Greetings and salutations readers!
In this week's production cycle, I learned some new tricks, and used my insights from my recent trip to Lightbox Expo to guide BSG into a "brighter" future.
While I was attending Lightbox the previous weekend, I got to hear a wonderful talk by Erik Smitt, the current Director of Creative Production at Skydance Animation and a former cinematographer for Pixar. In his talk, he went over a number of fascinating details about lighting and storytelling in films such as Incredibles 2 and Piper, and he showed how Pixar uses lighting early in the pipeline to tell their stories in more impactful ways.
During his talk, he showed a diagram similar to a pipeline diagram I made in Production Practices, but his showed how early lighting was worked on in filming, and how they are used to dictate the rest of the film. Here is the diagram recreation that I created.
Using this diagram and some of the notes I took from that presentation, I pitched and restructured my team's production plans for the next production pass. Previously, we were gonna just block shots and crank through them indiscriminately. Now, we are gonna light block out the environments and specific hero beats of the film, and then from those existing light setups, we will spread them to adjacent shots around the sequence. Ideally we will do the whole bathroom sequence first. But from that sequence we will build the rest of our time on the spaceship. Using this approach, I built our first set of lighting inside the bathroom, that looks like this:
A simple set, with a very contained lighting setup. I modeled it in 2-3 hours maximum. However, the simplicity of this set is what we want, with all the equipment to appear out of nowhere, and to progressively get more destroyed over time. My team mate Riley built the lighting of the panic mode for this set, and from that set I blocked and lit a hero shot of ours.
This moment is where our character finally regains some semblance of control, having ripped the minigun off the ceiling, and is now spraying all the devices that made him miserable in the bathroom. A fun happy accident of this shot is that the toilet, his end goal, is sinisterly silhouetted in the dark, and he stands as if defending it from the evils of the bathroom. By lighting this set first, and doing this hero shot, we now have a better idea of the feel of our film than by any level of low quality blocking in our default blinn world.
In addition to this process, I worked on a new approach to booleans for our smooth surface sets where the hard surface approach was struggling. For this method, I would create the objects to be booleaned, take them into Zbrush, use the live boolean feature there, export out a high poly but unusuable mesh, and then quad draw a nicer edge flow onto it. No geometry is truly perfect, but this resulted in less noticeable smoothing issues than the previous approach! I used this to boolean doors into our dome, and will use it for the lowest level of the abduction bay next!
Well folks, that is all for this update! Thanks to everyone for reading it this far! I look forward to sharing the next updates as they come in!
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