- [Announcer] We stand on the threshold of a great new age of exploration.

Its ultimate destination?

The furthest reaches of the universe.

- [Announcer] Three, two, one.

[futuristic music] ♪ - Good evening, folks, and welcome to the Frontier on the campus of Research Triangle Park for RTP180.

[audience cheering] [audience clapping] - I appreciate that smattering of applause, thank you.

My name is Wade Minter.

I am your MC for tonight's show.

Our topic is 3D designs and simulation.

Now you may notice that I'm a little furrier than the last time you saw me.

I'm growing up my playoff beard.

Carolina Hurricanes with a big overtime win last night over the New York Rangers.

[audience members cheering] Finally look like a good hockey team in the last 20 minutes, but that's beside the point.

We're having fun here.

Now I'd like to give a shout out to our presenting sponsor, RTI International.

They've been making this thing happen for quite a while.

We love us some RTI International.

You should give them some love too.

[audience applauding] [audience cheering] A larger smattering of applause.

I appreciate that as well.

Now, much like Humpty Hump, I've told you a little bit about myself.

Now I'm gonna tell you a little bit about this dance.

We have four speakers this evening, not our normal five, but they will be speaking for five minutes, at the end of which we'll have about a five-minute Q&A session, where you, the audience, have an opportunity to learn a little something more from our panel of experts in the field of 3D designs and simulations.

If you'd like to connect with us on social media, you can tweet at us.

You can hashtag at us.

You can find me on TikTok doing interesting dances.

Now just use the hashtag #RTP180, and we may use your question or comment during the show.

Now for those of you who have not been in this facility before, you are sitting right now in the region's only free coworking space.

That's right.

It's a beautiful facility located if not in the heart of the Triangle, at least in the duodenum, and it normally looks like this.

[chuckling] I'm glad someone finally appreciated that joke.

And outside we have all sorts of cool activities now that the weather's getting nicer.

We also have the Boxyard right across the street there, a beautiful facility there as well, so check that out.

Now we have other programs besides RTP180 here.

In fact, we've got on the menu coming up, sponsored by Barnes and Thornburg LLP, on June 6th from 12 to 1:00 p.m., another little lunchtime treat, Linda Nguyen will be talking to you about content creation and photography.

So if you're in the area on June 6th, wanna have a nice lunch here, come by.

Learn a little bit about photography.

Now you didn't come here to hear me talk, you came here to hear our experts, so it's time to introduce our first speaker of the evening.

He's got 10 years of experience in product design, prototyping, electromechanical engineering, design for manufacturing.

Coming to us from Touchstone 3D, please welcome to the stage Sam Felts.

[audience applauding] [audience cheering] - Hey, everybody, you hear me okay?

Thank you, sir.

All right, so I am here to talk to you guys today about the role of 3D modeling in product development.

Again, my name is Sam.

I'm the head of product development at Touchstone 3D.

I've got 9, 10-ish, years of experience designing products.

My background is in industrial design, or you might hear that called product design.

And when I'm not working, I'm usually working on something at the house, traveling with my wife, or watching some Marvel movies.

[audience members chuckling] So at Touchstone, we help entrepreneurs, small businesses, medium-size businesses take their ideas, might be a napkin sketch, maybe they've got an early prototype, all the way through the development process, from concept to commercialization.

It's almost always physical product.

So that's kind of in a gist what we do.

But today we're gonna talk about 3D modeling, and for the purposes of this conversation, I'm gonna call it CAD modeling 'cause that's what we call it at our office.

I don't wanna trip over my words too much.

CAD modeling is a tool that we use to visualize all of our ideas, kind of like sketching, but it allows us to do it as data.

And because we can do that, it allows us to design more complex, more precisely, and it allows us to design faster than we used to be able to.

One of the great things about CAD and CAD programs today is that most of them are pretty readily available and affordable, so anybody who's trying to get in product development and has the willingness to learn how to use it is able to do so.

For today, we could dive really deeply into it, but I wanna talk about what you can get out of using CAD.

So when you're looking for different programs, there's a lot of them out there.

They all have different strengths and weaknesses, so it's important to find one that is appropriate for both your project type and also your budget.

Some of them are free.

Some of them cost $10,000 a year.

Just depends on what you need.

There's kinda two main categories of modeling that we use.

The first one I'll talk about is called SubD modeling.

It's kind of similar.

You might also hear a term called nerves modeling, But this is really great for modeling organic and complex surfaces.

These usually have a push/pull interface, which is really fun to use.

It's fairly low precision, but it's really fast for making complex objects.

The next type is called parametric modeling, and when we do this, we're using features and sketches and constrained geometry to create very specific and precise features.

All of this gets rolled up in what's called a feature tree, and you can see that down at the bottom there.

So let's say I need to adjust a dimension on a cut that I made.

I can roll back in my tree, make that change, and roll it all forward.

I don't have to start over.

Everything should rebuild very nicely.

So usually we end up having to combine both of these methods to end up with something that's both aesthetically appealing and also going to be manufacturable and have the precision for manufacturing.

So how do we get started?

Like I said earlier, usually our customers come to us and they're bringing us kind of a napkin sketch idea.

I had this inspiration, maybe a technology, but I need to turn this into a product.

So we help them through some market research and then help them visualize different implementations.

Here's how your product could exist maybe to meet different business objectives.

From there, we choose one, and we start refining it in CAD.

We take that sketch, get it into 3D, and this allows us to iterate.

We can focus on things like different user touchpoints.

If there's electronics involved, we can make sure all of our components fit or we can tell the engineers like, "Oh, you need to make your PCB path this size," and then also we can start working through the manufacturing strategy for all the different components.

And I want everybody to think of CAD as a virtual blueprint.

We're gonna push data into the system, and it's gonna let us get out a lot of cool things.

It's gonna get us our production data.

We'll be able to do renderings and prototyping.

So when you do start prototyping, you're gonna start exporting your models to different techniques like 3D printing, CNC machining, maybe urethane casting, and at Touchstone, we are actually able to fabricate these and iterate almost overnight.

So these technologies lets you move really, really quickly and make changes on the fly.

There are a lot of different fabrication methods.

I mentioned three of them.

There's probably 20, 30 different methods.

All of them have different levels of quality, all of them have different cost requirement, and all of them are gonna require small modifications to your CAD data in order to produce whatever that part is.

When you are interested in finding the right look for your product, we like to combine the CAD modeling software with photo rendering software.

It's a really quick way of trying out different shapes, different colors, different materials, different textures without having to invest time and money into building physical prototypes.

And then from there, once you've got the design you'd like, you can start creating higher quality renderings and animations.

It's really great for advertising, marketing pitches, websites, all of the above.

I really prefer to combine renderings with photographs.

I think it's a really quick way of bringing a level of kinda realism and context to the design that you're working on for your audience.

As you are refining for manufacturing and trying to get your engineering work done, you can run your parts through different simulations.

So that might be things like molding parameters.

Is the liquid resin gonna fill the mold all the way or you gonna end up with giant sink marks?

Which you can talk to me later if you wanna know what that is.

Doing thermal analysis and applying different mechanical stresses.

And we do all of this so that we feel better when we go to manufacturing that the design is gonna work as we intended.

When you're getting ready to release, you're gonna need a way to tell your manufacturer how to make your parts.

So you can work from your CAD data.

You can pull dimension drawings, so you can call out critical features, critical dimensions, what materials, what colors.

Basically all of the instructions, you can convey your design intent to the manufacturer so they make the parts the way you want.

In the past, somebody would have to sit there almost by hand and draw each of those views, which would take a long time.

It would probably take me 10 minutes to make one of those drawings versus days, so it's a huge, huge increase in speed.

And then last, we always make sure to give our manufacturers assembly instructions.

We can export those same views of our product from the CAD model directly and explain to them, "Here's how we want the product assembled.

This is gonna help improve yield, and it's gonna help improve quality control, which in the end is gonna save you money."

So this is not industry specific.

If you have the right design process and the right CAD tools and knowledge of how to use them, you can do product development and really accelerate your product developments pretty much any industry, from medical devices to sporting goods, pretty much all of the above.

Thank you.

[audience applauding] - All right.

We're learning how to take ideas from digital to physical with Sam Felts.

If you have a question about CAD, how you can take something from an idea to manufacturing, please raise your hand.

Note, we do have swag bags tonight.

They are delightful fanny packs, for those of us who remember the '80s, filled with all the summer essentials you'll need to get your time started.

So first question of the evening.

- [Audience Member] Hi, I was wondering if you could speak to how you work with clients and their ideas.

So, for instance, if someone brings an idea to you, what kind of controls do you have in place around patents, or if it's a new idea, what controls do you have so that they can ensure that it moves from production from them?

- Yeah, so we've built a kind of three-phase, design-develop-deploy process, but as far as intellectual property is concerned, we always work with customers.

Kind of in that first slide we were talking about, they brought in a napkin sketch.

We're gonna show them three different designs.

All of those are gonna have kind of different pros and cons.

Some might have more intellectual properties, some might have less, but be more affordable, so we try to work through the design before we get too far into the CAD model.

It's a very iterative process, but we try to tackle that early on so that we've got kind of a mutual vision of what we're trying to make.

- [Wade] All right, next questions coming to you, Sam, from your right, over here on the couch.

- [Audience Member] Wonderful talk.

What software would you recommend for a beginner trying to get a minimum viable product to 3D printing?

- That's a good question.

We're a big fan of Fusion 360.

It's an Autodesk product.

It has probably 80 to 90% of the features is something more sophisticated like SolidWorks, but SolidWorks is gonna cost you $5,000, and you can get Fusion 360 for like 60 bucks a month.

So it's a good starting point.

If you're doing more sophisticated, like automotive engineering, it's probably not right for you.

But if you're trying to make more simple products, we can do everything we need to do with it, so I'd say that's probably good starting point.

- All right, next question's coming to you from center back of the room here.

- So I was one of the tech shop guys that I was sad to see that go, but if there's not a makerspace available, are there ways to export CAD content that's created so that you can be a DIY person and have a physical thing even if you don't invest in the equipment?

That's getting cheaper, but still costs a lot to have available.

- Yeah, good question.

So there are outfits like ours that do design and have 3D printers, urethane casting, laser cutting, all of that.

You can also find online resources, like a Proto Labs or an Xometry, where basically you upload your data, your file, and they're gonna produce it exactly as you made it.

So if you're feeling really confident in what you're ordering, then I would say go for it.

If you feel like you need some guidance from somebody who does this regularly, I would say you would wanna reach out to a local design firm that can provide that feedback back, like, "What do you wanna do with this?

Oh, well you should really make it this way."

- And then our next question is coming from the center aisle here.

- Do you end up designing differently when you're working on something that needs to be reworked or repaired?

And are you able to export repair instructions as well as the initial manufacturing instructions?

- Yeah, so I'm actually going through this right now.

I had a discussion with the designer today on why we're not going to use glue.

We try really hard not to use glue, OSHA doesn't like glue, but, yes, we do often, especially if we're doing things that are more like instrumentation or like surgical simulators.

We'll include extra parts, and then in kind of the same way we made those assembly instructions for the manufacturer, we'll make similar kind of Ikea-like guides for technicians or for the customer to swap out those specific parts, 'cause sometimes you know where your failure points are gonna be, and it's anticipated, the customer knows it, here's how you swap those.

- Got time for one more question, coming to you from your right here.

- So on the multiple outputs from a single input, do you get product metrics like weight or bill of materials?

- Yeah, so when we build our CAD models, usually the CAD software has kind of like a materials library, so I can tell it that this solid body is steel.

Okay, what's its weight?

I can change that to make it nylon or polycarbonate or fabric.

And if they don't have the material I need, I can usually make my own material if I know the properties.

- Perfect.

- Yeah.

- All right, give it up for Sam Felts.

[audience applauding] Lot of great questions, everybody.

I'm proud of you.

I'm a dad.

I can say that.

All right, moving on to our second speaker of the evening, she's one part executive, one part science and tech nerd, and one part starry-eyed dreamer.

Coming to us from Pro-ficiency, please welcome Catherine de Castro.

[audience applauding] - All right, thanks, Wade.

I'm super excited to be here.

Super excited to not be wearing sweatpants and sitting in front of Zoom all day.

So I know we're supposed to be talking about 3D designs and simulations, and I'm gonna get to that and the why I believe in simulations from an immersive learning VR/AR perspective, but first, because I'm so excited to see people, I wanna learn about the audience a little bit more.

So people talk all the time about understanding your why.

What's your purpose?

Why are you here?

So, wait, why are you here today?

[chuckles] - [Wade] I'm here today because they pay me to be here.

[everyone laughing] I wish I had a better answer.

No, I'm here today because 3D printing and other forms of kind of 3D modeling are becoming more common, more accessible to people, and I'm interested to see the applications of having this technology out to the mass market.

- That's great.

Anybody else?

Volunteer?

Why are you here today?

- Gentleman in the back.

- We got somebody back here who wants to tell us why he's here.

- Hello, I'm here because I started doing a little bit of deep learning training and simulation, so I wanted to learn more about what's available in just the simulation area and 3D modeling and all that.

- That's amazing.

So today I'm here, yeah, somebody volunteered me, but when I thought about, "Why am I here today?"

a couple of reasons.

One, I was told there was beer before and after the event.

[laughing] Two, when Amanda Ronan was organizing the event, and I saw the agenda, I mean, I'm gonna be honest, I am as far in the introvert scale as you can be, and most of the time I try to avoid speaking engagements.

I still remember the last one I did.

It was an investigator meeting.

So investigators are the people that do clinical trials on new drugs.

There were 500-plus people in the room.

I was pregnant.

I was hot.

I almost fainted.

I thought, "Never again," but I saw when Amanda organized the event and she listed the agenda very specifically who speaking, but then she ended it at 7:15, errbody goes home.

And I thought, "You know what?

These must be pretty cool people organizing this event.

I at least gotta meet them, show my face."

But the last reason is that many years ago I was at a speaking engagement similar to this, and somebody stood up and said something that changed my life, my career, and the way I looked at clinical trials in pharma in general and helped shape my future.

I come from the pharma industry.

And what he said that really resonated with me is that every minute, one patient dies of malaria, and it just made it that much more critical, what we did for development, and why I'm in the company that I am at today.

So the company we're in, we do simulated learning.

We focus on the investigators.

We're not doing these 300-page PowerPoint slides like I had to stand up and give.

But the benefit of that is humans can't learn and pick up 300 pages worth of information, and in the company that I'm at today, Pro-ficiency, we focus on the biggest risk areas.

We focus on the mistakes that are likely to make.

And these are patients, right?

These are people that we're dealing with today, so if we could just minimize the risk to the patients, we can get the drugs out there faster.

It means that we're saving lives faster.

I'm particularly interested in the simulations, virtual reality space, couple of case studies that I've either worked on myself and seen the benefits of, or it's something that we're working towards, I've read some studies, done some stats of, and in my hope for today, my third goal for being here, is as I was inspired by that speaker, hopefully at least one of you, we can change the world one at a time, will start thinking of things differently, start thinking of how you do things differently, and the impact that you can make.

So the thing that really got me very interested in simulations, virtual reality, AR, besides "Star Trek" and the Holodeck, was I once read an article, and I think everyone here is familiar with paraplegia?

It's a terrible, terrible thing, especially for people who are not born like that.

But there's this one case study that I saw.

It's a study that Duke's actually doing.

And for years, many people have tried to do many studies, tried to stimulate nerve growth, different medications, and they weren't able to solve that problem.

But through virtual reality and simulation training, Duke has been able to have paraplegics, so they put on these VR goggles, they have like robotic appendages, and through that, some people have actually been able to regain control of those nerves and can stand up and walk again.

There was even something in the news a couple of years ago where one of the people that was part of the study stood up and did a kickoff for World Cup soccer.

So, I mean, pretty cool application, right?

It's used a lot in the medical field as well.

I think it should be more broadly used.

I mean, simulations learning is not new to the world, but it's a little bit newer to clinical trials in my industry.

There's stats there that say doctors who are trained on VR in lieu of a regular cadaver are five times less likely to make a mistake when they perform their first surgery.

And I've seen this quite a bit myself when I used to work in the CRO industry.

So we were specifically training operational teams to make decisions about studies, and we did a pretty thorough measurement of everything they did, all the processes.

We had 30 different eLearnings that were focused on the simulations, how proficient they could get.

And when you measured the statistics of their performance as well as their engagement, the amount of time they saved, not only was it more engaging, they retained the information.

Something about the simulations, particularly when you add the virtual reality on augmented reality piece, I think with those mental repeats, for some reason, your body knows it's, your conscious knows that it's not real, but your subconscious treats those mental repeats, and you actually gain that learning from behavior.

So a lot of what we do today in our company is it allows the investigators running the clinical trials to make those mistakes in a safe space so when they go to the patients and are trying to get them through, they basically focus on treating them.

They already know what to do if they're not reacting well to the dosing.

They know how to adapt and all that good stuff.

So there's a couple examples I have that really makes me keen, and we're just doing what we can to continue to get pharma to buy in, and other industries as well, to really embrace this.

Pharma is, for those of you...

Anyone here in the pharmaceutical industry?

Yeah, so I think pharma is great, but it's very slow to embrace change.

So we we're doing our best just trying to get the word out there, and one process at a time we can bring those drugs to market faster and help save a patient.

I think we have five minutes here?

Five minutes, that's five people.

So just makes it more critical to do what we do and keep focused on that.

And I think that's it for me.

[audience applauding] I guess I accomplished my one goal too.

They told me this was a runway, don't fall left or right, and so I'm gonna get off, and hopefully I don't trip on the way out.

- Oh, no.

Oh, no.

Not time.

Not time.

Yeah, it's time for Q&A.

- Oh, yeah, Q&A.

All right.

- You gotta stand up.

[Catherine laughs] [audience chuckling] Not letting you out that easy.

Now if you've got questions on 3D modeling and simulation in the clinical trial space, please raise your hand.

We'll come with the microphone.

You can ask your question and get a nice little swag bag fanny pack.

So we've got a question over here to your right.

Here you go.

- [Audience Member] Hi, so I think it's fascinating to hear that if you are practicing in VR first that you can minimize the number of patients that you're impacting.

Thinking about something like laparoscopic surgery, I wonder, from your opinion, as you get slightly more removed from patients in these ways, what do you think it does to the quality of care that people are getting?

So it sounds like they're getting better care from the sense of less mistakes are being made but also being a little more removed from that personal aspect.

- I think even if you're... Do you have a specific role that you have in mind?

Okay, I mean, if you think about the theory behind simulations learning, really, it's a chance to make mistakes, to practice the decisions, and practice making the right decisions in a safe environment.

So that type of behavioral training, behavioral change, that's applicable to anything you do.

It's applicable to surgery.

It's applicable to soft skills in dealing with people.

I know that a lot of the, actually, I saw this in a museum once.

So a lot of the anti anti-terrorist training, so when they train negotiators, they have a simulated scenario, so they're trained to negotiate with the terrorist.

But there's this facial interface that actually measures the movements of your face and can detect your emotions.

As a negotiator, you're supposed to stay calm, supposed to not get angry, mad, emotional because it helps you focus, be more logical.

So, yeah, so it's applicable across the board.

Thank you.

- All right, next question's coming to you from your left.

- Yeah.

I'm wondering about the difference, I understand the difference between augmented reality and virtual reality.

I'm wondering if augmented reality is also showing up in how to train physicians or how you see that technology used in the actual operating room in the future.

- So the augmented reality, I have not done direct research for the past year, so my knowledge may be outdated.

I have this personal hope that AR becomes more mainstream.

I have actually been waiting since 2016 for the HoloLens to be used by everybody.

I don't know who's familiar with it, but the first demo I saw of the HoloLens, so it's augmented reality.

It's a Microsoft product.

So if you're only using it for the computer, instead of having just a flat screen, you can move all the apps.

Anybody here like to have 20 different tabs open?

You?

Yeah.

So the awesome thing about the HoloLens is if you're using it on the Microsoft Office, you don't just have your screen.

You have all around you.

You can have Excel in the back, PowerPoint in the front, all of your emails, everything around when they have the, the screen savers are 3D.

And I think that the thing that really got me hooked was just this robot game.

I am a nerd.

I pretend not to be sometimes.

But there's this robot game where you had holographs, where you wore on your arm.

And it sensed the room around you, so it could actually make it look like there's robots tearing holes in the wall and coming at you.

The experience is completely different.

So, I mean, that's more personal, but I think with that, the primary benefit, to me, of augmented realities, we hear all the time you can only do VR but so long.

People get dizzy.

They get motion sickness.

I mean, it disorients me too, but with AR, because you can see your environment and it's more blended into your environment, you could do it for longer.

You can pause less.

I don't know, you seem to have quite a bit of knowledge in the space too.

Do you have anything to add to that answer with the AR/VR?

Yeah.

I mean, if you don't, it's fine.

I just know we were talking a bit.

[chuckling] - [Audience Member] Actually, I was gonna ask you a question, and I will answer that later.

My question was, or is, what are some of the challenges that you see in scaling up the process of developing these VR simulations and then actually getting them out?

Because the access, the deployment is fairly complicated.

Like you said, HoloLens.

It's come and gone.

It's hardly available.

So, yeah, what challenges have you faced in scaling this up?

- So one of our challenges is when you're developing simulations, our business is highly, it's a large scale, but still a custom business.

When it comes to clinical trials, it's very specific.

Now we have thought about ways in our company to try to optimize that a little bit.

We have something that we call simlets.

So essentially there's typical problems you see across clinical trials, like enrollment and getting patients in.

So we'll have kind of templated ways of developing it, but then we'll plug and play different language, different patient populations into the context.

But another one is when you wanna do VR, like we also do simulations 2D just on the computer, but they're going into that simulated learning experience.

When you're taking it to VR, there's of course the cost.

The cost of virtual reality gear, though, is going down.

I think it's 1/3 today of what it was in 2017 when I was first trying to push these ideas to a big company, unnamed, that didn't see the vision [chuckling] back then, but it is cost prohibitive.

I mean, if you buy one Oculus, and you have people co-located and they're sharing it, that's one thing, but then when you're thinking about a large 15,000 patient trial, you have, say, 2 or 3,000 investigators spread out globally, just think of the cost of buying the equipment, deploying it to that.

There are less expensive options.

You can get the little Google box and deploy these to your iPhone or Androids.

You can get those for like 10 bucks in bulk, but the quality is not the same as you would get from the high-end headset.

So I think it just depends on the purpose how much a client is willing to pay and the level of benefit you would get from 2D versus a 3D simulation.

- All right, our last question coming right here.

- [Audience Member] So you mentioned that for this simulation training that you focus on the areas with the most risk.

Does that include the screening or the treatment phase of a clinical trial, or both?

- So, I mean, the answer to that, it's really dependent on the therapeutic area.

Our processes, we have our experts who have been in the clinical trials industry for a long time to really dissect the protocol, and so we talk to the clients.

I mean, the risk area, the risk mitigation we use, is your standard project management, like, what's the likelihood that this risk is gonna occur?

What's the impact this risk is gonna occur?

Do you have any previous outcomes data that show how many times this has occurred in the past?

And then based on that, we give them a recommendation.

So there's not one standard blanket answer for all of clinical trials.

It's more it's very protocol specific.

And kind of tying back to scaling, we do a fully custom business, so there's always challenges when you can't just copy and paste to the next and the next and the next project.

- [Wade] All right, give it up for Catherine de Castro.

- Thanks, everyone.

[audience applauding] Okay, now I'm gonna try this not falling.

[chuckling] - Many, if not all, of our speakers will be sticking around for a few minutes afterwards.

If you did not get your question answered, you can come say hi to them after the event.

They may be willing to answer your question for you then.

But we're now moving into our fourth speaker of the evening.

He's the founder and director of content at dash, a high-end animation and motion design studio.

Please welcome to the stage Mack Garrison.

[audience applauding] - Excellent.

Wow.

That was a great intro.

I hope you guys are excited.

Who has a pink wristband on?

They'll be my fellow creatives.

- Woo!

- Is there a creative in here?

Hey, yes, you made it.

I'm glad you're here.

Any marketers in the building?

Any marketers?

All right, a few.

All right, how about people that just like cool stuff?

Like, anyone who's... All right, I don't know why some of you aren't raising your hands, because we're gonna get into cool stuff.

So, yeah, so as Wade mentioned earlier, we have five minutes.

This is fast, and as a creative, I wanna show you so many cool things, but we're gonna jump right in, not waste time, and I'll try to set the record for how many slides I can show in five minutes.

So we're dash.

We're a high end animation and motion design studio built around creating incredible content.

What is motion design?

This sounds fancy.

Motion design, in my opinion, is an umbrella term that describes anything that moves on a screen.

So primarily we do a lot of video content.

That can be live action.

That can be animated.

In some instances, we actually do some experimental design.

So it's a little bit all over the place.

So as director of content, my job is to really foster the types of projects we take on as a studio.

We are a boutique studio, but we do a lot of work with some pretty big clients.

So, for me, it's all about the relationships, less about what the service or product the client is offering.

We really like to collaborate, working with internal teams with the companies we work with as well as ours to make really good work.

But that's not only the main reason folks come to us.

I think this day and age, if you really wanna separate yourself as a business, it's not just what your deliverable is, but it's who you are as a person, and at dash, this is us.

We're gregarious, if you haven't been able to tell.

I would talk to an empty room, but I'm glad there are people here.

We're symbiotic.

We really enjoy collaborating, working with our teams and our clients.

Optimistic creative is paramount for us.

And then, of course, honest and efficient 'cause you need more honest and efficient businesses.

So as it really leads to is one of the reasons we really believe in community is that collaboration.

So we have 13 full-time creative staff at dash, but we also work with a network of probably like 30 to 40 freelance creatives on a regular basis, and so it allows us to have these small, intimate, single one-off videos, and then we can also handle really big campaigns, and that comes with really investing in our community.

So we do mentorships, internships.

We even threw an animation and motion design festival called the Dash Bash last year, where we really brought together a lot of top-tier creatives in the animation and video space to really help elevate and hang out.

So we're partners, illustration, 2D animation, mixed media, cel animation, character animation.

Like I said, if it moves on a screen, it's really our forte, but we'll talk a little bit today about is 3D animation.

Before I get there, I just wanted to run through a few still images from some of the various projects that we've done over this past couple years, but when I really think about dash, we are really a generalist studio.

We're not defined by one single style.

We can do things that are a bit more cartoonish to a bit more sophisticated, but our teams of creatives are really flexible.

In my industry in particular, a lot of folks get good at one thing, and they kinda repeat it.

That kind of sounds boring, so we like to say yes to really any cool project, really get to work on some variety of content stuff that's a bit more elegant, illustrative, and things there.

But today we're gonna be talking a little bit about 3D, which we'll have a couple of slides coming up to here in a second, and from our 3D capabilities, it can really be anything that's like more VFX, where we're compositing stuff into live action video.

It can be stuff that's more put together and more motion graphics and have been on the sci-fi things.

So this is a piece we did for Red Hat, [chuckles] where we were talking about one of their products and services that involved a dog feeder, in this instance, which is pretty cool.

Or Wolfspeed, if anyone's familiar with Wolfspeed, a silicon carbide manufacturer.

This was really fun, kike kind of sci-fi S-type product.

Things can look hyper real too.

I mean, so our capabilities have come a long way in the 3D space and in animation in general, where it's pretty achievable to make stuff that looks pretty realistic.

But what I figured would be really good today would be to talk about maybe one particular project in general, and like, how does an animation even come to life?

Like if you wanna make a 3D video, what does that process look like?

So this was a project we did last year for num.

It is a numbing spray that goes on the arm to help kids who are afraid of getting shots, or adults too.

I mean, no offense, we're all there.

So kids or adults who are afraid of getting shots.

It's a numbing spray to make the pain less noticeable.

So it starts off, whenever we're doing a project, it's these six key steps.

Clients like steps.

We like to break things down, make animation not look so much like magic and look a little bit easier to achieve, but like a lot of projects, initially starts with discovery.

Why are we doing this?

Who's this for?

Where are people gonna be watching this video?

What do we want them to do after watching this video?

It's this initial kind of discovery that really helps shape the creative.

If we are making content for 60-year-old brokers as opposed to your 18 year old who's scrolling on TikTok, that's a very different direction.

So understanding a little bit about the goal of the project is a big piece of it.

From there, it's ideation.

What is the solve?

We do design charrettes with our team.

We bring everyone together.

We talk about ideas that could work really well.

We look at the industry as a whole.

What's really trendy?

Where is the motion industry going?

And from there, we jump into messaging.

What do we wanna say?

What is the cadence or voice of this video?

Is it more thought leader?

Is it conversational?

All those things have dramatic impact on what this video is gonna do.

And then from there we get into pre-production.

Pre-production's all the little pieces that come together that make up that final animation so that the idea is that by the time you get to the end of the process, there's no real surprises.

So pre-production are all these little pieces that make up the video.

And the last two, production and final files.

So production, that's what my team loves.

That's where we've mapped everything out.

We're starting to bring everything into motion.

Then final files is where we deliver various compressions, whether it's gonna live at an event, online or broadcast.

So that whole process typically takes about 10 to 12 weeks on average, with reviews at every step of the way.

We've definitely had clients that have pushed us a bit to deliver things sooner, which we can, and then we've also had projects that have been a bit delayed and take a little bit longer.

So messaging, this is typically what one of our scripts look like.

So you have a voiceover on the left, visuals on the right, basically laying out in general where we think the projects is gonna go, even in descriptive terminology initially.

From there, it's on to character sheets.

How do we wanna define the characters of this piece?

It's important and we take into really big consideration on, what are the body types gonna be like?

Inclusion and diversity is incredibly important this day and age, and as designers, we are tasked with making sure that we are pushing our clients to consider that as well.

So doing things like character sheets really allow us to kind of explore what the body types and shapes are gonna look like.

From there, it's off to style frames.

Style frames are still images to convey the overall look and feel of the project, from color palette to the environment.

If there were gonna be text callouts in here, how those would be treated.

And then from there it's into storyboard, so how does that script start to unfold into the video?

So these are really simple sketches, but you can start to see how things are gonna unfold and flow, and the importance of that is animation, it's just such a time-consuming process, no one ever wants to animate more than they need to, so storyboards really help shape that.

So once we get through all the boards, then it's on to the 3D stuff and starting to model things.

So this ensures that all the assets that we're anticipating on building have been approved by the client.

So we start getting into modeling.

We start breaking out the characters and how they're gonna look like.

We start getting into rigging to make sure that they're all prepped for motion and animation that comes later on.

And then we start even looking at the product itself, the environment, and all those little pieces.

So then we get our little crew here.

So we have a doctor, the polar bear, who's representing num, and then we have the mother and her son.

So the next thing I'm gonna show you is what we call an animatic in our space.

You'll notice that it has a really great voiceover that goes along with it.

But the basic idea of an animatic is that you pair a voiceover with the storyboards we saw earlier to get an overall timing and feel of the project, so this way if it feels too long or is feeling too short, you can start to play around with the timing to get exactly what you need.

So I'll just play about 10 seconds of this one.

[animation beeps] The fear of needles is real, for kids and adults, and the solution is num.

num reduces pain by rapidly cooling the skin.

So you can see there's a great voiceover.

I don't know whose voice that is.

Was amazing.

[audience chuckling] But what an animatic does is it really starts to lay the foundation of what's to come so that way you are ensuring that you're just animating what you need to.

So all these pieces come together, and now we have laid such a great map of where we're going, and so at this point our animators can feel really confident about leaning into the motion and bringing this thing to life.

So what do you think, you guys wanna see the final piece?

[audience chattering] Yes.

Good, I don't know what we would have done if you said no, but anyway, here we go.

[gentle music] - [Announcer] The fear of needles is real, for kids and adults, and the solution is num.

[whimsical music] num reduces pain by rapidly cooling the skin's surface prior to a needle stick.

Multiple clinical studies show significant relief from needle pain with vapocoolants.

num is the only FDA-cleared sterile numbing spray, which helps eliminate the risk of cross-contamination, and it works instantly.

No need to wait like with some other numbing agents.

[bright music] num can be used prior to an injection, IV start, blood draw, or other needle-related medical procedures.

The num polar bear provides a welcome distraction, which helps reduce anxiety for your little one and maybe even the child in you.

Never worry about the pain of needles again.

Next time, num quick before the stick.

- All right.

[audience members clapping] Whew, thank you, thank you.

Yeah, so, wow.

So quick.

That was like a flash in the pan of what we can do, but, like I said, we are dash studio.

We're a high-end animation motion design studio located here in Raleigh.

You can do animation in Raleigh, crazy.

But if you're interested in more work, definitely follow us on Twitter, and our Instagram is chock full of just cool little inspirational doodads.

But, yeah, I'll turn it over you, Wade, and I can answer any questions.

- All right, time for Q&A about how a design comes from idea to 3D on the screen.

We got a couple questions back here.

We'll go to the back of the room first since that's the hand I saw first.

- Hey, when it comes to the ideation and the charrettes, how do y'all draw inspiration for the trends and the look and feel?

Where do you kind of, where do y'all start?

- Really great question.

So if anyone didn't hear it, it was, where do we find inspiration and the trends in the animation space to determine what we wanna do?

The first is that for most of the folks in this space, we're constantly following other creatives, other studios similar to dash, so we kind of have an idea just by following all these groups on social media what tends to be trendy.

The other piece of it, though, that's really important is to look in the industry of the subject matter that we're addressing, what are competitors doing, what are people doing in that space, to see if there's a way that we can kind of cut through that noise, do something a little bit different.

And then I always think just having a big group and going around and really just tossing out every bad idea you can to find that good idea is always really helpful.

So we'll do even something as simple as 30 minutes where we're just get in a room, 10 of us, and just kicking around ideas on what we could do for it.

- All right, we'll go two rows up for our next question.

- I know animation is very complicated.

What is the timeframe that, and use this as an example, from the beginning process of the animation to the delivery of the end product?

- Great question.

So the timeline for animation like this, I would love to say that we can take forever on it, but that's unrealistic, so typically we try to aim for about a 10 to 12 week turnaround.

And at each of those phases that I shared earlier, that gives the client about two days for them to collect their notes and provide feedback on that.

And one of the things we do, those incremental steps, is it just ensures that we're always adjusting along the way, so then at the very end when we have this full product that's been delivered, at that point, typically, I'll say typically, not never, but typically, there's usually no big surprises or changes.

But 10 to 12 weeks is a good time to aim if you're thinking about any animation endeavor.

- All right, next questions coming front and center.

- Hey, so animation does take a long time, and it can be quite difficult with how much movement there is and all, like a lot of different variables, but have you found any use or like, I guess, use case for using live footage to track your animation to?

Is that something that actually makes sense in animations that are this length, in these size projects, or does that only really make sense in larger movie-style projects?

- No, that's a really great question.

So you're talking about incorporating animation with live action and kinda composing it in there, more or less?

- [Audience Member] I'm talking about like if you were to have something tracking your movements and applying that to use.

- Oh, I see, a motion capture.

Yes, so we're in kinda the early stages of where that ultimately is going to be.

For the type of work that we're creating for these kinda marketing teams, it hasn't realized to a point yet that it's helpful, but I do know that there's a lot of stuff in the works and it's getting easier and easier.

One of the crazy things about animation that is just really good to know is that for a long time, it was really kind of hard to get into.

It was kinda like a secret.

You used to have all this machinery.

You have to have all these big setups.

But with Adobe and their subscription services, I mean, most of the stuff that you saw in here, we have After Effects for 2D, Cinema 4D for our 3D work, but it's become really easy and attainable, and so I forecast over the next 10 years that things like motion capture are gonna be more relative and we can all kind of get into it.

So to answer your question, not quite yet, but it's coming.

It's coming soon.

- Our last question's coming to you from your right.

- Hi, what's a common misconception that clients might come to you with when they have an animation idea or wanna work with you about your whole process?

- Oh, man, that's such a good question.

So the biggest misconception, the number one misconception, is probably the time it takes to do that.

So I think folks are used to dealing in live action when it comes to video work, even people who are experienced in video, and with relative ease, you can probably turn around a live-action video in four weeks with relative ease, five weeks.

But animation just has so many different pieces to it, and, depending on the style that we're going with, has nuance, and so if I could tell anyone anything to keep in mind as they're thinking about an animation project, it's gonna take way longer than you think it would, and particularly if you wanna get the quality that's out there.

That's it too.

You never wanna feel rushed on this stuff.

But that's a great question.

- All right, give it up for Mack Garrison!

[audience applauding] All right, Mack, you're running off with my clicker.

- [Mack] It's mine now.

- Got tracking device on that thing.

All right, folks, we moved on to our fourth and final speaker of the evening.

He's an associate professor of computer science and the director of the interdisciplinary faculty cluster in visual narrative at your North Carolina State University.

Please welcome Arnav Jhala.

[audience applauding] - Hello.

So I challenged myself when I first was asked to suggest people or to speak at this event.

So I do a little bit of work in VR and games, is AI in games is my specialty in terms of research, but I challenge myself to not do 3D and not do simulation, but still make it relevant, right?

So we'll see how that'll that'll go.

I run a research lab at NC State in computer science.

It is interdisciplinary, so I have colleagues that are in history, in psychology, in art and design, and in computer engineering, so we are very diverse across multiple colleges.

And my lab's name is called ARNAV, which this logo is off.

It's from my students.

It means Automated Reasoning for Narratives and Visuals.

What I work on as a research area, which is more commonly people would recognize AI as a research area, artificial intelligence, what I work in is what I call narrative intelligence.

The distinction is subtle, but I think a very important one.

In artificial intelligence, we are trying to get very intelligent according to human standards, agents, algorithms, right?

But our focus, a lot of our focus, I shouldn't say all of it, a lot of our focus has been on things like chess, right?

Winning games of chess as a marker of intelligence or "Jeopardy!"

and this is all individual intelligence.

It's like an individual who is the best at something.

But our collective intelligence, our wisdom, the intelligence of our species, the reason we are successful as a species, is not because of individuals.

Individuals are mere blip in the timeline of our species, so no individual can have any significant impact within their timelines.

It has to be a collective effort, and where is all that wisdom stored?

It's in narratives, right?

Our fictional narratives also have real intelligence or wisdom stored in them.

So that's sort of my philosophy in terms of how I approach research.

How does that connect to us?

Well, we use narrative intelligence, or the lens of narrative intelligence, to do sensemaking reasoning about data that we see, about observations we make in this world.

We look at input modalities, text, video, audio, or any kind of data, and then we look at how individuals operate on that, and then how they then generate complex ideas, generalizations from the low-level input that we get, and how we then communicate with each other to agree on what then gets transmitted on as sort of an efficient piece of wisdom, right?

And this research is pretty broadly applicable to many specific domains.

My interest and my students, my lab's interest, is in the core science of it, is understanding how we do it, but, of course, it is applications.

But I'm a professor, so I will take you back to 1944.

And you look at these little animation to the right, what do you think is going on?

Someone?

Yes.

- [Audience Member] Triangles trying to go into the box.

- Yes, triangles trying to get into the box, right?

So in 1944, scientists Heider and Simmel created a bunch of these animations with these triangles and circles, showed people these animations and asked them, "What is the story here?"

And there were many, many different types of stories that people came up with.

The big triangle is the little triangle's parent, and is trying to make sure that the little triangle doesn't hang out with the circle, which looks different.

[audience chuckling] They're all classmates, and the big triangle is a bully, right?

So racism, bullying.

It's just triangles and circles absolutely randomly moving around.

So we actually recreated this experiment and ran it crowdsourced on a large scale.

But I'm a computer scientist, right?

So we had to do something related to computer science.

We actually created an animation generator that generated more curated sets of higher level behaviors, right?

Chasing, cornering, things like that.

And then it sequenced behaviors to then ask the crowd what sequences of animations did people find interesting.

So I won't go too far into this, but we have lots of stories that look very similar, but some of us are better storytellers.

They tell a more compelling story, right?

Why is this relevant?

Well, now let's come back to our simulation aspect.

In the, if I can use the term, metaverse, which I don't understand, and I have a hard time using the term that I don't understand, but it's a hot thing, so let's just say it.

So when you have characters, when you are in a virtual world that we are increasingly going into where there are lots of stories, there are also virtual characters that we interact.

Unlike an animation, which is entirely hand controlled, these characters actually need to be interactive.

You go speak with them, right?

You expect a response.

You go ask them the same question again, and you expect a response, but maybe slightly more nuanced response, slightly different response.

Maybe the character is irritated because you are asking the same question multiple times.

Game characters don't do that, NPCs.

Non-player characters in games don't do that.

So how do we simulate in this 3D virtual world that looks very real but has a lot of artificial characters?

That's how I'm gonna connect 3D and simulation with work on narrative that we do.

So one thing that I want to mention here is this distinction between realism and believability.

When we say simulation, what we mean is, how real can we get the simulation to be?

That's one of the goals, right?

Like a physical simulation or chemical simulation and so on, how real can it be?

Simulating people is hard.

People are complex.

People are contextual.

We don't understand people.

So how do you simulate people?

We cannot simulate people by thinking of realism.

We simulate people by thinking of believability.

Can you create a bunch of people that have interesting stories that are in a space where you can interact with them and come up with believable interactions?

So this kind of takes us back to artificial intelligence.

In cognitive science and psychology, believability and interestingness of stories has been researched for a long time.

And so this arrow right here are theories from cognitive science and psychology over many decades, where it says, well, background knowledge makes people interesting, right?

If they have good back stories and so on.

If they can show how they form their beliefs and how they change their beliefs, then that makes it interesting and more believable.

There's some sort of incongruity that you can see.

People are not perfect, right?

And so these virtual people that we are simulating may not be perfect, and so if they show some incongruity, then that might actually be good, right?

Reconceptualization is that we are able to reconceptualize what is being talked about and so on.

And then the last one is sort of predictive inference where they can actually predict and show that they have predictive inference capabilities.

What's kind of interesting is that down here, in this sort of now the vertical part of our T, if we look at the agents that we interact with a lot, characters like Siri and Alexa and so on, a lot of the focus on language processing in terms of AI has been on trying to perfect language.

It's going back to our individual skills, right?

Which is to say there's a lot of work, just like millions of dollars of NSF funding that goes to things like correct spelling generation, all the things that you do with Grammarly now, decades of research, but really none of this is relevant in terms of believability, as research shows.

And so what I want to kind of make a point here is that to simulate people, we need to look at narrative intelligence and believability rather than artificial intelligence and skill modeling.

An amazing graduate student, Sasha Azad, and one of my collaborators, Professor Martens, have started developing what we call the Little Computer People Taxonomy, where we are systematically looking at all of the features of believability in simulating people that we might need and starting to do experiments with them.

And we have a couple of examples of these that are sort of little experiences that are out there.

One of my former students, Chris Miller, developed this algorithm called Stories of the Town, which is an algorithm that generates an entire village, an entire town full of people, thousands of people.

You can select a person and you can talk to them, and they give you a backstory of why they're at that position in town, like, "I'm in front of a doctor's office because," and there's a whole backstory.

They can keep telling you their backstory all the way back to their childhoods and so on.

And this is entirely procedurally generated, and so that includes a lot of simulation planning and other techniques.

We've also kind of, in the game side, one of my collaborators in Portugal, a few years ago we released a mod for the game called "Skyrim" which allowed people to create social states for characters that are in towns in "Skyrim," which is this big, open world game.

They actually react to interactions that you had with their friends in the village, and so if you don't act nice to someone, then later, someone else is not gonna like that and you won't get the information you need to finish your quest, and then you'll have to figure out how to navigate around that, to get them to like you.

And we call it Prom Week Meets Skyrim because a lot of the things that come into play while trying to navigate your social physics to get a prom date is kind of what is going on in that particular example here.

So that's my talk and happy to take questions.

[audience applauding] - All right, time to get your questions about human interactions being modeled in the 3D space.

Raise your hand, and I will bring the mic to you.

If you have questions, we've got one in the far back here.

All right, here's your question.

- [Audience Member] Who's your favorite theme park character in "Westworld"?

[audience chuckling] - That's a tough question.

I'm not gonna answer that.

Not on TV.

[audience member gasps] - [Audience Member] Really?

You're just gonna leave us all hanging?

- I will leave you hanging.

[audience chuckling] - Okay, fair enough.

- Talk to me after.

- [Audience Member] I will definitely see you after.

[audience laughing] - It's more intrigue than I've seen at any show so far.

All right, other questions?

We've got one right here, front and center.

- Left the best questions for me.

- [Audience Member] This may or may not be germane, but I'm interested if you have an opinion on what the hell happened to "Second Life"?

Was it too early?

- Okay, yes, that one I will answer.

I won't deflect it 'cause it's, "Second Life," interestingly, is still, to some degree, around [chuckling], Lindon Labs.

And in fact, at one point, if you look at this example down here, so for those of you... How many of you don't know of "Second Life"?

There are people are too young here.

[audience chuckling] So "Second Life" was basically a virtual world that was, it's kind of like a 3D game version of Zoom.

It's like an MMO, but for more like- - [Audience Member] Classes, teachers.

- Classes, teachers, social gatherings, things like that.

There were islands, and I think IBM had a few islands there, and people at IBM used to work there, but this was like many years ago.

Interestingly, "Second Life" did get, at some point, interested in this character simulation aspect.

This bottom right one, this example here, is from an iPad app called Versu, V-E-R-S-U.

And this was a simulation, so a writer and an AI person developed this.

What they were doing was they took Old English, sort of Victorian English novels, and they simulated character interactions through characters in that.

And so you can actually look at stories that were generated by getting a collection of these, and there, their emphasis was on social practices that were consistent with that time period.

And so that's what they were simulating in that.

So I highly recommend, if you're interested, to look at Versu.

Also, Emily Short is the writer, and she has a fantastic blog.

Might be worth checking.

- [Wade] Our last question coming here from your left.

- [Audience Member] Hello, there, I would like to ask you, about the "Skyrim" mod, it looks really cool.

Where can I get it?

[audience members chuckling] - So It's called Social NPCs, and it's available on Steam and also on Nexus Mods, so you should be able to get it.

Yeah, leave a review if you like it.

[chuckling] - All right, give it up for Arnav Jhala!

[audience applauding] All right, folks, this concludes RTP180 for May of 2022.

Next month we're having another one, third Thursday of every month, just like we do.

Our topic will be EdTech.

Education technology will be the subject.

That is on June 16th, showtime, 6:00 p.m. Now before we go over there to get the beer, first of all, thank you so much for attending.

Tell your friends, "Come out, see RTP180."

We have a different topic every month.

Some of our speakers will be sticking around.

If you did not get a chance to have your question answered here live, go find them, maybe buy 'em a free beer, and you will be able to get your questions answered.

Come back next month.

We'd like to have one more shout out to our sponsors, RTI International.

They're the ones making this happen.

On behalf of RTP180 presented here at the Frontier, I've been your MC, Wade Minter, saying thanks for coming out and have a safe journey home.

Good night, everybody.

[audience members clapping]