troygbiv

Final article in my three part graduate series, this particular feature will focus on my third graduate piece the French Cafe.

(You can visit my Graduate image gallery by clicking the menu link or the link supplied in this article.)

The idea was to emulate daylight conditions and then simulate night time conditions inside the composition as there was no direct reference to utilize for the shot representing night lighting. Most reference was sampled from various other images that depicted a potential night scenario similar to the current environment. The scene geometry is actually extremely simplistic, but was complex enough to supply the necessary forms to capture contour detail and highlights.

The biggest challenge here was to visually stimulate a mood or a sort of thought of having been at that location. The daytime scene was rather cut and dry, emulating reality through a lens with physically accurate materials and proper settings via Mental Ray proved rather straight forward.

The night time render proved to be rather fun than aggravating. The lamps were utilized to great effect in order to achieve the look. Taking into account off camera light and other interactions one would expect from a realistic situation I began to fill space off screen with streetlamps so they would emit back into the camera lens.

In order to light the scene accurately I utilized baked Final Gather and Global Illumination maps to control the lighting. This was done on a duplicate version of the original geometry with a basic form of the current shaders as a test bed for lighting color, quality and control. Once all the proper settings had been tested and were certified good for the scene I reverted back to the original shaded environment and baked out all necessary maps.

Even though the final render felt nice it was missing some post process work I felt would really make the night render stand out. I decided to take it into Nuke and add some simple processing based on luminance values mostly in order to get a foggy haze kind of appeal. As well, I decided to give the lamps some additional lens processing to make the environment feel moody and humid.

At the end of the project it had become a race to recreate the night scene before the deadline. In retrospect there are several things I would have changed about the way I approached this work. But, it was ultimately worth the effort.

Model Credit : Joel Durham

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.

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.

Captain America: Super Soldier pre-rendered CG Trailer for the game, I loved this project, our team was very dedicated to make this even better than Thor. The only downside was since we had made transitions for rendering we were working off less brute force rendering. Scenes had to be perfect first time which provided a complication since our tools had broken and caused complications when setting up render scenes, it was like digging through a haystack for the issue.

My main role was character shader development, environment shading and lighting and character lighting. I had so much fun working on these characters. I also was a primary gateway for verifying asset work from UV work to Texturing to ensure a smooth transition to shader development.

During downtime I had been given the soldiers to texture. I started with the Shotty character to establish the look that would work across all other soldier type characters. I worked on simultaneously shading the character as I finalized the textures. Once this was complete I oversaw additional texture work for soldier variations. Which included weapons or accessories.

From that point on I focused on shading all of the other characters, Captain America, Baron Von Strucker, Dugan, Bucky, Tank, Red Skull as well as the other characters you see in the Trailer.

Having that done I created the light rig for the wilderness environment including the fire light. Then shifted focus to the interior sequence with Red Skull, Strucker and Arnim Zola. I started by shading and lighting the environment setting it up for the camera shots. As soon as that was finished I integrated the characters and created their light rigs and rendered out the sequence for comp.

I really enjoyed working on this. It had come all together at E3 when I had a chance to see the work our team had been involved with on a big screen at the Sega booth.