THE CROODS

Scope of Work

I worked on The Croods as both Technical Director and Lighting Artist. On the technical side, I wrote several critical artist tools and plugins for the show. I also worked closely with the Crowds department for realizing and optimizing the heavy crowd simulation in a sequence. As an artist, I did lighting and compositing for over 90 shots and took them all to completion.

Tasks of note

In the piranha-owl (bird) attack sequence, we had up to 40,000 birds in each shot. With a run-time deformation solution using 'Massive', the frames were too heavy to render in a reasonable time. I worked with the Crowds team to replace this solution with instanced geometry and use a randomized animation offset on each bird. This brought down render times to minutes.
We used 'Image Based Lighting' (IBL) for the first time. I wrote a plugin to create an IBL Heads Up Display in our lighting package, to easily visualize and manipulate the environment lights.
We also used something akin to AOVs for the first time on this show. I wrote a wrapper around our current scene definition system to allow artists to break up their renders into different passes (most commonly 'diffuse' and 'specular'). This allowed for easier manipulation in Nuke and reduced render iterations.
We often had our characters interpenetrating or floating above the ground after the ground displacement was applied. I wrote a plugin to fix the ground displacement in a shot, based on where the character's feet landed. This way we didn't have to ask surfacing to paint new displacement maps for every problematic shot.
I also wrote a tool during pre-production to automatically create diagnostic renders for every geometry part for any given asset on the show. This helped us detect any non-optimized or heavy to render pieces and have them fixed by modeling and/or surfacing before full-fledged production.

Challenges

Aside from the challenge of developing the many tools and solutions for the show, there were some interesting lighting problems to tackle. Lighting inside the family cave was particularly tricky because there were no direct light sources aside from the cave opening. So a lot of the shaping had to be done with bounce lighting. In one of my shots, the characters moved all over the cave and I had to use many lighting cheats to not lose any of their acting.

Fun Fact

The character lighting throughout the show used a principle we call the "Deakins wrap" (since it was suggested by cinematographer Roger Deakins who was also the DP on The Croods). It is about wrapping the light 3/4 of the way around the actor's face using a soft falloff. It works great!

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