Science Fiction Volume 1: The Osiris Child
Orb VFX, Sydney | CG Supervision
After arriving in Australia in late 2015 I had the fortune of coming across the good people at Orb VFX, Mat Graham and Steve Anderson who were starting post production on an epic Australian sci-fi independent feature film, conceived and directed by Shane Abbess. As Orb VFX was a tent pole studio, my mandate was basically to build a pipeline from scratch, and oversee the execution and delivery of more than 450 shots over about a 7 month period. Faced with obvious time constraints, approximately half the shots were divided among other Australian vendors - Cutting Edge, Cumulus and Rising Sun Pictures. Internally at Orb we tackled all the layout, tracking, design and building of global CG assets (ie spaceships), a plethora of less render intensive CG shots, followed by heaps of compositing.
My first priority was to setup a bare bones pipeline which was facilitate as many revisions as possible for the compositors - so automating all incoming assets and sequence templates in addition to automating output, in addition to setting up a render farm. Second was creating a robust enough review process not only for our internal dailies but for the 3 houses that were helping us in addition to the 'remote' staff which was probably around 15-20 people all told. Next was flushing out scripts that would facilitate our core maya/vray lighting and rendering work which was primarily tons of close up cockpit shots. Lastly we set up a decent UDIM texturing/look dev peipeline, a move I wish we had done earlier.
Besides pipeline and creative input duties I also setup comp templates for key sequences, established best practices for comp, did final modeling clean up, sequence lighting setup, matte painting projection setup, and even hard surface animation for one off shots. This project really absorbed my vast library of experiences and skill sets from various projects and work settings over the years. Too bad after the show was over everything was dismantled, I really felt like it was a good start to something!
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