This page gathers together technical art tools, personal projects and development challenges that don’t really fit anywhere else. Older experiments in Unity and Unreal can be found on the ‘Realtime’ page, but I’ve decided to leave that page ‘as-is’, and separate the two by time.
This was a project to train a machine learning system in terrain erosion, to speed up the process of landscape creation. It used a dataset from Washington in the US, and a custom version of ‘Pix2pix’. While the results looked promising, the resolution (256×256) wasn’t high enough to be useful, and turned into more a learning exercise than a production-ready tool.
‘Greenhouse’ is my continuation of the work started with the ‘Diorama’ tool at MPC – but in Houdini rather than Unity
Early versions of the tool used a CSV file to transfer the data between Houdini and Unreal. This is the grass scatter example combined with vegetation sprites and an HDRI captured at the Squamish spit (before it was demolished).
Bunker Digital was lucky enough to be contracted by Dimension Studios to work on Roland Emmerich’s ‘Those About to Die’, which included a stint on set at Cinecittà studios in Rome. The production was one of the few big budget shows to continue filming through the 2023 SAG strike.
The bulk of my work on the show was the Virtual Production environment of the ‘Circus Maximus’, along with Levi Victoria, Ina Chen and another Bunker Digital artist – Kaitlin Perry.
There isn’t a lot of ‘behind the scenes’ material showing the crowd system we developed – but fortunately Dimension have also released a short film called ‘The Bet’ which demonstrates a similar workflow.
I’m credited as ‘Virtual Art Department Supervisor’ on this show, and spent several months on set with Dimension Studios and DNEG360 in Wellington, NZ
This environment (Bingley in the Ice Age) was simply referred to as ‘Snowy Plain’. The principle challenge was the snowstorm, which I created using a volume shader for the fog, and multiple layers of animated textures for the cloud and spindrift. The distant landscape is a detailed matte painting from DNEG’s DMP team, but you can barely see it in the final frame.
The settlement is seen in three different lighting scenarios, including one at night with a realtime Aurora Borealis I created that seems to have made it to the final shot almost untouched!
The last significant chunk of work I completed on the show (and before I left Wellington) was the desert encampment for Mansa Musa’s caravan in Ep. 4
‘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 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.
In 2021, I co-founded the company ‘Bunker Digital’ along with Krystian Guevara and Ariel Lorenzo-Luaces. One of the first large projects we landed was client-side supervision on Netlfix’s live action remake of ‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’
The Omashu throne room was the most successful ICVFX environment – very well suited to the scale and layout of the volume (the biggest in the world at the time). Main build by Dimension, with supervision from myself and Andrew Budyk. Optimisation and additional shader work by Bunker.
One of the pieces of work I’m most proud of from my time at MPC was ‘Diorama’. I had the opportunity to co-present this work at SparkFX in Vancouver, and at Siggraph 2019 in LA.
Final layout example from one of the demo run-throughs. Approx 4 mins of work (see the embedded video to see it done live).
Diorama was used in some way on most shows that came through MPC Vancouver – including 10,000 billboards for the Ryme City environment on ‘Pokémon’s Detective Pikachu’.
John and I were invited by Unity Technologies to present ‘Diorama’ at Siggraph 2019. Unity were kind enough to record and release the talk online.
Despite starting off as a 2D concept artist, I’ve found a lot of my personal projects have drifted into technical experiments in realtime and VR.
Two Houdini procedural assets combined in Houdini Engine for Unreal
Unreal scene, combining the same assets
MPC Vancouver was the primary vendor for the 3rd act of ‘Justice League’ – set in the fictional town of ‘Skrunda1’ (a mix of Chernobyl and Pripyat). The Environments team was tasked with dressing a full CG city, 12km square
This daytime shot is one of the few where our work is really visible. A lot of the rest of the team’s efforts is hidden behind FX, motionblur, and a heavy red grade.
Two part TV Movie for AnthemFX – meant to be a prequel to the ‘Peter Pan’ story.
I worked for MPC Vancouver for more than 8 years, 7 of them as head of the 3DDMP / Environments department.
As far as I can tell, I hired 154 people into the department during my time there, around 40 for their first ever role in VFX.
The studio closed it’s doors for good in December 2019
My first project in Vancouver, for AnthemFX, the company that brought me to Canada. They’re sadly long gone, but they threw amazing parties…
This was my first film at Cinesite, and the one that taught me not to chase projects. I was initially very disappointed to be given this instead of ‘Prince of Persia’, but ended up having a great time, and the opportunity to have large creative impact – even if it’s not necessarily a film I’d actually watch…
Freelance contract for ‘FlamingCGI’
Aerial Timelapse of ‘King Abdullah Economic City’
Trailer park interior for ‘PaintingPractice’. Based on an idea by Dan May.
Night shot of Boston Harbour, all digital. Was meant to have a ‘magical’ look, but wasn’t really in keeping with the surrounding shots, and ultimately never made the final cut.
The Finest Hours – 2015
I was again lead artist on this show, as well a HoD of the whole of the Vancouver environments department. I created several coastline matte paintings for this show, as well as some skydomes. This is one that I worked on at a rate of about 1hr/week for the duration of the show – a fully digital grass bank, blowing in the wind.
Another of the few shots I completed myself for ‘Jersey Boys’ – a Matte painting / set extension of Coney Island amusement park. Wheel and roller coaster were rendered in Modo, with models and textures by Corey Sewell and Aline Nordmark.
Matte painting of the Tree Spirit colony on fire. Flames and smoke were added by the FX artists.
Icebreaker at dawn (the ‘hopeful’ shot at the end of the episode). I don’t think this made the final cut.
Stages of the ‘Town Street’ illustration for the Film’s prologue. The sequence was meant to have a comic-book feel, so these illustrations were used as backgrounds in the actual film, rather than concepts for a more photo-real painting.
One of the key ‘looks’ of the documentary was to use Scanning Election Microscopy (SEM) images for any shots within the body. As SEM images are basically depth maps, I used them as displacement maps within ‘Fusion’ to create pseudo-3D scenes. Combined with extreme depth of field and false colour effects, the results were very effective.
