For the Africa shot, I worked with Loren to come up with our shot breakdown. I did some paint FX work to populate the savannah grass with custom brushes to match the set props. Then lit and provided elements for Shu to comp. It came out pretty well.

For the ‘super hero’ sequence, I worked on layout and shaders and lighting, alongside Cody Smith. I did some painted projections to expedite the texturing.

A lot of the final mood was finished in comp by Lou. He did a good job on it.

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So intricate that the shoe took several of us a significant portion of our time to build, rig, and look dev… I spent hours with the shoes at my desk, studying materials, so that I could match textures and other physical qualities exactly as they were. The shoe has many different materials, a very complex build. We ended up with a shoe that had about 65 shader assignments, and over a hundred pieces. Everything was modeled. except the finest details. Even the yellow stitching was geometry.

To turn this around quickly, animation was being worked on while look dev was going on, with no solid referencing system for render setups. This means that on my end I was faced with over a hundred shader assignments per shoe (left and right) for each shot. Not only would this kill me by boring me to death, but we simply couldn’t spend the time to do this. So I scripted all the shader assignments, along with a starting light rig setup, and I handed the script to the layout/anim ninjas who helped me setup all the shots in 2 days and get them to render. What would take a couple hours of work at best was automated into 30 seconds. This was pretty key to our timeline.

Adam did another amazing job modeling this shoe, one of the most complicated things to model that I’ve worked on. And it shows. The elements we handed to comp looked really good on their own. Izik did a great concept for the spot, and in the end Nike came back for more.

Kids better be buying this 100 dollar shoe…

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I set up a lighting rig that could be dropped in all the shots with scripted settings, so that the animators could help me block out the lighting scenes without having to do much fiddling and labor. And then they would take it into render after the sup gave it a thumbs up, or down… This allowed us to set up all the shots for lighting in an afternoon, as we were animating right up until the last minute.

I wish I had kept a still of that whole suit rendered, it was a damn fine job I tell you.

The clip I was given had some audio sampling issues, but I left it on so you could hear Ludacris’ voice over… Yeah, Ludacris. He even came to the studio with his entourage, or crew as they say, to see the amazing work we were doing.

If you are reading this in Seattle… Love you guys.

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I was handed fluid elements to comp and create a smoking/smouldering look with animated shaders which I created. I also created animated caustics shaders and passes to get the look on the WB logo and the Green Lantern Logo.

I love working with good people

The Photo

#2 Pencil Sketch and the color palette I used

Right away, my familiarity with Photoshop cost me a crucial mistake, which, unfortunately, I didn’t catch until it was too late and I had to live with it. Not a big deal… The bottom Canvas layer cannot be arranged or duplicated. It stays there… So I put my photo in that canvas layer for reference, but it would have been better as a top layer to hide as needed. I created a line sketch with the #2 pencil tool for blocking out reference, and proceeded to play with brushes to get a feel for them and block out the first layer of color. Throughout the process, I learned that brushes from the oil tool set didn’t play well with watercolor, of even acrylics… I thought that the brush feel was the only thing that mattered, but actually, even the stroke behaves like the medium it is supposed to be… So I couldn’t blend oil and acrylics strokes together, for instance.

To paint, I built a palette of colors that I would sample from. I would then hide my paint layer, observe the source photo, then go back to my paint layer and work from memory. This was my way of pretending I was there, outdoors, with my easel, painting on a canvas. With the added advantage of being able to use the overlap in layers to make accurate placement, resulting in a more faithful reproduction.

I struggled with brush settings and eventually settled on thick wet camel brushes and a glazing round brush. I would lay in a base color that averaged the relevant area’s color, then a shadow color with the wet camel brush, and then would go over with a blender or a glazing brush when my strokes were too scratchy… Finally, I would do a highlight pass, again, smoothing with blender for broad lit areas and touching up with a sharp, fine camel brush for tight highlights.  The process was tedious, but I had achieved a textural feel I liked and so I stuck with it. This workflow was very time consuming overall, and if knew better, I would have tried another approach. But that’s what learning is for… Next time, if I use a photo as a reference again, I will also extend the framing more to my liking. Finishing this piece seemed daunting enough at the time, so I didn’t want to make it any larger!

I painted different scene elements into different layers, from background to foreground. I wanted the piece to have a painterly feel, so I didn’t go in tight and tried to keep some stroke texture, like in the sky and shrubbery. Often, I would zoom out to see whether the feel of lighting was preserved when I painted, and then would go back to 100-150% zoom to paint in. Once the landscape was laid in, I painted some loose strokes which I then blurred and adjusted layer transparency to create the ocean mist. Finally, I took the file into Photoshop and adjusted a few curves to bring in some cyan, and was happy to bring this to a closure.  You can view the full resolution piece here.

Filling out details after blocking in

The finished piece

Andrew Soria, perceptive as he is, captured my once frazzled state with a beautiful drawing.

Everyone put in a solid effort and the client was very happy in the end. We certainly gave them all the latitude they wanted while not compromising the delivery. Thanks Superfad!

http://superfad.com/work/project/ca_lottery_rabbit_foot_factory