troygbiv

Animation lighting, as we all know doing lighting is much more complex when there are objects in motion rather than static as my graduate specific pieces were. So I thought what better practice during my waning hours of graduation than to get a hold of some animation work from graduate students and create a nice lighting setup, based on their needs and wants of course.

As I had no real game plan to accomplish this task I was actually kind of diving into lighting these characters with no previous advanced knowledge of the task at hand. Invariably I was able to come up with a method that worked well but probably was not the most efficient when it came to rendering.

Most of these animation renders were done in a single shot, there was no separation of elements from the background in order to concentrate lighting on individual objects. Overall these light setups were rather simple and focused more on the characters than the background. But, as graduate animation reels are apt to be bereft of lighting in general, it was a nice addition to the already beautiful animation.

In retrospect, there would have been many changes to the original process I used to light a good deal of these animations. The initial setup was a single combined scene. After having worked on several animation scenes for lighting I would have split these up into motion categories and non motion. This would be a process of recreating a film technique where we create in a sense a back plate to render cg elements on.

I know what your thinking, "But Troy, is this not all CG?". If this is what you were thinking then yes it is. However for integration purposes there are tools that allow use to do compositing in Mental Ray using production shaders. So its not reinventing the wheel but re-imagining the process backwards.

Taking this into account I would create a nicely setup rendering environment for the background and get it the way I want it to look. Bake out my maps and render a sequence of images to re-project back onto the geometry. Then I would add in all motion items and use production shaders to composite the work together in a 3d environment. So not only do I have full individual control over the characters lighting but I am matching lighting from the environment without affecting the environment after it has been approved by the animator.

This requires a bit of setup but the payoff is wonderful. Not only do you take out potential pitfalls of complex lighting setups with motion based items on complex scenes But you also provide a framework for reintegration, a typical method used in film for with back plates.

I paired up with Breanna Carzoo and Althea Gata and Pooja Rathod for their animation assets.

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.

Red Faction Armageddon. Video game cinematic sequence work.

I am extremely proud of this project. Not only was it my second project out in the professional realm it was enormous in scope. We worked closely with Volition Games to work on cinematic scenes inside Red Faction Armageddon which was recently released at the beginning of E3. I actually was fortunate enough to be able to go to E3 and meet some of the other team members from Volition. As a personal notation I have to say Volition is awesome, not only are the people we worked with directly amazing, they make great games.

Our initial turn key solution at Pendulum Studios focused on using in game captures, but inevitably there was a decision to shift the entire pipeline to a pre-rendered process. Which is a little more at home with regards to established pipelines at Pendulum.

My main function on this piece was actually rather robust. I started out with character shading, then into environment shading and lighting and finally into shot setup, character lighting and rendering. Practically most of the characters you see had look development done by me. Hale, Darius, Winters, Red Faction soldiers, cultists. There was a combined effort from me and William Schithius (who I worked side by side with in shading environments and lighting assets and characters for this project, as well as being a awesome MEL guru). Initial asset upresing was done by Pat Switzer and Gina Adimova.

During this phase of the operation we had gone in and setup environments for shading, lighting and rendering by matching the source provided by Volition via the current game build. After animation caching had been accomplished and assets were ready for importation. We would go through and create a final render setup with all corrected scenes and begin the lighting of the characters.

Having been my first production work utilizing the pre-render pipeline at Pendulum, it had become apparent there were some serious technical issues with Maya. There were a lot of hurdles with nested referencing, which I had never used as the complexity of work established at school never required it. Having gotten to this particular point in the pipeline we had run into some very trying issues. One of the main ones was light linking. Just thinking about it makes me uncomfortable but I sat down with William and we were able to figure things out from a technical standpoint and using MEL he coded up a quick method of fixing this terminal complication. The other proprietary tools we had to remedy this were broken, severely. So I took the night and decided to breakdown the process of cleanup so I could discuss fixing it with William the next morning then we could implement a fix as soon as possible.

As soon as some of the kinks were worked out we were able to simply move forward and get work done. There were times when things ran smoothly, there were however other times when things went horribly wrong. We worked hard at fixing our problems to end up at a point were we could enjoy lighting scenes and setting up renders for compositing. We proceeded progressively based on the producer's shot priority inside of our shotgun toolset, but there were obvious hurdles to overcome to maintain our projected deadline.

Other than focusing our efforts on aesthetics we would stay around the studio to ensure that our final output had come out correctly. If things needed to be fixed we were always within arms reach to come and fix things.

One of the most back breaking projects I have worked on, but as well on of the most enjoyable for the payoff. In the end it was nice to go to E3 and see some of the Volition guys and hear that they liked the cinematic scenes a lot.

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.