Cloudscape using the ‘four point’ shader material, created as a proof of concept for the Appa flying shots in Avatar: The Last Airbender. The material also included a depth-based shadow system, so the flat cards would shadow each other.
Cloudscape
Category: float_right
Circus Maximus material masks
To simplify the massive UDIM tile count into something that could run in 48GB of VRAM, we used a fairly involved layered material / height blend system. An automated tool baked each section of the stands into a set of materials masks – Red for dirt, Green for wear, Blue for rain staining, and Alpha as a material variance mask. We managed a very close match to the VFX final with less than 5% of the texture data.
Jungle 4
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’.
Mushroom planet 2
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.
Burnt forest
The ‘burnt forest’ was a fairly successful ICVFX environment (and one that made an early trailer), but was partly replaced in post for story reasons by Nexodus.
Minstrel Cave
Minstrel cave environment – created as an emergency backup when a practical location fell through. Main build by Dimension Studios and Bunker, taken over in post by Untold Studios.
Diorama demo 2
Each station demonstrated one of the features of the tool, including clustering, physical scatter and a quite advanced layer-based culling system.
Tree billboard
This experiment splits up a tree into 8 atlased billboards. The field of view is limited to around 90deg, but the results are promising, and (apart from the overdraw) quite efficient.
JL Realtime
To allow such a large area to be fully dressed in only a few months, I proposed using a new toolset, based around Unreal Engine 4. At peak, 5 artists were working simultaneously in Unreal, with the final layouts exported back to the MPC pipeline for rendering.
JL – Siggraph
Myself and John Vanderbeck gave a talk at Siggraph 2018 titled ‘Accelerating Film Environment Creation Using Game Development Tools’. The work described here formed a large part of the presentation.
Luella tourbus
Visualisation of Luella Bartley’s GO! tour bus, created in SketchUP. The old ‘Routemaster’ buses were being sold off by TfL, and the idea was to host a mobile fashion boutique inside one.
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MPC Jersey Boys 1
Jersey Boys – 2013
This was my first show as CG supervisor, working with Greg Butler as VFX supe. I oversaw the creation of around 120 shots, which wasn’t a large number – but were split across around 20 sequences, with only a handful of shots in each. This is one of the few shots I worked on personally – the bowling alley sign which gives the band it’s name.
Sanctuary hotel
Concept for the Buenos Aires hotel in Episode 10 ‘Acolyte’
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LVK Jimmy illustration
Illustration test of Matthew Horne as ‘Jimmy’. The director was hoping to have a fully illustrated poster commissioned, in the style of the old hammer horror films. This was my pitch for me have a go at it.
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UEFA Aerial 1
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Aerial view of the stadium, from the main title sequence
Surrounding city is a combination of north London (the area surrounding the Arsenal stadium) and Barcelona, which has the largest football stadium in Europe.