Spy
San Francisco, CA
Priest
Sr. Look Dev / Lighting Artist
I contributed as a lookdev artist at a San Francisco post house called Spy. It was here and on this project that I got my nickname lookdeb. Their team for the project was comprised of some of the ex–The Orphanage group who had just closed their doors. I never had a focused role prior to this project. The movie was shot on film with anamorphic lenses. My lookdev team was a team of four artists, led by Craig Hayes. Craig is a legend and a big deal in our industry. It was such an honour and privilege to have worked under his guidance.
The assignment was to create shaders and textures for hero assets such as the train, train tracks, statues, hat, and ground set extensions. The train was a hero asset and a big part of a few sequences. On set, there was a semi-truck pulling three containers dressed on one side as the boxcars. These were our reference to replicate our CG boxcar shaders and textures from. As a team, we decided to split the work into shader and texture in order to have a workflow and good consistency between assets. The challenge was that we needed to extend these three cars into a full train of twenty or so boxcars, plus a unique locomotive, fuel car, dining car, and end car.
We needed to distribute these assets across 125 shots across a few sequences. We were also responsible for designing the render layers and passes that the lighting department was eventually going to output for the comp department. We needed to be as efficient as possible in our asset workflow before we sent them to all shots. This required cross-department planning and coordination. Our team worked closely with prod, dev, modeling, lighting, and comp. During this time, I was in constant communication with the department supervisors. We tested and rebuilt scenes to test automation when distributing to shots.
For the train, we decided that the most efficient and consistent way to assign the shader was to use one single shader so that in the shots there wouldn’t be any false assignment. At the time, there was no Mari or UDIM, so Photoshop it was. We went old-school UDIM by manually offsetting the UV 2D placement. We designated each car to a tile. Each tile was broken down into a few different textures and masks (diffuse, grime, dust, etc.). The assignment to each model was delivered by a triple shading switch. With twenty cars, the network got big pretty fast. The rest of the assets I had to set up shaders for were pretty simple compared to the train, but they were no less important.
The Priest project will always have a special place in my heart. To this day, I still think that all my knowledge of working in movies is owed to the Priest team. Thank you for this opportunity! I’ve learned so much in just a few months being on this project. It set my path for the next few years.
