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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

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.