Another personal Unreal project, this time for an internal Impossible Objects piece.

The idea for the Doors project, was to have multiple artists create world’s, with every piece using the same camera move, and ending with an opening door, that would be stitched with the beginning of another artist’s piece, creating one continuous move through multiple worlds.

Our camera opens, showing the POV of a viewer on a space ship, seeing a large black hole nearby that is sucking in objects, including the ship we are on.

I wanted to have fun with the camera move, so the ship is quickly hit by an asteroid thats being pulled in, and explodes launching our character and POV into the black hole itself, revealing the singularity is the door that leads to the next shot.

Having gotten a late start on this, I used the week I had, to build a world with a story out of the myriad of space-themed marketplace objects I had in Unreal, mixed with some from and Big/Medium/Small. These included some great space blueprints for the blackhole and planet, and Niagra sims for the smoke, explosions, and smaller debris. Layout, lighitng, anim were all done by me. Start to finish this took about 4 working days.

The great team at Impossible Objects was kind enough to bring me in to help out with the Spring 2024 Cadillac project, Boldness in Bloom.

I had a varied role, helping with pre-production inside of Unreal, testing various materials and render settings, as well as rendering asset turntables for client review prior to the shoot.

As a comp supervisor for the 3 spots, I also prepared the lens grids for the shoot at the virtual production stage, and lead the comp team in look development, and comp finishing of shots rendered with Unreal’s path tracer.

Shot work was a mix of all CG car shots, rendered in Unreal, some with FX elements from Houdini, and plate shots from the stage shoot. Some light HUD lookdev was also needed to recreate/edit the screens and gauges in the practical car plates. A smattering of normal cleanup and one-off VFX element and plate work was present.

As a personal training project, I decided to recreate one of the shots from a Porsche marketing video fully in Unreal.

Environment, lighting, animation, and camera were all done in Unreal. Car materials were built in Unreal to closely match the original. The shot was rendered with the path tracer and then final comped in Nuke.

As a bonus, I also took one of the marketing stills for the same car, and did a little bit of a holiday themed update. Once again building the environment, and lighting fully in Unreal, then finishing the path traced render in Nuke.

The idea was always to get “as close as possible” knowing matching 1:1 might be impossible. This was taken one step further on the holiday themed shot, matching the general feel but needing a cooler, more winter vibe, than the original warm beach.

For Star Trek Picard season 03, our Outpost LA team’s first assignment was the introduction to the star ship of the season, the Titan. Picard and Riker take a shuttle from earth into an orbiting Spacedock to get aboard, and try and commandeer it.
The space dock was built by another team and supplied to us to implement. It was a huge asset with a lot of lighting challenges due to its size, and the fact that we had to use some camera tricks to make the inside fit correctly with the outside. Looked was re-done in house to fit our pipeline, just like all the ship models.
The Titan itself was unfinished as we developed the sequence looks, and went through multiple iterations before delivering the finals.
Earth, the star field, smaller ships surrounding the space dock, and all lens effects were developed in comp, leaving CG to focus on finalizing and rendering the larger assets.
In addition to the full CG shots, we had a handful of practical plates that needed to tie in, including those shot on the shuttle set, and the titan bridge.

For Outpost LA’s work on Star Trek: Discovery s04, my team was tasked with developing a sequence that takes place in and around a dead husk of a planet.
The planet asset had been begun at another vendor and the team in LA was able to use that as a basic layout, and develop a houdini-based procedural texture to give it burned-out, dried-lava look.
The planet featured in full CG shots, as well as out the windows of the ships as they flew near, into, and landed in the planet.
The final scene takes place as a “programmable matter”security system tears apart the cloaked shuttle. The team and I developed the look and feel of how this system worked, and tied it in with some previous canon tech.

The bulk of the work I lead the Outpost team on for Cowboy Bebop involved an episode where Spike finds himself stuck in a VR world, trying to reach the Bebop to escape. The work ranged from CG and Comp additions to the chair Spike is stuck in, to larger CG and DMP extensions to the VR world as he revisits it multiple times over.

The team at Outpost LA was approached to help realize the Netflix’s live-action Cowboy Bebop remake. In addition to the large sequence of spike in the VR world, I supervised various other sequences throughout the season. Included here are some examples of the work done for the “Atmosphere Farm” setting, work on the iconic church fight scene, and on a large one-shot fight in a gang hideout.

Harriet was one of the star robots we developed at DNEG for season 3 of Westworld. In her introductory episode we see her attempt to steal a pearl containing the digital brain of another character. This scene plays out as a mix of a heist, fight, and chase scene that places our CG asset into quite the variety of lighting and environments.

I started the lookdev early on with Harriet, developing the right mix of colors and materials for her body, before we landed on the light gray rubber we see here. Using those early tests, we built out comp templates for her paying special attention to the sheen and color of her carbon fiber parts, as well as the reflectivity of her rubber body.

These templates would then be used to develop her look for the different interior and exterior lighting environments. Warmer and darker, with a fast fall-off to black for the interiors, and the bluer brighter exterior look. Again we made liberal use of in house tools to help us match the softness and color separation we see in the film scan from the show.

The FX team went to town developing the damage we see as Harriet is shot repeatedly by the guards, and ultimately taken offline for her demise. For final we would augment these body FX with 2D and additional 3D FX elements to taste.

Netflix’s Dark Crystal : Age of Resistance was a worldwide effort from DNEG TV. As the sole vendor, DCAOR was principally lead out of London, but it would grow over the course of a year to include work from every site including Canada, India, and our team in Los Angeles.

Though we were responsible for various bodies of work throughout the series, our largest chunk would be developing the look for and compositing the Caves of Grot.

Split over multiple episodes, we would see our practical puppets integrated to fly through an underground cave network, full of blue glowing moss, cave cities, and a handful of various creatures. The development of the looks was a close effort between my team in LA and our supervisors in London, as well as the director and producers.

The comp team made heavy use of Nuke particles in these scenes, from the wooshing clouds, and the dusty particles we see in the earlier caves, to the blue fireflies and atmospheric smoke and mist seen in the later blue areas. Deep compositing was used to help blend everything in Z space through the cave network, and tools were developed in-house or co-opted from the London team to speed up these processes.

For many shots the team needed to devise ways to make the puppetry and camera moves from the original plates feel more organic and dynamic. For some this meant added camera shake from the wind buffeting. Others would see the team blend between the practical puppet and a CG double that could fly and move more freely. Often CG wings, and face augmentations were added to fill out the movements and add some extra reality.

For season 1 of Star Trek: Picard, the DNEG team took on a large and varied body of work. For the first half of the season, I worked as a second 2D supervisor and DFX supervisor, splitting my time between helping look dev larger shots, leading creative on some early sequences, and general 2D troubleshooting and shot work. This page showcases some imagery and highlights from that work.

For season 2 of Marvel’s Runaways DNEG LA was tasked with designing the look of the alien space ship that plays a large role in the seasons climax. Unlike most space ships, this one was not meant to be mechanical, but more organic and alive.

The comp team worked closely with the 3D team to develop the look and feel of the ship. Special attention was paid to keeping the colors and densities of the ship consistent throughout multiple scenes and states of the ship.

The first time we see the ship is underground as a pulsating, unidentifiable object. These scenes inside the hole were accomplished completely in 2D and set the look for the “skin” of the ship, as well as the color tones for the remaining scenes.

As the episode progresses the ship lifts itself out of the whole showing its full size, then after playing as a large set piece, it begins to die and ultimately explodes in a bight display of fireworks and colors.

The practical plates for this scene all had pulsating colored light that was quite the challenge for the comp team to match up to. Judicious roto and plate rebuilding, as well as well timed lights and glows helped integrate all the different lights into the final comps. To help ourselves with this we created a flare tool that would accurately match the huge horizontal flares found in the original footage.

Many of the wide shots also had FX and CG debris integration to consider as well. Anywhere the ship would hit the edge of the hole had it interacting with large concrete chunks and kicking up dust.

These were some of the largest comps we had done at the time, and the small team of about 5 people was able to get through over 75 shots in just a few weeks.

A small selection of shots from sequences I worked on and supervised between 2018-2019. My duties were a mix of comp supervision, DFX supervision and art direction, and individual shot work. Password available upon request.

Old Lace was DNEG TV’s major contribution to the Runaways. She started before any other VFX work began on the show, and was built principally by DNEG TV’s London team, with help and input from the LA team. All final comp and lighting was done in LA.

While the production team was initially worried about using a full CG dino cut against the practical puppet, the great work of the DNEG teams ensured she had more and more screen time.

The asset was refined and given major overhauls between seasons, to fix any larger issues and make sure future work was as smooth as possible.

From a comp standpoint our major concerns were mostly lighting related. The complex set lighting wasn’t always reflected in the CG light scene, and complicating matters production would often use a different lighting set up for HDRIs and plates. Many times it fell to comp to help keep Lace integrated into the shifting light and shadows. We developed some in house tools as well to help remove some of the tack-sharp CG detail to better match the softer-lensed plate pulls.

When it came to matching practical reference, it was always a bit of a gamble as the comp artist. Often the practical puppet would be lit darker than desired, and we would augment the lighting of the CG to better show the performance of the asset as requested by the client.

Overall Lace was a great learning experience and would go on to guide future character work done by the DNEG TV LA team in collaboration with teams in India, Canada, and the UK.

The robot bulls from Season 2 of Westworld were an particularly interesting challenge. We were originally asked to develop, animate, and composite the bulls on an extremely short schedule for a Super Bowl spot the client was doing.

While the team in LA ingested the clean up and rough comps from another vendor for prep. the team in London started in right away on building out the bull skeleton. Because of the time difference, we were able to work round the clock, handing the bull asset off between studios to develop it rapidly and model/rig the many individual pieces in the skeleton.

Since the schedule was compressed we made the decision to only model and animate the parts of the bull that were needed, with comp. taking the reigns on helping merge the body-tracked skeleton animation to the practical bull. We used some nice 2D tricks to help connect the bull’s skin to the skeleton, tracking points between the CG and the bull fur, and using a spline warp tool to automatically stitch them together for a tighter, more natural fit.

For the final touches we added all the light interaction from the blinking plate lights in comp by using some specially rendered light selects and timing them with the original footage.

A few example stills from some of the many Quinjet comps I have done for Marvel's Agents of SHIELD.  Most comps involve the main Quinjet asset, as well as the ancillary pieces developed like jet exhaust, navigation lights, and any wingtip contrails, that might be requested by the clients.  My work in these is comp and 3D projection mainly, with some paint, roto, and matte-painting additions when necessary.  The CG elements are created and rendered by FuseFX's great CG team.