Spy
San Francisco, CA
After Earth
Lead Look Dev / Lighting Artist
After Earth was another project I did at Spy. There were people from the Priest project who were still there or came back for this project, just like I did. It was a nice team reunion.
Spy was awarded a few sequences for the movie. I was commissioned with a combination of lookdev and shot lighting that contained a few assets. The assets were a navigation system called Topo on the Hesper spaceship, a 3D scanner display, HUD and UI design for the ship’s interface system, and a curtain door system.
The Hesper ship was high in technology and the design was futuristic. It was made out of organic materials. Topo is the dashboard of the Hesper ship. It’s made out of carbon fiber–looking pins that shape the location map. The pins are driven by a hidden plane with particles that are driven by topography texture maps. This approach was similar to the vermiculite instances in the Cirque project but used hexagonal pins that could only rotate six ways. We needed to randomly distribute a handful of pins across the particle sheets with the least amount of geometry without making them look too repetitive.
The 3D scanner was a handheld X-ray and MRI scanner that Cypher used to diagnose the damage to his leg after he crash-landed on Earth. It functioned like a hologram display showing tissues and bones. In this case, I was responsible for coming up with a shading system for Cypher’s broken leg and for integrating this method to interact with the live-action plates. The HUD and UI design were similar to the scanner, except that the render was used on a 2D flat screen. Both the 3D scanner and HUD were later treated by the 2D artists for color and glow effects.
The curtain door lookdev was straightforward, as we just needed to match the look of the live-action door.
As for the shot-level tasks, I was assigned some hero Topo shots where I could continue developing shaders and begin testing their behavior with lighting prior to distributing to other shots. I was also doing animation tests for the Topo maps in one of the shots where we needed to show a cross-section of a mountain.
I made a light rig that would later be distributed to the rest of the shots containing Topo. This light rig served as a starting point to be used by other lighters to keep the sequences consistent. Each lighter was responsible for rebalancing and repositioning the lights to integrate with the shot plates.
