Thor: God of Thunder pre-rendered trailer for the video game, one of the most challenging pieces we had to work on at Pendulum. On top of doing certain things like ice and emulating Winters Casket via the movie reference. Our time constrains were pretty horrible. As a whole the ideal was to shoot for a new level of quality when it came to rendering.
My particular focus on this job was shader development primarily concerning skin (which I am very very happy with, take a bow Thor you look gorgeous), environment lighting and character lighting. I worked on the look for the majority of characters you see in the Trailer minus Ulik and Surtur. Initially I started out with creating the Skin shader for Thor from which we would transpose to all other characters. Most other shaders that were developed initially were created for the character Heimdall. Once that base was created it was quickly emulated across the majority of other characters with relative ease. Establishing a good parent model helped to make this transition relatively painless.
Once most of the characters work had been completed I shifted focus to environment lighting and shader development. I worked primarily on the Rainbow Bridge, Healing room and Ymir Lair environments. As well as character lighting in those respective environments.
After a bit I was switched to do ice shader development as well as Casket recreation. With some of the rendering time constrains we were facing my ice development was adjusted by Mike Mccormick to work within our time frame.
Late nights and continued reinvention of our process helped to refine our final output. With such a short time to output this Trailer I have to say I needed to take a nap, for several days I definitely needed some R&R.
