‘Sonic’ was the last show completed by MPC Vancouver, and was led by Scott Russell. The ENV team was slowly reducing in size as contracts came up for renewal, and there was no hiring or onboarding to do, so I had more hands-on involvement in the show than normal.
A large part of my work on the show was using the Unity-based ‘Diorama’ toolset I developed with John Vanderbeck for the creation of several complex fully CG environments. See the ‘Diorama‘ page for more information on the development of this tool.
The dense jungle in the opening sequence was the most detailed, primarily done by myself and Emily Cho. Layout and temp renders were done in Unity, with the result exported to a ‘shotPKG’ for rendering in Katana/Renderman
Houdini was used to process the underlying terrain in all of these environments – though the detail is usually hidden by the resulting dressing
Most of the vegetation was sourced from the library of jungle plants used on ‘The Lion King’ the year before – but was missing mid-scale elements. I therefore created a set of tree fern assets in PlantFactory, and textured them in Substance, with the assistance of Jeffrey Scott.
The ‘real world’ pine forest environment was created in the same way, using assets from Megascans, as well as pine trees from the landslide sequence in ‘Pokemon’.
The production shut down Highway 17 on Vancouver Island for several weeks for the ‘drone chase’ sequence, but shot all the driving plates from exactly the same height. To get the dynamic camera moves the sequence needed, I set up a system in nuke that reprojected the plates onto a smoothed version of the lidar scan, and re-rendered the (more interesting) shot cameras.
For the most extreme movements, we had to re-create the road surface entirely. To save time, this was done in entirely in nuke – including the wet road and puddle reflections. The projected environment was simply mirrored, blurred, and revealed with a mask.
A particularly challenging shot was a pan of the second drone vehicle, as we only had footage travelling forwards over the bridge. Jeffrey Burt in the layout department came up with an ingenious solution, reprojecting the same plate backwards for the first half of the shot, and aligning it with the same plate played forwards for the end. I reconstructed the missing middle section as a projected DMP, along with Hana Hirosaka and Nozomi Nakano.
The largest environment I worked on was the ‘Mushroom Planet’, again done in Unity using the Diorama toolset. The layout was published to Katana, and the resulting renders enhanced in DMP.
Diorama was retired by MPC after I left, but this sequence really showed the power of realtime instanced workflows. The first version of the layout was heavy, but still navigable in Unity – but it was too large for renderman, and had to be significantly scaled back in order to render in a reasonable time.
I believe this is the last shot I worked on at MPC. The far background was from a drone shoot done in Squamish by Scott Russell and augmented by Hana Hirosaka. I added the FG vegetation as set of projected cards. I was also, bizarrely, responsible for the animated UI of Tails’ handheld tracker, which was created in nuke. I would not recommend doing this…