



‘Those About to Die’ was the first Unreal 5 virtual production show completed at Dimension
‘Those About to Die’ was the first Unreal 5 virtual production show completed at Dimension
This was the last show I touched that used Unreal 4, before the switch to UE5, lumen and nanite. I can’t say I miss lightmass!
Houdini was used to process the underlying terrain in all of these environments – though the detail is usually hidden by the resulting dressing
The bulk of the virtual production environments were used as reference, and replaced in VFX. My work finished as soon as principle photography did, so I’m having to make some guesses as to what remains in the final image. Happy to correct any mistakes – definitely don’t want to take credit for any work done (or redone) by another vendor!
We had a lot of support on this project from Unity Technologies, particularly Mike Wuetherick and the M+E division.
I’ve been making good use of procedural tools and workflows for the work shown here – something I think will only grow in future.
This was the first show at MPC to make use of a game engine for VFX production.
Freelance contract for ‘PaintingPractice’. Work was a combination of concept designs to be sent to Rocket Science VFX in Toronto, and DMPs that were completed locally.
My concept work tends to start in SketchUp for basic massing and perspective, and is finished in a combination of Painter and Photoshop.
Recently I’ve been experimenting with alternatives – Affinity Photo instead of Photopshop, and Krita instead of Painter. Both seem pretty promising.
Cinesite was a Nuke-based facility, and I’d been using Fusion for several years. I had to switch over very quickly!
At last count, there were 29 different tools in use within the department, but these are the ones I was instrumental in bringing into the company, or integrating into the pipeline.
This is probably the fastest-paced show I ever worked on. Most matte paintings were done in less than a week, and many in only a couple of days.
When I started, Anthem had one very old license of Vue, but were kind enough to upgrade it for me, and I made VERY heavy use of it during my time there.
All of the illustrations were done using a combination of SketchUp and Painter. The aerial forest matte painting was given to me as a challenge – it was far larger than anything I’d ever done before. I learnt ‘Vue’ in a weekend, and then came in on a Monday to do the shot.
‘Shake’ had just been discontinued, and Rushes decided on eyeon ‘Fusion’ as a replacement. I made heavy use of Fusion’s 3D compositing functions on this show, including particle systems (for the Tornado) and displacement (for the SEM effects).
Concepts done in SketchUp and Painter. Final Matte Paintings done in Photoshop. Source renders from other artists, or created in Vue.