Student Accomplice Shading
On BYU Center For Animations 2024 film Student Accomplice, I worked as the Shading Lead and led a team of artists in developing the look and materials of the film. Below are a few examples of the environmental work I did on the film. I also developed the film's shading pipeline.
Buildings
Procedural Street Shader
For the film we needed a street shader that was...
-
Lightweight and procedural
-
Looked good up close and from a distance, non-repeating
-
Customizable per shot (paint lines)
Using RenderMan's layered material system, hex tiling, and alexeysmolenchuk's hGeo Patterns plugin for RenderMan, I created a procedural street shader that made the film's streets effortless in every shot. Houdini curves and points could be defined as input for street features such as paint lines, tire wear, and asphalt cracks.
Shading Pipeline
I developed the film's shading pipeline, making it so artists could receive, process, and publish textured USD assets with ease. I used Python to develop plugins for Substance Painter, Maya, and Houdini. With a few clicks, an asset could be loaded into Painter, exported with the correct material configurations, and brought into Houdini with their RenderMan node graphs already built and ready for tweaking. One more click published them to our asset library for the layout team to use.
