Q&A: Vaughan Ling (HEAVYPOLY) | Blender Everyday

Hey guys amazing, work i'm baffled!

• Was it all full 100% cg?,
• Was all the animation 100% keyframe animation, or was there some mocap involved?
• how did you mix up all the softwares in the pipeline?,
• what was the studio you guys worked for or was it directly at ubisoft madrid?.

Thanks again, truly inspiring stuff!

What does a render look like pre- and post-processing? I would love a full breakdown if you have time! Thanks!!

Such a marvelous work! What was Blender role in all this?

Leave your questions to Vaughan!

With the recent release of Ubisot's Watch Dogs Legion cinematic, HEAVYPOLY (also known as Vaughan Ling) and I can finally share what we worked on last year! He also worked with Alberto Mielgo on The Witness (Love, Death, & Robots) and Spiderman: Into the Spider-verse so there's quite some to talk about.

• it's everythings scripted and storyboarded before or there is a bit of stylistic ongoing decisions? ... some action and camera solution are so good and natural !

• why the taxi driver doesn't deserve nostrils?

I'd just like to ask vaughan which parts of the workflow he uses blender for and which he doesn't? why? Is there anything that he thinks that should be improved in blender ?

Hi Vaughan your works are truly amazing!

What are the two or three main features that you wolud like to be implemented first, and a couple of criticism to improve Blender?

Do you think that allow vertex group for subdivion modifier would improve your workflow?

The theme you use in Blender is very nice.

Hellooooooo Pabloooooo (hope you read it the was meant) we all know

Ctrl+Alt+0 creates a camera from view

can we have

Ctrl+Alt+Shift+0 which creates a "NEW" camera from the view which will help us in setting up multi-cam shots quickly... and in the world there are some people and in those some people you guys are awesome people...

hello pablo! i love your live streams... watch dog legion trailer is amazing....love the animations, lighting, camera work ,style ,environment......except the driver face especially nose.

1. hello, Vaughan your renders were awesome . especially the style.
2. pablo ,my question (rigging) i have currently finished my character facial rig . Action based workflow same as set keyframe from maya. Action constraint is awesome and powerful. but when stacked around 30 to 40 constraints i couldn't use more than one rotation in one axis without getting unexpected results . i think this patch solves that problem developer.blender.org/D7547 . but there are no reviewers specified. is it planned for master?. thank you..... any plans to improve action constraint? like adding Extrapolate option...

Hey Vaughan,

I'm a fan of the visual style of The Witness and this Watch Dogs cinematic.

What do you think, could be this pandemic situation a shake up for the motion picture - esp. animation / VFX - industries to rethink and produce less Yet Another Superhero Franchise Piece kind of content, and more non-mainstream stuff? I think there are too many animation/VFX people around in dark caves, who are slaves with a lot of unpaid overtime, and the only motivation for them is the worn Happy Meal superhero figure on top of their desks. I think they desire more intellectual driving forces... and the audience as well.

Another example is the Chernobyl miniseries (HBO), it's 9.4 (!) on IMDb. Real story with invisible VFX (mostly/mostly). Superhero franchise stuff barely can achieve 8.5 on IMDb...

a little breakdown of the models and lightning would be great!and are some of the models made in blender?? thank you. by the way i also make tutorials for blender at youtube.com/watch

Hey Pablo, Blender 2.90 brings a huge change with amazing features! Specially the viewport denoise for CPU users and Eevee object motion blur! Just wanted to ask that in which version of blender will the particle nodes is planned to be added? Regards to Blender Community!

Hi, will there, at some point, be touch gestures (like pinch to Zoom/Two finger Pan) in Blender? I do Sculpting and sometimes Greasepencil animations on Surface and Wacom devices and I really miss those control options, especialy in Greasepencil. It would be so lovely if I just could take two fingers whilst drawing/Sculpting and rotate the canvise.

Hello, Pablo and HeavyPoly.... Hope You are doing well. That Trailer was amazing. Like really amazing..

I have just one Question, What was the resistance fighting against?

Not a question really but I really liked the cloth sims. Can't wait for the Blender simulations to become that good.

Any chance we will see voice activated short cuts?

What are the features that you would like to have in HEAVYPAINT going forward? I really liked the concept of "no bs just draw" simplicity of it. Maybe make a devfund for it in the future?

Can u answer my question?

How to make cool background on blender 2.8.3

This is also a question for each of you (pablo and heavypoly). What was the most challenging part of working on this wonderful film project technically speaking?

Hey Pablo and HeavyPoly! Sending love to both of you guys.
When rendering the blender-based scenes with cycles, what kind of hardware/farm did your team use? Any ballpark estimates of how long say the convenience store scene took to render?

Can we focused on multisimulation at once like branches of simulation ? and particles effect can we manual control the flows ?

I feel limitations of blender is particles system can we add like xparticles and multi simulation Branch at once?

Can we get mechanical rigs ddons ?

Is Ubisoft adapting Blender pipline ?

hola, Vaughan Ling your work is amazing, what difficulties if any, you find in mixing software in production? Pablo, I have a question, have you consider making a lighting tutorial series or a walkthru a scene you have a light ? (Saludos de Costa Rica)

a little break down of the shaders and lighting would be coool!