This first article is a 3 part harmony about my work in the professional world, post graduate. This is merely a memoir of various projects I have been a part of including the studios I have worked for.
The very first job I had received outside of school was through Pendulum Studios located in San Diego California. The initial job was UDK cinematic work in conjunction with a video game development house by the name of Propaganda Games. Pendulum provided the turn key solution start to finish for cinematic scenes in the game.
My particular role in this endeavor was scene setup and character lighting as well as rendering and some pre-compositing work (to check output). After all animation and assets had been cached out and exported we brought all of these individual elements into Unreal and applied the exported animation. Then based on the camera would setup lighting.
In all honesty the process seemed a tad bit convoluted to achieve the final product. But when it came time to render it was merely executing proprietary tools to output a sequence of images so that we could run some post composite work on it. The unreal editor had the limitation of 8bit images so it was light composite work, nothing extreme. The client was also very concerned about it matching the quality of the in game assets. So as a whole we had very little wiggle room to provide awe inspiring results.
I do believe however the animation speaks for itself. This was the primary contribution to the cinematic scenes. Tons of talented individuals animated these scenes James Jones, Matt Cambell, Kaitlyn Peplow, Jimm Pegan, Jae Park, Mike Goode, Chip Carle, to those I missed, let me know so I can add you!
To my good friend and colleague who worked on rendering and lighting right along side me Jason Yacalis, game engine aficionado and all around wonderful guy, you rocked.
