In your blog you frequently mention production challenges and how you overcame the problems that occur. A lot of problems within a pipeline seem to be related to limitation within certain software. Do you ever have any direct contact with the developers of software?

There are definitely issues we would come across within the software packages and most of the time we were able to contact the developers and get it resolved. It depends what the problem is of course. If it could not be solved we would just find another way to get the result we wanted. The most common issue that I almost always faced on every project was RAM usage. Big environments rendering in HD often require a lot of RAM and it was always a battle to wrangle the RAM usage down to something that would render in 32-bit.

I really enjoyed your explanation of the work you did on Hawx in your blog entry. Can you explain to our readers how and when to use .map or .exr as opposed to typical texture files for texturing environments?

Hawx was the first time I’d used tiled exr’s in a project. In fact in the end I ended up not using them and just went back into my shots and found some corners to cut to make my jpg textures work. Tiled .map and .exr’s are pretty interesting though. They come in handy when you have lots of extremely large texture maps and not enough RAM to render them. They basically break the texture map into smaller pieces within that same file. At render time only the portions of the texture map that are necessary to render a bucket are loaded into memory and then flushed when the bucket finishes. You end up with a very low memory usage and you get to render your highres texture map. The downside is those maps become pretty huge once you save them out “tiled.” You trade RAM usage for hard drive space.

Having worked in supervising, compositing, modeling, texturing, and lighting, it would seem that you understand all of the roles that go into making a cinematic. Have you ever considered making your own CG cinematic?

I feel that I understand the roles necessary to create cinematics, but that doesn’t make me capable of creating a full cinematic all by my lonesome. At least not to the level I would want it to be. The reason studios like Blur create such amazing work is because they have teams of very talented people doing what they do best. I’ve never really wanted to create cinematics on my own. I loved doing them all day at work, but in my free time I like to get away from the computer . Sometimes I have ideas for environments that I really want to create and I’ll spend some time working on still images. It’s good to maintain a balance though.

Digital Domain is famous for the work they have done in movies and commercials whereas Blur carries a lot of popularity from their cinematics and short animated films. Is there a difference between the focus and amount of work that goes into creating a commercial as opposed to a cinematic?

To be honest I haven’t been at Digital Domain long enough to feel completely confident with my answer. Based on the two projects I’ve been on so far at DD I would say that there is definitely a difference in the expectation level between the two studios and a different mindset about what is important and what isn’t as much. I think that those differences are totally realistic and appropriate for the different types of work each studio does. When the end goal is different then the level of effort in certain areas and the expectations between the two are understandably different. There is much more focus at DD to achieve a photo realistic end product which is to be expected. So the amount of time spent in all areas of production to reach that goal is longer in general than at Blur. On the flipside of that Blur puts out top quality cinematics at incredible speed. Blur’s pipeline is an extremely well oiled machine.

What is a typical work day for you?

I come into work around 9am and get a cup of tea. Then I go through any new emails I received overnight and check the frames I kicked off the day before. I am a generalist so depending on how far along we are in production I will either continue with modeling and texturing of an environment, character or prop, or I will be setting up the shot lighting, preparing render passes and putting together composites. Once in a while I’ll be asked to write scripts for the pipeline and I’ll spend my day writing new tools. Once we start rendering passes and compositing we go to dailies to review them in the afternoons. Most of the time I head home around 7pm, but again that depends on how soon the delivery is and how much still has to get finished before then.

What process do you follow when you create an environment? Do you start with a sketch and then move onto modeling the basic elements in the scene?

It all starts from the initial idea. Sometimes that is concept art that is provided for me and in the case of personal artwork it all begins with the initial idea. The concept art I would get would have varying levels of detail depending on how much time the concept artist had available to work on it and who the concept artist was. For personal artwork I often figure out most of the details in my head before I start. When I’m not sure about something then I’ll sketch out a series of different ideas to solve the problems. I don’t generally spend a lot of time sketching though. It’s all very rough and mostly me just playing with composition and the major elements within the scene.

Any advice for artists wishing to pursue a career as an environmental artist?

Really pay attention to the world around you. When you think you’ve done that stop and do it again and try twice as hard to notice the details. Successful environments are the ones that get the broad strokes right as well as the main focal points. Scale is extremely important. Its important from a subconscious level as well as from a technical lighting point of view. We are very aware of the world around us and even though we may not know exactly how big many common things are (like windows, doors, cars, trees, etc.) we still subconsciously know when something doesn’t look right to us…Its those things that make you not sure why your renders don’t look real, but something feels off. Lighting in all 3d packages I’ve used works best with realistic scales.

The big thing that I notice is when people don’t get the horizon lined up correctly. They composite a background photo or matte painting behind their CG and sometimes totally miss where the horizon should be which creates images that too me feel like the world is falling over. Its great that 3d packages do most of the perspective work for us, but when your dealing with many layers of environment that get rendered separately you really need to pay attention to making sure all the layers line up realistically. Environments your dealing with often contain many different types of textures, and depending on your archive of texture maps you have to mix and match a lot of different sized textures. It is very important to get the scale and resolution of your texture maps looking consistent. You don’t want two foreground objects, one mapped with an extremely high res texture and another with a very low res one next to it. If you don’t have texture maps that work well, then consider going outside and taking photo textures yourself.

Be very critical of your work and get feedback from friends and coworkers or on online communities. One of the best things you can do after working on a scene for a long time is to get away from it. Take breaks and come back to it with a fresh eye. I can’t even begin to count the number of times I would leave for the night feeling happy with what I had accomplished that day and come back in the morning and immediately spot everything wrong with what I had done the day before.

Thanks to Tim Jones for taking the time to answer our questions.