Morning. Good morning everybody. Welcome to day two. I hope you're feeling okay. Since it's Vegas, I'm going to take a little bit of a gamble. It's also your chance to mess with me if you want to. So, what I want you to do is I want you to clap when I hit your range. So, I'm going to do a range from 1 to 10. I want to hear how your day one was. So, I'm going to give some categories and clap when I hit your range. So, think of a number. Rate your day one. All right. So, how many of you are in one to five? Okay. Let's talk later. We'll find you and talk and find out what's going on there. All right. 5 to 7. Okay. Okay, that's good. 7 to 10.
The front row is making it hard for me to tell what's going on in the back. All right, I'm going to take that as a win. Gamble paid off. I'm not too embarrassed. I want to talk to the one to five people because that means there's something we got to do better. We always like that. So yesterday we talked about what's possible when you unlock capacity. I hope you saw how AI is eliminating grunt work, helping you become more productive, more creative, and more innovative. And you saw how unlocking capacity doesn't have to stop with organizations. It can extend to entire project ecosystems because when data flows seamlessly across and between companies, everyone can commit fewer resources per project, bid on more projects, and win with greater confidence.
Before we dive into today's keynote, I really think it's important to celebrate the real heroes of this story. You're all here today and actually many of you are part of Time's latest editorial list, Time Trailblazers and the Autodesk Design and Make awards. These were two recognition programs that celebrate people and ideas shaping the future of design and make. I want to highlight three companies I'm particularly impressed with. The first one is the Foothill Catalog Foundation. They're accelerating rebuilding in wildfire affected areas like Los Angeles. Backed by Autodesk, they're creating a first-of-its-kind catalog of pre-approved home designs. It's co-developed with communities. These designs are cutting permitting timelines from over a year to weeks and they reduce pre-construction costs for the survivors by up to 95%.
So, I had a chance to meet with the two founders. They're amazing young people and they are young. They're also married. Pay attention to that marriage while you work the company problem, too. You know, stay strong together. Stellar Creative Lab created connected animation pipelines to bring Marvel zombies to life. I love that line, bringing zombies to life. They're using Autodesk tools to connect artists, assets, and production across the studio. It's a great example of the future of animation where scalable collaborative workflows support the pace and creative demands of episodic TV. So, let's give them a hand, too.
And KT, a startup from India, helps farmers adapt to climate change. Its greenhouse in a box is an affordable farming solution that combines technology with training and support. KT is partnering with Autodesk to strengthen its physical product and digital systems, hoping to reach 1 million farmers by 2030. Let's give them a hand, too. For companies like KT, the Foothill Catalog Foundation, and Stellar Creative Lab, more capacity isn't an abstract idea. It has made a real impact. But capacity isn't unlocked all at once. It's built step by step, workflow by workflow. So today, our leaders will show you how each and every one of you can unlock capacity within your industry, starting with media and entertainment. Please welcome Diana Kella.
For a long time, making a movie or game took either a very large budget or years of your life, sometimes both. That's changing. A new generation of creators are doing big things. You've got YouTube shorts reaching millions of people, indie games with massive player bases, and a low-budget movie breaking box office records. They don't need a green light from a studio. YouTube and Steam give them access to audiences, and Autodesk gives them access to the tools they need to make it happen. New tools like Autodesk Flow and AI that turn months of production into weeks, even days. They unlock capacity to put more of your imagination into your first scene, your first level, or the world of your story faster. All you need is talent and a story to tell. Today, more people can make the movie or game that they dream about, even me. So, today I have actually been working on a short movie. It's called Robots of the Wild West. It's about two robots, Rusty and Lasso Liz, fighting to save their town from a ruthless gold miner. Of course, they beat him against all odds. And, you know, they fall in love while doing so. All right. I know. I know, I know, I know, I know. All right, so first challenge. Robots are expensive to make. I don't have a massive visual effects budget. But I have a story and I want to tell it with Flow. Now I can. I'm going to ask Nicola, VP of emerging technology and the creator of Flow Studio to help me.
Hi, Dana. Happy to help. All right, we started on the characters and we already locked in Lasso Liz as you can see here and Rusty, our hero characters.
Let's create a villain now.
All right, so before we do that, Nicola, how hard is it to create these characters?
Traditionally, it's quite hard. Can take sometimes days and weeks to iterate on 3D designs, but with Flow Studio's 3D tools, we can generate images and designs and concepts really quick and then turn it into a 3D model. So, we can move much, much quicker. So, let's do that. I'm going to open our text-to-image and here I'm going to use Nano Banana to get some prompts in and generate a couple images so we can agree on the design.
And because Flow Studio is a web-based solution, I can do multiple of them at once. So, let me show you some examples here that I have and you can tell me what you think.
Okay. Let's start with this one here. What do you think?
Nope. Not mean enough. Okay, I got better. What about this guy?
Okay. Seriously, you don't like the mustache?
Okay, look. And he says tough. I'm the director. Let's go.
All right. Okay. All right. We'll do that one.
This guy is actually awesome. He looks mean, which is exactly what we want the villain to look like.
Okay, perfect. So, it's quite easy. Once we get an image, I can just select 'Use as 3D input' and then I can give it a name and just press 'Generate a mesh'. And then we're going to start generating a 3D version of that image.
All right. So, Nicola, all these characters that you've created, can I actually use them for a game, too?
Okay, good. Because today we have, you know, to recreate them to go from a movie to a game, which obviously is pretty inefficient. So,
Yeah, no need to recreate. Our AI doesn't just generate a model, it also rigs it. So, you can export it and use it in your game. You can even export in Unreal Engine.
Okay, great. Great. Okay. So, now that we have the characters done, we need to capture the actor's performance. So, we're going to need Hugh to do that. He's with the production crew in San Francisco shooting the mocap data. So, he wants my direction on the actor's performance.
Okay, sounds good. Let me just open Flow Capture rooms. And we got Hugh.
All right. Hi, Hugh. How's the shoot going?
It's going great. We have two live camera feeds set up in Flow Capture. So you can see what the cameras see. And now that you're here, let's shoot the scene where Rusty enters the saloon played by VJ.
Okay, let's do it. Roll cameras.
And action.
All right. Okay. Okay. Let's do it again, VJ. All right. So, pause when you enter. Look around. You know, a little bit more energy.
You heard her. Going again. Roll cameras.
Camera speeds and action.
Okay. Love it. All right, let's lock it in.
Perfect. It's in Nicola's inbox already along with some other takes.
All right. Thank you, Hugh. All right. So, thanks Hugh. That was cool. Like I get to tell people what to do like from a stage in AU. So, that was great with Flow Capture. That's awesome. All right. Nicola, what's next?
Okay. Now that we have performance and we have the character design. Let's open our 3D editor. It's the newest Flow Studio tool. And I can combine now multiple sources in here including animation, character, etc. So, I'm going to start with adding our Wonder Human. This is our template character. I'm going to use it and I'm going to replace it later with our robot character. But first, let me apply animation to it. So, I have the shots that Hugh sent me earlier. And we have something called AI motion capture which takes a video, it analyzes the performance and then turns it into a 3D animation. So, all I have to do is just click 'Add to stage', apply, and then just like that, I have the animation from that performance we just saw.
But he's missing something. He's missing a world. So let's give it a world. Marble World Labs and Marble is a model that creates worlds from images or prompts. And this, as we know, we have a saloon. So I would give it a saloon image and then press generate. And something like this takes about 3 to 5 minutes but just like with characters, you know, it saves me a lot of time to iterate. I could go quickly because traditionally creating a world is even more complicated sometimes than the characters. So I have that pre-loaded earlier so I'm going to show you what that looks like. So we have him now in the world here and we have the animation and what I really need your help with is the camera. So let's give it a camera here. I'm going to create a camera and you tell me where we were thinking. Start wide maybe.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So start wide and then when he stops like push in close and so we can make his entrance like more dramatic.
Got it. So we're going to give it one key frame here. Add another one and then push a bit. Something maybe something like this.
Yeah. Let me just play it.
Slow. Nice little push in.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay, that's good.
Okay, that works. That works. This is what I like about 3D editor. In a couple of minutes, I can precisely lock in the shot, the camera move, the animation, and world combined. And once I'm done with it, what I would do is I would send that to Canvas. Okay. And what Canvas is, Canvas is our node-based solution where essentially I can give it multiple sources. So I can give it an image source. I can give it a video source and reference. So in this case we have that video that we loaded. And then I'm going to give it an image reference of a saloon and I'm going to give it an image reference of our character. And essentially once I combine that I basically tell a video model, hey use these references, use this image and replace our Wonder Human with it. And you get something like this.
He's looking around and then he spots the love of his life, right? Yeah. And the beauty of the Canvas is this is just one workflow. I don't have to go 3D to 2D. I can iterate all in Canvas. So, what I can do, I'll show you a couple examples here. What I can do is I can actually start with a lot of images and it's an infinite canvas. So, I can really iterate a lot of design, mood board, etc. And I can also start with an image. I don't have to start with 3D. I can just start with an image. If I feed it this image, I can start with an image and give it a little bit more even more dramatic Rusty moment. I think he's depressed here.
Oh, he left. She left him. She left him. No, she didn't leave him.
Hey, don't tell them the story.
Okay. And so the way I like to think about it, I use 3D editor when I want precision and control, and I use Canvas when I want speed.
All right. Okay. So, talking about speed, we now need a horse, which by the way is very difficult to shoot them.
No, no, no horse. No, no, no. So I've asked Lance to animate it in Maya using the new Motion Maker tool. So, let's take a look.
Hey, Diana, we've been working on your runaway horse scene. Maya's honestly perfect for something like this. You get complete control and Motion Maker makes the setup fast. No need to sit there manually keyframing just to get it moving. Just give it a path so it knows where to go. Then you can change the timing, speed it up or slow it down, walk to a gallop. And with Motion Maker, you can even make it jump or change direction. It handles the tedious work and still gives you animation curves that you can refine and add personality to. Motion Maker gets you moving faster. Maya keeps the artist in control.
Okay. The horse looks good. We're good. We're good. Okay. All right, Nicola. So, now let's show everyone. Let's put it all together. Awesome. Let's take a look.
Wow, that's amazing. Thanks. I love it. I love it. So, anyway, I can't wait to see it with the villain. So, thank you, Nicola. Great team. That's a wrap for today. Thank you.
