PROJECT DETAILS & BREAKDOWNS 2022

One of the most satisfying experiences of my career, over the last two years I have been let loose to spearhead a generalist team in the creation of several large, extremely detailed fantasy environments for this lush AAA animated feature. It's been a privilege to bring to life the environments envisioned by production designer Matthias Lechner.

• Led a team of 10 artists in the creation of a dozen 3d environments and dozens of matte painted 360º skies, totalling over 1,200 shots. 
• First SPI animated feature to use a generalist Environments team for full environment asset development (model, texture, lookdev, dressing, matte painting).

Techniques and Technologies Used

Foliage

This project involved a lot of foliage work - in all, our team created over 700 discrete animated tree and plant assets using Speedtree; of these, over 500 assets were created by me personally.

A publishing tool that I commissioned from our Dev team fully automates the publishing of lookdev'd, render-ready assets out of Speedtree. This pipeline is the epitome of the agile, artist-centric, iteration-friendly workflow that I've been championing at SPI.

Houdini

For landscape geometry, we used Houdini quite heavily. Two discrete workflows were used, depending on the needs of the asset:

1. Houdini terrain tools: Houdini's built-in terrain generation tools, based on heightfields, were very useful for certain background landscape forms, allowing quick and easy eroded landscapes to be generated, complete with embedded point attributes that are accessed in Katana to aid in lookdev.
2. Houdini VDBs and surface displacements: we brought in low-rez blocking geometry - generated either by Environment artists or the Modeling department - retopologized it to an even mesh density using VDB volumes, modified the shapes procedurally either within VDBs or through surface displacements, and embedded point attributes for use in Lookdev. 

Texturing & Lookdev

Once the geometry was published, we'd access the point attributes embedded in the geometry to drive certain aspects of the lookdev in Katana. We made heavy use of triplanar-mapped or bombed PBR texture sets from real-world datasets like Quixel Megascans to achieve high levels of detail and realism, as well as procedurally-built texture sets generated in Substance Designer.

For some environments, we made use of SPI's proprietary Fearowpaint software, a tool that allows the artist to build up layers of tiled PBR textures and blend between them easily using vertex masks and heightfield blending. The layer blending algorithm creates highly detailed, natural blends automatically even with the most crude, low-resolution layer masks. The resulting textures are not baked into maps, but exported as Alembic point attribute data, an extremely lightweight dataset that is parsed at render time by the Fearowpaint shader. The export of a large environment's textures thus take only seconds and uses only a few megabytes of storage, and is immediately available for rendering, greatly facilitating rapid iteration and creative exploration.

Environment Dressing

Our workflow for dressing environments with instanced geometry was centered around SPI's proprietary Sprout software, which allows the artist to paint instances onto terrain rapidly and with complete manual control over all aspects of each individual instance. 

We also developed new Houdini Engine functionality for Sprout enabling us to easily create customized procedural scatterers for large-scale background coverage where manual art direction was less important. 

Scatter data is exported from Sprout to Alembic point clouds and inserted into shots through proprietary SPI pipeline tools which allow easy deployment to hundreds of shots at a time.

Our largest environment was massive in scope: over 30 million instances and approximately 35 trillion polygons.

Lighting & Rendering

All of our lighting and rendering was conducted in Katana; proprietary SPI tools make it easy to run out dozens or hundreds of shots at a time from sequence-level templates.

• Created hundreds of foliage assets and dressed them into bg city and fg set extensions.

Techniques and Technologies Used

Foliage

This project was all about the foliage - in all, I created over 500 discrete animated tree and plant assets using Speedtree.

Environment Dressing

Our workflow for dressing environments with instanced geometry was centered around SPI's proprietary Sprout software, which allows the artist to paint instances onto terrain rapidly and with complete manual control over all aspects of each individual instance. 

Scatter data is exported from Sprout to Alembic point clouds and inserted into shots through proprietary SPI pipeline tools which allow easy deployment to hundreds of shots at a time.

A tremendously enjoyable, concentrated project with just one goal: to make a highly detailed, photoreal desert and chasm and integrate it seamlessly with location plate photography.


My small team of artists worked in Houdini to generate the canyon geometry. Point attributes generated in Houdini fed into the lookdev we created in Katana. And the environment was hand-dressed in great detail with millions of instances of rocks, twigs and other debris.

Video Links

• Watch a vfx breakdown of the environment (YouTube)
• Watch the full desert sequence (YouTube; canyon appears at approx 2:25)

This was one of those projects where we had to think on our feet and adapt to highly variable resources, utilizing a mix of:

• Full 3d environments (street level at base of Eiffel Tower)
• I created a 3d environment of trees and street furniture and dressed the fg/mg environment with Sprout. A matte painted city and night sky formed the backdrop.
• Matte painted aerial cityscapes (view from top of Eiffel Tower)
• We took advantage of good location photography to project Paris onto geometry, allowing reasonable range of camera motion.
• Hybrid photogrammetry/projected matte painting (view from Trocadero)
• I cleaned up comprehensive location photography, did a day for night treatment in Photoshop, and projected the images back out onto lidar-derived geometry in Nuke to achieve a poor man's photogrammetry that gave reasonable freedom of camera movement within the environment for the end sequence.

Video Links

• Watch one of the Paris sequences (YouTube)

This was a quick, fun 3-month project - I took on a sequence whilst waiting to start on MIB: International. 
Collaborating with the lookdev team, we repurposed some of the underwater assets previously built for The Meg, dressing a very extensive area of coral heads to create a colourful and unique fantasy underwater environment suitable for the zany antics of Drac and friends.

Video Links

• Watch the Volcano Reef sequence (YouTube)

Video Links

• Watch the vfx breakdown (YouTube)

Who doesn't love a good Jason Statham action movie? This was a particularly interesting project for me because I started on the show during pre-production and was initially tasked with visual development of the underwater environment using a rapid Modo-based workflow - I modelled, lookdev'd, dressed, lit and rendered a series of images to achieve client buy-off on key aspects of the environment before the sequence was even officially turned over.
 Many of those assets were then ported to SPI's official pipeline to be used in the final environment build.

• Created a photoreal 3d underwater environment, including some asset development, texturing/lookdev, and environment dressing.
• Worked with the SPI Dev group on creation, testing and iteration of Fearowpaint 1.0 (proprietary environment texturing system) for this show.

Video Links

• Watch the environments breakdown (YouTube)
• Watch the full underwater sequence (YouTube)

Video Links

• Watch the environments breakdown (YouTube)

Video Links

• Watch the matte painting-heavy Through The Looking Glass sequence (YouTube)
• Watch the matte painted Room Of The Living sequence (YouTube)

Video Links

• Watch an environment shot breakdown (YouTube)

• Sprout, SPI's proprietary instance scattering/painting system - now a mission-critical part of the pipeline for several departments including Model, Layout and Environments.
  • SIGGRAPH 2017: I co-presented Sprout with SPI developer Daniela Hasenbring: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3084363.3085046
• Fearowpaint, SPI's proprietary PBR landscape texturing system, now in use across multiple SPI projects. 
  • I wrote the complete technical standards for Fearowpaint, and prototyped the heightfield blending algorithm - the heart of how it works - for subsequent implemention by the shader team.
• Matte Painting pipeline, including integrated color management, Photoshop exporter, and Nuke toolset. 
  • In use across all SPI projects since 2016.
  • I wrote the complete technical standards for it, and designed the UI.
• Speedtree pipeline, a one-click publishing pipeline that fully automates the process of publishing fully lookdev'd, renderable foliage assets to the SPI pipe from Speedtree.
  • In use across almost all SPI projects since 2017.
  • I re-wrote the technical standards of an existing, simpler publishing system to make it a fully-automated end-to-end solution.