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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.

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.