main broadsheets, one of our main sources of news to millions of people in the UK to be owned by a foreign government, which is effectively what this is. So this is certainly a story just, you know, we'll keep we'll keep updating you. This is a story that's going to run and run. And as soon as the UK government gets gets its national security clause into a deal, this could this could die, this could end up actually going back into the hands of one of one of the hedges that we spoke about, or maybe a different suit that will be found. But yeah, just a little update on the telegraph. I love that. It's OK if it goes to one of the hedge fund managers, because all the politicians are mates with Ken Griffin. All right. All right. Cool. Well, that is the conclusion of the four part series. So for everyone listening, I hope it's been informative and enjoyable. Don't forget we are running still through pretty much into Christmas, the M&A Finance Accelerator. So it's happening on a pretty much weekly basis up until Christmas on a Thursday. Typically, all you need to do is check out the link in the show notes. Click on that register. We'd love for you to take part. And even though this was a mini series, we'll be back again. Don't worry the next week to talk about the latest deals that have come out. So thank you, Stephen. Thanks, Hans.


But welcome to Blender today, beacon edition here, ready for Blender conference 2020. I'm streaming live from a very unusual place, my work, the office. We're streaming live from the Blender Animation Studio here. You don't see anybody here because everybody's hiding right here. So maybe I can show you. You're gonna be out of focus people, so don't worry. But just to see, you wanna be on the shot? There. Everybody's socially distanced. Oi! Don! Andy. Mike, Julian. Everybody's in the back. That's so cool. Okay, not awkward at all. Wow, it's even... It's translating me live? Yeah. Okay.  I know. All right. Is everything okay? How's the chat? I'm having a beer as well. I'm not having a beer. I'm sure any, yes. Blenty. Okay. Wow. How is everybody? How are you doing at home? Are you waiting as much as we do for the Blender conference video? We were preparing until the very, very last minute. It's really something unique. We have, I don't know how many, it's like 50 people in total that send their videos from everywhere in the world from studios, from hobbies, from the entire Blender community. Thank you very much, boss. I got a beer, yeah. Cheers, whatever you are. How's the chat? Tony's so cool. I guess it's just a big captain dissolution. Yeah, he's on the show, actually. We didn't share who is in the show, actually. It's going to be a surprise. It's going to be a surprise. So... We have a special guest. How about a mine? Please, come. Who do you want to talk to? Here, let the chat. One beer for Pablo. That's amazing. Where are you guys watching this from, actually? We're in Amsterdam, of course. But I get... Oh, there you go. And I have some tea. Hello, everyone. This is very cool. Thanks. That's amazing. So, how are you preparing yourself for Blender conference? How are you? You get to open it already? I didn't open mine. I think I have an idea of what it has. So for licenses, of course. Don, people want to talk to Don. Or... Sergey... Hey, Sibron, it's in the chat. That's amazing. South India, Australia, Nicaragua, Argentina, Minnesota, Ireland, Seattle, Munich. Where is the people from Munich here? Yeah? No? Kind of? Come on. I have to study as German. Nobody from Munich. No? That's amazing. Where are my t-shirts? That's amazing. Italy, if you appear at Slovakia. Well, here. Tell me, where is people from? Let's see how... How... Huh? Please come here. Slovakia, Sweden. Kazakhstan. Clap, clap, clap. How do I get in the shot with being really far behind you? You should sit here. Oh, like... Oh, wait, wait. Maybe we can... Yeah, we have a fixed lens... Hello, I'm from Portsmouth in England. Anybody out there? Probably not. Is it a small city? It's a small... Yeah, a small city. Small as in... 300,000 people, I think. It's not like small, small, but... Let's let somebody else take the camera, I think. This is a really... I'm the least interesting person in the room. No. Let's see. There, perfect. Hello from Amsterdam. Andy wants to come and say hello there. No, no, no, no, no. Oh, greatest designer in the world. No, no, no, no. We've got a camera. Oh, wait, we lost Mike. I didn't even get to ask what is Mike doing here. He's a web designer. And also he designed the... Ident for the Blender conference this year. And the LA conference. That didn't happen, unfortunately. But it might happen in the future. Okay, who's my next guest? We've got to improvise. Geez, how we lowered the bar from last year. India, Brazil. Amsterdam. Yeah. Is it even fun? We're not just messing around. We are waiting for the video for YouTube to encode the video and get it ready. Once that is ready, we're going to put it live. We're going to share it here in the chat and on conference.blender.org. So you're going to be able to see it. It's a premiere and it's going to last over almost two hours. Around two hours. So, yeah, get yourself a drink. Hey, Sebastian. Here, Sebastian Pants. Let's see. I can bring a chair. Let's keep distance. We're still in corona times. Closer, closer. How are you? Sebastian, you know Sebastian. If you watched Blender today, you know Sebastian. Yep. Right? What do you do? I hope so. Yeah, I'm doing good still developing stuff, I guess. So, yeah. What exactly? Which area are you working on? Right now, I'm basically helping out with Edea NPR, which is basically a way to get lines from 3D geometry, so freestyle basically, but reworked in some ways. Freestyle, but real-time and in part of Blender. So it works in EV or cycles. Yeah, real-time ish. It's like ish, ish. That's a detail in a few years. In 10 years it's going to be real-time. But that is like having wrist pencil but automated following the shape of an object or something like that. Yes, exactly. So then you can take character model or specific character models and animate them and then get the strokes from them to get the 2D look. Wow. Or even, for some people, they don't really care about the characters, but it's more like the environments. Wow. Yeah, for characters, I guess if it's organic and stuff, it's not going to work. Well, it does work. But you usually need to do some very specific tweaks to the model to make the work fine or edit things in post. Which you now can do with grease pencil. That's why it's so great. Turn up the volume. Up, yes. Yeah, people calling for more volume. Okay, I guess... Well, yeah. I mean, yeah, now we're clipping. But that's fine, I guess, maybe. So let's see. That might be a bit too much. Yeah, I guess I can just... Yeah, I should wear a mouth cap, yeah.  We can hear. Maybe because the compressor is too high. Yeah, maybe. Well, I'll do it more, yeah. More. Let's see. More. More. I know, it takes like 30 seconds for you two. Yeah, yeah. But there's still crying out, oh, too much. Yeah, exactly. I can actually hear you. I can actually hear the laugh in the background. Looks like it sounds like a sitcom. There you go. Perfect. Perfect sitcom laugh. Yeah. But anyways, right. So as I was saying, just basically helping people do 2D stuff easier. And besides that, physics stuff. So I worked a bit more on fixing rigid bodies and also some cloth simulation, but not that much, to be honest. So it's not something that, yeah, I've worked on this and it's really awesome. Go and check it out. It's not there yet. Well, in 2.91, you fixed rigid bodies, right? The connections between it? Yes, basically in 2.90 and before, when you animated objects, rigid bodies were really unstable. So I fixed, or fixed in quotation marks. It's maybe not perfect yet, but it's a lot better than it was before. So now I think you could use it if you're a bit careful with animated characters. Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap. Okay. Thank you very much. Now it's your job to go pick someone. Yeah, I guess we just go circleize. Another victim. I hope I'm not making you... It's too loud. I'm gonna speak slowly, slowly. Right, Captain Disillusion is in there. We should do also some... Okay, okay, let's get our next guest all the way from Amsterdam. Ooh, that's far. Yes, Jeroen Bakker. I always talk about his patches. He's been working on Eevee Compositor. And what else? Viewport, Blender, long-time support. GPU work, drivers, making sure that the words are all machines. Ooh, last livestream. I mentioned that we might get in the near future something like cryptocurrency for Eevees. I don't understand what's that. Cryptocurrency. No, no, no, no. We're getting... Yeah, I'm working now on adding a lot of the render passes we have in Cycles into Eevee. So, AUV is scheduled and CryptoMod is scheduled. Nice. Basically, matching what Cycles has in terms of render passes. Yeah. Good. What did it make sense in that last week there was a question about that. What did it make sense to... If you're using Cycles to chest for CryptoMod or switch internally to Eevee because right, it's object data. Like, it's object masks. Well, for CryptoMods there is some differences like if you have transparent materials. So, Cycles can handle transparent materials much better than Eevee. But if you have solids or depth... Probably faster. Yeah. Awesome. Any upcoming... Any things... Things that are not even published yet that you can talk or not? No. I'm really working hard on these projects and I will see what my next project will be. And you're following the Everything Notes Project section of Geometry Notes. Yeah. Like, how is the team doing? Today we had to do the meeting, but yeah. Yeah, I know. We're trying to find out if we can work in a more agile way. And that's basically saying from, okay, let's define in real small parts from what do we want to achieve. And then with the whole team, just invest all our effort into making sure that that works. And that's a new way because normally you don't do that in a team where what is not in the same room. So it's really challenging to get that working. And we'll need to see how that evolves. Good. How long is this going to keep going, do you think? How many sprints? I think we're at least going to work three or six months with that. And it will grow every week with new features. And that should be more the focus. The focus. And as soon as something is kind of done, you will go to master? That's the plan? The plan is that when everything is finished, it just goes to regular code review and land in master. As soon as possible. Yeah. You heard it first. I'm lander today. Any questions from the people? It was very light. And what's the point? Let's see. Shadowcatcher on EV. Shadowcatcher. Is that possible, even, or is that in the roadmap? I think it is possible, but we haven't looked at it in too much detail. From the theory, it could be done. Yeah. Awesome. What else? Displacement. Displacement. Is that even with OpenGL it's possible, or we need for Vulcan, or it's not even possible at all? It depends. Because the displacement like cycles, it really changes your geometry. And for EV to be real-time, you don't want to change too much of your geometry. So we need to look into that. Awesome. Geometry shaders or something like that. Geometry nodes. Geometry shader nodes. It's not going to be confusing at all. Any other questions? Left. What about your face masks? Okay. I think we're panorama render in EV. Oh, that's for the light. Is it even here? Yeah. Thank you very much. Clap, clap, clap, clap. Louder. We need to speak louder. I know. But we also try to keep a distance, you know, try and be safe. It's bad that I'm not even wearing a... Yalta is coming. Oh, okay, okay. So we might have a live performance here from animation director, animator, voice artist.  What day is tomorrow? Tomorrow is... Oh, 31st. No, okay, never mind. Sunday is the first of November. You know what means, what November means? November means November. And for that, to talk about it, we're going to have Simon, Thomas. Clap, clap, clap, clap. Simon's a rock star. We have it here. And it's our rock star at the Blender Studio because he's working, he worked on the procedural shading training on the Blender Cloud, which is doing amazing, actually, subscriptions to end up really a lot. So thanks for that. If you haven't checked it out, procedural shading notes in the Blender Cloud. In the new Blender Cloud, designed by Mike, who was first. Simon, how are you? I'm good. Good? Yeah. A little bit closer? Oh, yeah. I don't know if people can hear me. Yeah, maybe a bit closer. Yeah, I'm doing well. November is dreading on the horizon. But you're also working in the newly announced, the just announced, Sprite, Sprite Open Movie Project, plus involving geometry notes, Project November. Are you even going to try? I'm going to try. We'll see how far I can go. Maybe I have to, like, trim it down to not doing every day, but yeah, I'll try. Or do it weekly and then just try and do as many as possible? Yeah, something like that. I mean, I don't really want to trim down on the quality, which is going to be difficult, having little time, but we'll see.  No, you didn't, the year before. Last year was actually the first time I think you did it. At least as far as I know. I don't know if maybe people did it before. Well, yeah, that was 2019. Last year you did it. I'm curious. I never done it myself, but like halfway or towards the end of November, does it get easier?   So now I have that set and kind of just reuse it for this time. And from last year to this year there are a bunch of new notes and cycles. Yes. And EV. That's going to make it actually a lot easier. Easier?  I guess it's even, could even fun to see a difference. Okay, last year I could do this. This year I can just use the one note. Yeah, yeah. I mean, to be honest, there's been so many changes, I'm not exactly sure what was in last year's Blender version, but it's definitely a difference. Yeah, you use master, I guess, on everything. Yeah, currently here. Also, any questions in the live stream? Anything you want to share with the world? Your artwork is great. Can the mic be closer? Yeah, not the mic closer, but we can be closer to the mic. Maybe we can boost the audio maybe. I don't understand English, but we can do much about it. Microphone is two-directional to both of you. Okay. What is November? What is November? Yeah, that might be a good point to start. Yeah, yeah, assuming everybody knows. What is November? Yeah, November is basically like an event that lasts the month of November with a different prompt each day, like a topic to create something with nodes. It can be anything. It can be shaders, which I've been doing, animation nodes, sort of like any add-on with nodes. It could even be another software, but yeah. And yeah, you learn a lot. You can share your things on social media and learn a lot from other people, and it's really cool to do. So I encourage you to give it a try. Did you get to hear anything? Okay, some people can hear everything. Oh, yeah, I was raised. Thank you, Andy. No, not even. No, there. I can't do that. All right, Simon, thank you very much. Wait, wait, wait. You get close to the anniversary of working at the Blender Studio? Oh, right, yeah. I mean, I started in January. January, okay. It's getting close. You could go special, and now it's special. Now it's November special. That would be actually pretty cool. Yeah, that would be fitting. Depends on how much you can do in November. Thank you. Thanks. That is everyone. Okay, just pointed at the victim. Who else will that drop by? Pastien, all the way from France. A developer. Pastien Montang, developer. Developer, developer, developer. Yeah, source for a developer. Yeah, working on... Mostly data management, so that covers library overrides, imports, linking, all those kind of things. And also a bit of meshes and various areas of that. So the library override is gonna replace proxies. Yes. I was going through the changes recently, and it's really there. There is an option to replace a proxy, to re-link, to re-sync everything. What's left? Mostly some parts of the data that are still not overwriteable, that should be to be able to extend ad strips in the NLA editor, for example, or to edit animation when you already have animation, any data structure in your data block. So if you have drivers already and you have an animation in it, be able to edit the animation, because right now you can create new animation in an override, but you cannot edit an existing one. And also, like, kind of important-ish features, like not storing the whole mesh, for example, when you override a mesh, right now it's storing the whole data again, which is a waste of space. So there are middle important things to finish, like that, to consider the project. Optimization. Yeah, more like optimization and polishing and fixing bugs, because we still find some bugs sometimes in it. All the same things. Awesome. Any other pressure? Do you want to continue working in the future? I have to override. There will likely be some addressing technical depths and trying to improve some internal code, which is really suboptimal currently. Yeah. And then, yeah, there's some bigger projects, which are also not directly affecting users, because they are more in the really low-level part of the code. So trying to make Blender more professional and so people can... More efficient, although the idea is to have the code in a better module status so that when you touch something in one part of the code, you don't actually get unexpected effects in totally different parts of the code. And that's really lacking currently in areas of Blender. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Claps, finish. He's working on library overrides, changing the way you work on a pipeline or even on your own animations and to talk about animations and proxies. We have here all the way from Iceland. Oh. Wolfie. No. So... I actually tend to taunt you through it at me. I did not. Thank you very much. Hello. How are you? It's all right. I'm not doing it. Yeah. How many hats are you wearing nowadays? You are working... Yes. Maybe not... There's going to be more of them as the project maybe continues. The project, which is? Sprite fight. It was announced yesterday, two days ago. Two days ago? Yeah, exactly. It was announced recently in some live on the Blender Cloud and people can watch the animatics, right? I think they are not yet being put on. It's soon to happen, but there's this internal conflict of there's a bit of a twist in it, and then do we just boil it by throwing everything or do we reserve at least chunks of it and maybe once it's released online, then share everything? Yeah. Well, for Sintel, we had the SVN Commits live on Twitter. At some point, she changes a lot. So we couldn't use the names. So we basically changed the names to whatever or something else. Did you have to use code names? Yeah, code names. Maybe you can replace it with other stuff that is not going to be in the film. That's really interesting. I remember Colin had an update on Sintel. He used to have the blog. There used to be these video updates every week. I remember seeing one of them where Colin had accidentally left the edit in the background as he was chatting with the camera with a massive spoiler. And then later on in post, he blurted out or something. I think it was like scales with blood and stuff. So it's bright fried. How's the story? Is it locked already? It is locked. The story is locked. We have an edit that goes all the way through to the end. So it's a complete story all the way through. And we're kind of preparing for the layout phase right now. What is the layout? In my head, it is the filmmaking part of the whole thing where you're not just talking about things or drawing things, but you're not also going into the minute performances of animation. It's like that halfway step in between where you're trying to tell the story, where you're choosing the camera, you're choosing the lens, you're choosing where to move the camera and why push in and why are we pushing back and staging the characters. Or you take all the camera decisions and even as far as depth of field, maybe? Yeah, exactly. All of that together. How long is that going to take? Well, let me check the layout department. It's me. Yeah, exactly. Hello. Hello. Layout, okay. So we'll see. I'm not quite sure. I was kind of hoping maybe we would get like one other person to help me out. But, yeah, it's still a little bit in the air. You're co-directing? Yes, yes, yes. How tempting is it when you're doing the layout to go, you're like, maybe I'll make a little change here and there. It has happened here and there, where it's like, ooh, I think it would be funnier this other way. And then, you know, at the end of the day, I'll have like a Skype meeting with Matthew and we'll watch the thing together. Like, what did I do that day? And we'll watch the entire thing together. And then I just, like, because the camera is in my face and I'm just looking for reactions.  So that's... Yeah, yeah, exactly. Whoa, okay, let me go back on that one. That was meant to be a joke. But then I've also noticed that you watch this thing every single day for, you know, 60 versions or whatever. And you just get so numb to it. So you're watching it and sometimes you're watching it and it's like a hint of a smile in this one shot. And then the rest of it is like nothing because it's just not funny to you anymore. Yeah. But that always happens, I guess. Which part is your favorite? Now that you worked in many projects, you've directed your own short films with the Coffee Run, with HLT2-7, and... The Dweeps. They did Dweeps, yeah. I will tell you that... The layout is a bit... Doctor Sergei Charibin. I don't know if he's behind me right now, cringing. But I asked him today, this is official, this is online, out of all of our films, what is his favorite? Ah.  No, I'm kidding. He said he actually liked Dweeps a lot. I don't know. I think it was probably because it's so short and sweet and... You can just laugh and get out of there, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Awesome, so what's part of the pipeline you like the most? Storyboarding, thinking about the story, or layout, or animator, because you are an animator. Yeah. I think the animation is probably the most painful in a weird way. The pain of animation. Yeah, exactly. Because you have to... You have to be in a moment and you really have to... And this moment is going to be brief, it's going to be four seconds or whatever, and sometimes it's very emotional or whatnot, but it's going to take you maybe four weeks, maybe five weeks to do it properly, like all the way from blocking, doing refinements, all the way to polish. And you have to just be in that state of mind in that moment. It's like that moment is in slow motion and you have to absorb it on that level. Yeah, and if it's like a sad thing, there were instances where I was working on a really sad thing, and then animators, a lot of times they have mirrors on their desk, and I would just get a glimpse of my own reflection. I was just stuck in a sad phase while I'm doing this thing, just because I'm kind of living the moment or whatever. So you're having a great day and then you have to work. You know? Yeah, I think... The other way around too, right? If you have to animate, like the days where you were animating the waves, fixing. But then you also kind of start kicking yourself because you get so numb to the joke that you feel like, oh, it's not funny anymore. Ah, damn, it's not funny anymore. And it's still funny, it's just not funny to you.  It's probably funny. Just have to trust it. Okay, last question. You did Coffee Run, kind of sad for moments. You did the Daily Dweefs, hilarious, and you did the Asian, which is more action. Yeah, comedy but action. Of the three genre, which one you enjoy the most as a whole? Honestly, I think action. I love the, when I was coming up with the choreography of the fight, even though we had to trim it down, trim it down, trim it down just because we couldn't go on for too long. But I just loved the, you're really deciding when something happens at what point and what is the most interesting moment to just like flip that around and it's the cliche like he's winning, no he's winning, no he's winning and it's I don't know, there's something about it and all of it happens so fast, you have to really like if you're like one frame off, that can be the difference between like feeling like a hit didn't land or it did land and it's like I'm really excited now about like the next shot that's going to happen. It's a very fine line, but I don't know there's something about that that I really enjoy and I hope maybe in the future we'll do something really action packed. Or maybe a feature film? Of that, yeah. Thank you very much. Thank you, thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, I had to hear more some.  I don't know if you can hear what Jesse there is. Alright, who's the next victim? How far are we? It's a video already. Okay, another one. So we have artists, we have developers who is Julian? You want to come? Alright. All the way from Germany. Where are you from? Because I said Germany. Northern Germany. Well, it's somewhere around Bremen, but it's like in the middle of nowhere, you wouldn't know the name. It's called Deep Holds, so it's like the name is very descriptive. Very descriptive. Does it mean anything? No. It's just wood, so it's basically deep wood. Okay, is there wood around it? Or is it like in the Netherlands where there's a lot of bargain places with no mountains? It's a little bit of woods, a lot of fields and swamps. So, yeah. Beautiful. What are you up to these days?  Yes. Blender side on the sculpt team, but also doing sprite to fright. Yes, it's pretty exciting. So I'm basically sculpting the main character lineup. So I'm like in I was like in constant contact with the director, Matthew Loon and the production designer, Ricky Nieva. So it was really exciting and just kind of building the characters up from the ground just like step by step. Yeah. How many characters are there? I mean, it's five in terms of the main teenager group and then there's sprite. So it's basically two characters, but there's going to be like a lot of variation among them. Yeah, that's already a lot.  Up to the level of Spring. Basically, yes.  Oh my God. You're also helping, right? Oh, yes. Andy is helping. Of course. In Spring, I was like I mean, Andy was also working on Spring on the characters, mainly the grooming and some of the shading. But now like I got like Simon also helping out. We got like Vivienne as an extra concept artist. The team is bigger than in Spring, which is definitely necessary. I don't know if like within the time that we like set this all in, I would be able to just like work on five to seven characters at the same time. So it's mainly sculpting that I'm doing, sculpting and some modeling work. And at the same time, you are in touch with the sculpt developers and there's kind of a team going on. I see that you're removing patches as well. Trying to, right now during lockdown, it's a bit harder again since I'm only doing it on my own personal computer, but it's a lot of fun always being like in the midst of what's happening in the latest versions. Anything, any spoilers? I want to coming. Are you reviewing a patch right now or is it the brush system project? Yes, that's definitely a big discussion point right now with the whole brush management, asset management thing and reworking the UI for that because whoever had the latest version of Blender Open, you can see how many tools got added recently. And now is the time to actually adjust everything so that it all fits in to get like all of this new features that properly displayed. Yeah, in the last release only like seven or so more. Yeah, and it's a lot more. You give a presentation here at the studio regarding the tool system. That's also something you are overseeing as a project? A little bit, yeah. I'm in discussion with people because there's definitely the task in 2.9 the series to like polish up a lot of the features the UI, the tools getting basically the whole 2.8 project is being wrapped up. So this is the time to really give feedback. It is, it is. So that's your request to people? Oh yeah, of course always give feedback. Yes, feedback. How can they even get in touch? Can you go to DevTalk? There is a thread on DevTalk. There's always DevTalk. There's always threads going on there. There's also still right click select. And on the main developer forum, not so much but you can always check out what's going on there and like directly like shout out certain patches if you want to like give feedback maybe on DevTalk and right click select. It's not so great if like the comments get flooded in there, I noticed, but still it's great if you like stay in touch on all these three websites at least. Awesome. Favorite feature that was added recently? Recently as in the last three months. Oh my god, in the last three months. Oh my god. I think I guess one of the best features is still the cloth brush, the cloth sculpting system which is being worked on right now. I need to try out more with it because right now all of these new features get added to really make it shine like collisions and I think that's going to really like that's probably become the biggest game changer in terms of sculpt mode. And there's some new stuff on the horizon with dynamic topology improvements. Yeah. Have you tried that or something? I haven't tried it yet, but it looks promising in general performance improvements. And by the developer who worked primarily on Vmesh Yes. And he mentioned that Vmesh wasn't made for the topo and that explains a lot of things why it wasn't so fast. So it's great to have him involved. It's awesome.  Exciting times. Any artwork? Ah, November tomorrow. Are you draining now? Oh my god, no. How is sculpt generally? Well, it's not too long now. Is it like two months? Oh my god. I need to prepare. Yes, I kind of skipped the last one, but it would be amazing to like, oh my god, in October I should think about that. Oh, it's over. No, I missed it completely. You have a full day. I got one day left. To do 30 drawings. Oh no. But yes. But the sculpt generally, do you think it would be great to like I would really like to do it again like power through it. Possibly like do some tutorials based on it. That was a lot of fun last time. You did it two years ago, but not last year. That's when I mixed it with Simon. Yeah, exactly. You did it one year and he was like, no, I'm not doing this. Wait. It's a lot of work. Awesome. I'd encourage people to do it. Thank you very much. Thank you for dropping by. You're here all night. Exactly. I'll stick around. Thank you. All right. Are we production? Are we close to the We're waiting. We're patiently waiting for YouTube to encode the video. The video is like a it's going to be long. It's going to be like a feature film. And it also includes close captions. So it's going to be subtitled so you can see it as you can see it and read it at the same time, but also if you can hear properly or you can hear where you are right now. Tom just said two more minutes. Tom How long Okay, I'm not going to shout next to the microphone. How's everybody in the chat doing? Is it okay? I'm curious. I want to see how many people are watching this. Oh, wow. 1.6,000 people. What to say to 1.6,000 people. Hug your friends and families. Hey, okay. Who's coming? Who's next? Francesco. Do you want to... Francesco. He got all the way. I just want you to relax. We're just going to be silent here. I don't know when the video is ready. No, I want to know how you are. I'm doing great. Thank you. What is the video? You would imagine... We cannot... YouTube, because we're streaming on YouTube. We're streaming on YouTube, but that's okay. We're not monetizing this. But if you upload the video and you set it to processing in those very big expensive data centers full of Google engineers, user experience designers, underwater, that cannot design a progress bar to tell you how far the processing of the video is, that's where we are. The video is uploaded. It's processing for like 15 minutes or so, maybe 20 now. This morning when I did the test, it took 15 minutes. So I think it's fairly close.  So if you refresh the page, do you have something there? No, no. If you can point at his face, I have here a little thing that you can... So that's the video. So as soon as YouTube decides to finish processing it, then we can all enjoy it together. And I hope it will be entertaining and it will be fun. It will? Oh, yeah. Nice thumbnail. Oh, it doesn't even have a thumbnail? Yeah, there should be a thumbnail. That is... That's exciting. So it is there. Yeah, it is there. What can we expect? This is the longest video Blender has ever published. Tell me about it. Yeah. I really don't know. I mean, the past few days have been really, really busy with all the different announcements, different things that have been happening with Blender. But like this video, of course, is one of the things that I spent finishing. But you know, we were working on it together yesterday and the thing that amazed me the most was really like the diversity of the content that you're going to see. I mean, I don't even... It's not even about hyping it. It's really like I was so happy to see so many things, even more than what you would normally see at the Blender conference, that you would not normally be able to be there. Or like, you know, you wouldn't think about it. They're very busy people. And so it's really cool that people could take like a couple of minutes of their life to share what they're doing. And it's really unique. So I... To me, that's like the best part of this of this video. And of course, there are like lots of surprises and plot twists and try to make it like a story. That's something unique, really. I think this idea of this video is that Tom came up with the idea of making and it's just amazing because it's really something we couldn't do otherwise. We were planning to do a conference in Amsterdam and one in LA. But that will bring only people that can go to those places. Here we're going to see people from all over the place. All over the place. And indeed, like even the... Because right now, it would be in the middle of the conference. Like the conference would have been happening. Like the actual conference in Amsterdam. Right now, yeah, we would be at the Bali or like having them, yeah. Yeah, so that's... I'm just a bit phased out thinking about that because, yeah, we are not there. And it's going to be so condensed. Like after this, we were also joking that do people know that this is it? Like this is going to be the... It's a conference. It's a one hour and a half video with a case of blender conference emotional roller coaster and learning experience in one handy device. It's not that then we... tomorrow there is another one, because otherwise... You can watch it again. Find the details. I think it's worth watching a few times. Yeah. This week, you're also... just because it wasn't enough to make a one and a half hour video, you released the new Vendor Cloud announcing especially the new projects. Some people from the team here are working. Yes, already, but you're also producing this. Yeah. The team is very happy that I am producing this because I can dedicate plenty of time to the team, especially when I'm doing the other things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, it's been going on for really a long time, so it's great to see it public and I'm really looking forward to share more and more of the content that is there and of the process. Matthew, Matthew Land, the director, he is very open and enthusiastic about talking about story development and the story process and so on. And so it's really nice that he's embracing a little bit the idea of the platform and to share that part of the process too, which normally... it is a struggle, it's always a struggle, but it's cool if you can make it and you can make it public, like just the rest of the art process struggle. So yeah, I'm very excited for the project. It's going to go on for many, many months still and there is already months worth of content there to check and explore. You also produced Coffee Run, all the previous Open Projects, three more recent Open Projects, Spring, the Caminandas Projects. So compared with Spring, which was huge, how is the size of this project? I mean, I think you can already tell from the artwork, from the concept art that this is going to be even huger and that's of course making everybody a little bit uncomfortable. So as a producer or in general, trying to make a project together with everyone, you try to find a good balance between what is uncomfortable for real and what is like, okay, let's just push it a little bit further. I've been trying to find a good a good limit, like a good balance and yeah, I mean, I think that this is though very, very ambitious. So it's super exciting. I'm very excited about it. It's a good next step towards making a bigger project even in the jump. Especially to enable the workflow and the collaboration of people in a way that is less ad hoc, like in the past we really managed to make films work very tightly together. It was not very big and we had enough time on our hand to do things but like over and over we've been presented with the same challenges that we always solved in ways that were not very sustainable and they were not making everybody happy and I mean, of course for obvious reasons. So and for this film in order to produce the amount of animation that is required we need like for example a bigger animation group and to make that efficient we really need to have like a pipeline in place that allows a process. So the focus of this project? This pipeline is working together and using Blender to work together and sharing that process so like how do we use Blender to work together? It's not just Blender it's tools around it that you need to make to make a film. So are there tools needed? They're going to be developed and always open source? Yeah, of course. Yeah, so that's like I think that it's a great next step because after this we can definitely hopefully create something a bit more sustainable for the future and we can do even more ambitious projects which is what we always like to do. Yeah, what would you like to produce? What do you think as a producer based on the experience that you had on spring copy run this? Yeah. What is, do you think the next step for Blender to take? Blender Studio and Blender? No, I mean there is always the idea of working on feature formats but that's like very ambitious and complicated but I think another aspect that is even more interesting than that is to create enough sustainability in the Blender cloud so that we can have, for example, multiple productions happening. Like imagine if you could make you know two sprites in one year I mean of course it's not, if you think of it that you have to do it yourself then you will be like okay rather not but if you could have enough momentum, if you could have enough infrastructure enough people, enough subscribers to be able to pull that weight then what is preventing you from doing three films per year and I think that if we are able to find that format, like finding a way to make this work and it comes both in how we share the work we do and how you know the platform itself is going to work but those are the kind of productions we make I think that that would be a very exciting direction where to go. I think I should go check the upload maybe so I'm gonna have a look and if you don't see me then it means that probably it's time to go live the link is there is in the front page of Blender.org so you just need to refresh and then everyone who is around they can just go and check there at some point there will be like we make it a live premiere we try at least so there will be a countdown there will be a chat there so everybody can jump from one chat to the other and be there and I really hope it's done so I'll see you soon. Thank you very much a huge applause Yes Unbox You should be wearing it already I have to Unbox it Live? Yes But Okay Well my first unboxing Hello So Together apart do not open until today Nobody asked what's the drawing in here and it was just obvious Sprite Fried Movie project This box was designed by Mike Thank you Mike Evian was also helping there Drawings are based on Yes, concept art Just making time so I can Okay I get to open it here You want the knife Yeah, no it's okay I open it, it's okay There is a mug? No Alright So the first thing is green Snashwreck Day Blender conference 2020 Sprites Evian That's so nice Yes, I'm still a kid, yes Yes, amazing Nice Oh, wait Wait, wait There's something else here So for your mouse An exclusive Blender mouse pad That's so cool, I actually didn't know that we had this thing in That's so nice Alright, more What else, oh postcards Postcards Stickers We had, okay so here We had a bunch of stickers for the blender community For the beacon For the sprites And the blender sticker Nice These are the new blender community Badges that we made recently How we published recently That's so cool And of course There's a bunch of Amsterdam postcards because you know It's like when you come to Amsterdam Of course you only do the postcard Can we, awesome Greetings from Amsterdam The bag, this is where The Blender conference started What, 20 years? 18 years ago 2002 The first Blender conference was here The new market in Amsterdam The Bali, that's where There are other conference Happened too Many conference actually we had here At some point we just couldn't grow any bigger We couldn't feed any more people So we moved to Company together Where we were there last year The Bali, but we're still going back To the after drinks We still go there This, what is this? Okay quick This is Entrepot Dock This is where the Open Movie projects, the second movie project Happened, Big Bag Bunny And then all the other ones until we moved To this building Entrepot Dock 57A Is one of the most beautiful Areas in Amsterdam We were there recently with Like Sentimental, we missed that place But then we moved to this place Where we are now, in Amsterdam North This building We Call it Fagli at the beginning Because it wasn't the prettiest place But now it is Because it's surrounded by pretty people Here, company together The conference was last year And then, Amsterdam So nice, it's also designed By Mike Right? All right I got a letter Are we supposed to read this out loud? It's a letter by the CEO Of the Blender Foundation I think this is personal for each one That received it And also there is a time where we're going to be Meeting A lot of energy Yes, good wishes But it's more Of a personal note to everybody The comfort box This is what I should be wearing The Blender B-Con 20 With my name tag I should get my name there Then this goes together With the linear Orange, of course We never made an orange before Last year was blue So And then, to write on it We actually got Pants? Yeah, three pants A pink, blue Blender pants What are people saying? It looks incredible Read it, people want me to read the note No, no, come on It's a personal note A pin Oh, I got a Suzanne I think there was a random one Suzanne That's amazing, okay So during the People that never been to a Blender conference These pins are They're like There's a black market of pins People are exchanging it They're all putting it there on the old lanyards So there's a black market of pins And This is the best, this is the sound that Whenever you make this sound And people hear you They're always turning their heads Cookies And the round ones Okay Okay So I know what to do, okay I know what to do Yeah, I Okay, I'm getting notes about what's going on The video Upload or the processing of David's stock Stock Okay, while we wait for that We can Stream from this live stream We can put the video live But I need orders from the boss With The Italian one, yes I want to know if you can mention What exactly how should I proceed And where can I find the video Technical stuff More Paolo Ah, that's so nice, thank you Oh, I can invite more people in So what are the cookies about This is the strobe waffles Two strobe waffles and then the other one It's probably speculars, in this country They love speculars, I'm not sure why Strobe waffles, I'm gonna Should I open it Do you know what a strobe waffle is We watch Paolo eat the cookies live Why? Hello Francesco, ciao How are you? Good So we have a plan, don't tell you About it?  No, that's the only downside Can we get it? No No, I don't think so Ah, maybe, that way Put it on VLC But then you stream it through VLC Because it would be better if you would serve it as a file Yeah, but I can put subtitles there I think Can do a live OBS discovery session Yeah, hey guys Do you know if we can add a video with subtitles? Yeah, there you go, exactly There are like a thousand people that know probably Yeah, there must be, too Andy, do you have your USB C? Stick Then we are gonna use Dan Alright, I'll be right back Okay, try to get the sub D And I think VLC is not gonna be too bad Okay Alright Live television Okay, I'm gonna put everything back here How's everything I mean, VLC solves every program Yeah, because it's open source, man It's open source for women Okay What to do now? I'm looking at you Yeah, I'm not directing anything No, no, you're I'm not directing There are more people here I can do a second Yeah You wanna drop by? Who's gonna interview a new animator? Okay, here I can sit here Focus on my face and then you sit here Yes, yes, okay It's light to be in Yeah, okay, cool So Claps, please Alright, we got in the house Andy Godalczyk Director of Spring Art director of Pretty much everything else Stuff, yes, yeah, okay What are you doing right now? You're involved in Open Movie Project You're involved in the development of Blender stuff Yeah, just giving feedback Answering Questions Just rambling about things You know, bug reports and stuff Bug reports So in Sprite's When you guys started actually How long have you been working on the project so far? Oh gosh, I think it must have been A couple of months Now March, February I forgot No, no, no, wait It was later The copyright was still going on? Yeah, yeah The whole year is a blur That was project and then Sprite's What are you working on in Sprite's project? So currently we are Bringing the main Five characters that Yuri was talking about From sculpting to Actual mesh That can be raked in everything And then at the same time Some environment art Look developments happening Currently we are All together working on A cover for 3D World For the 3D World magazine I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say that here Now you know But it's an exclusive So we will have one of the main Characters on the cover Fully shaded Opposed With an environment The sprite sitting on her hand Without having Made the whole movie yet It's super difficult Because we had to do everything It's like the closest to a teaser Or trailer I think we are treating it as A look death personality pose To find the style of the film Something that we Haven't done it really to that extent We always had to At some point push things together Then you get a picture That looks like the final film But yeah Do you think already Based on your experience What we are going to see in the cover Is going to change much Or it's Like what do you expect Like towards the end of the project I mean I I don't know really I don't think I don't expect it to change much Very deliberately going for a specific Style But That's the same with all the stuff We've made before It never turns out how you want it to be It always is better I guess Speaking of style Compared to the other open movie project This looks already completely Different How was the approach this time How did you I mean a great deal was Is just comes from The character designer Ricky Nervar Who had a lot of input in how the characters are Made and that influences The whole style of everything But also it comes a lot from the people here Because People here really want to do something That they haven't done before Something more experimental Something more 2D Something pushing the limits of What Blender can do and what you can do In animation So yeah it's unlike Anything we've ever done before And that's really exciting Do you think In Blender itself you're going to get to use Any of the new features Do you already plan to have some Improvements in Blender That you use like a game I mean we're basically using Master every day Like with all the crashes and everything Like with the doc reports Trying to make sure that That people and the developers Are best supported in their work Even if we just end up complaining a lot But yeah And I mean we're going to Make use of all the new features that we can And Sebastian already improved some of The simulation Stuff Overwrites, Bastia is Working on overwrites and we're going to use The software for everything for the whole project We are in fact using them already And I heard that It might be the first project to use Some geometry nodes Or some of the new system of nodes Yeah yeah I'm just basically waiting for that stuff To be A little bit more solid So we can use it for stuff but yeah We'll use everything that's there Everything that we can I know you're not still building Like a whole scene But compared to Spring was the last Big big big project that happened Like big Short and that was Half in 2.7 and the big chunk In 2.8 Pipeline wise are you changing Much from what you learned from Spring or like the collection system Are you using differently now or I think we are Like we're doing a lot of Generations currently how we are Building A short file that people are Animating and then different people are Using a different file for lighting But hopefully Like I mean the thing with Spring was That the collection system was being Developed as we were making the film So in the end It was kind of there where it is Right now so we are starting From a better So it's like that's going to be A total breeze and I think A lot of stuff Also with the override system That's going to influence how we use Collections A lot of the linking of Collections is going to be Pretty much the same but that's Like that's so powerful All that stuff that came in 2.8 So great Exciting you're also being Sorry if I keep you to Python Oh yeah a little bit You were Playing with more Pipeline sign like caching and stuff That you did Awake A part of you that Oh yeah it's I always wanted to do Like just Dumb coding stuff Like putting some Python into the thing And see if it runs It really encourages you to do it And I like if you If you're thinking of it I can really Just like go for it try to do Some of that stuff because it's Like it changes the way that you work It can make you more efficiently And it's not really that hard Like if you know some You know how some basic code Structured you don't really need to know How to program you can just like Read the documentation paste the line Or even just the Stuff and then just go to town with it So it's very very approachable Awesome and we Have a training On the Blender Cloud for that Is the scripting for artists That people can check out So good yeah And that might be a segue to get Another developer In the chair We're talking about scripting And he's an artist So I was kind of Oh you're eating sorry I think the camera Stand by please We are trying to fix your issue The camera yes Do we have a webcam Like a box Is it? It is yeah now you have to press play Maybe there's a shirt or something And cancel No no no Again And okay we are back You can press play here And then you would have turned it to me The one you would have known Okay we are back Sorry the camera had a Issue try to make sure the plug is It should show like a little plug That it's charging so okay That was Andy got Alchic And the battery is exhausted But we are not so we are going to continue In a podcast fashion And in the meantime Is there anybody that can find a Just a regular webcam Only amazing and people cannot see me eating No thanks Thank you Is there anybody Around that can find a webcam Just continue Yeah the cable is Maybe not the greatest Yeah I don't see anybody moving I thought somebody walked I think Julian ran off Okay cool awesome So we are going to get the webcam back But The audio is off no no the audio is fine Right Here okay We are We are going to fix this Hold on to your hats And cameras Is it plugged in? There you go yeah yeah yeah Live OBSing There you go Camera quality dropped down A bit But I love the white balance On this like the purple To composite the green It is just beautiful We are purple actually the camera is Fine the other one was wrong Okay So Hello hello How are you? I am good For the last I don't know month and a half I have been working More on blender on the animation side of things And it has been fantastic There is so much more new New development going on Life in the animation module We got To join the module we got We got We got So he is now also official part Of the module Exactly So it is fantastic To have more new developers In the team And they are doing fantastic Jobs like wage working on the Non-linear animation editor Which really needs a lot of love Because nobody has looked at that for years And he is picking it up and doing great things Kristoff is working On a new post breakdown User interface Which he is going to abstract So that other parts of blender Can also use it And it looks so good No more waving in the air For just guessing where you are But it is really nice And then we have Basam Who has all the knowledge From way back then About visual keying He knew exactly Who implemented it How we got implemented And other areas as well So it is fantastic It is an actual team animation Luciana Munoz is also working on it And there are more people Who are active And we now have my weekly meetings Like fourth nightly meetings To make it clear it is not twice a week But it is also not Yeah Wow How can we follow this progress On blender chat There is the animation module Animation dash module Chat channel That is the hub for all the communication In the Header of that in the topic We have links to the work board Where you can see what we are working on And there will always be links There for the meeting nodes And people can also join the meetings If they are interested in animation That is animation 2020 Really waiting to happen Okay We are getting news That We are getting close Around 10 minutes Less than 10 minutes 5 to 10 minutes In a nice way So animation module So we are not going to spoil anything But you also Participate it in this In this video You are going to see the first shot that you see in the video For today Yeah That was fun to do We are not going to spoil anything But Apple might see us No Okay So animation module Scripting for Artists today This year 2020 Was one of the I think we can put it here Monitoring it seems fine Open up The Blender open up In March When Europe or this part of Europe Went into lockdown Blender foundation, Blender.org project Announced the open up Which you are a big part of it Scripting for Artists That was so good Making new chapters And they are available for everybody And that was also very nice to do So the responses that I got On twitter For my calls, for more information Were fantastic Basically I didn't have to do anything Just call out what you guys want to hear And I got many responses And I dive into it And now also on the chat People still refer to it The How do I call it The roast my add-on What was that I look at the code I go from top to bottom And everything that it shit I just point a finger at it And twirl it around until It all comes up And it's a really fun way Of doing it because It's basically doing a code review But in a nice way A bit of a harsh way But that's how you gotta be Sometimes you need it And the responses that I got From people were very positive So maybe we'll do it again And maybe it inspires other people To do something like this Which would also be very cool Scripting is a big part Like Andy was saying Blender encourages you To learn it Maybe because there's Not a better way of doing something But also For many ways That Blender is capable Of doing so much And making it work For your way of working For your workflow It can really help a lot when you script things And it's really powerful in Blender If you want to have the bit of script That does what a push-off button does You just hover over it With your mouse, you press Ctrl-C And you have to code The starting out is that simple So, yeah, of course How do you use your Blender Developer, core developer Do you think for people that want to contribute That starting by making little Add-ons or small tools in Python Is that a good starting point Or would you suggest people to just Start from scratch with C? Well, if you're good enough in C++ Or in C and you're Good enough to understand How Blender works on the inside Which is quite tricky Then by all means do it But I think if you can do it in Python Maybe it doesn't perform as well Maybe it is just a little bit Of a proof of concept But if you have a working way That shows other people what you mean Then that is so powerful That is so much easier to convince people Pretty much in the same way As filmmaking, right? You don't let your characters talk about What happened, you actually show people What happened And coding is the same way If you can show what it should do Then it's way more convincing So I think If that is the way you can Kickstart that part of development That you wanted to go into That's great, yeah Anything you're excited for in 2021 Blender development Being together again That's the number one But apart from Blender development Right now I will just be very Eccentrically and talk about the animation module We are very much in sort Of maintenance mode We're taking all the features That Blender already has And lifting them to a new level We're polishing them, we're looking at What was intended by the developer But maybe not implemented the right way Yeah, patch reviews Patch reviews, that kind of things And basically Making sure that everything That is in Blender now That works really nicely I think by 2021 We can Leap forward from that And really start adding new features Which will also be very exciting Exciting, well Serian also was involved You made all the new USB pipeline In Blender in the Latest releases Well, the Alembic pipeline was already there But I polished it and added some more features I didn't know, you made the USB one And then you implemented that into Alembic So How complete do you think is that For us to use I think currently If you're using Blender as The start of your pipeline So you're using Blender for modeling USB and then Import it into something else for Other stuff Then you can already use it If you want to use Blender somewhere in the middle Or the end of the pipeline, that is more tricky Currently There is somebody working on an importer So there is a separate branch That you can now already check out And see for yourself To have a USB importer We're still talking about Design stuff So it's very rough of course But he is doing great work There's a branch already Well Exciting times ahead I saw an Italian Dropping by here, so I think we might have some news Yes, we do have news Good news Good news Go to the page And I will start the live from here Oh wow Okay So everyone clap for me please Alright Ladies and gentlemen We are We are Close to Wrapping up this live stream Because you're going to have to jump into the other live stream Okay Alright, so I'm going to Give you the link Here Yeah, I have to give them the link Alright, so I'm going to give you the link Or just go to the Blender Foundation Well, you are in the Blender Foundation YouTube channel So just come here And I'm going to give you the link In the chat for everybody And we're going to see you over there Here, here's the link Yes, yes, I got the link Alright Go there, it's going to be live in two minutes Is everybody there? Please click the link Thanks everybody for Tuning in It's been a pleasure Let's go watch the film Bye bye